ABSTRACT

How do cultural sociologists experience their objects of analysis? Does it even matter if they do come to know and experience them? Isn’t it more the point that they understand how these objects operate in the social world, how they come to be produced, assessed, valued, and exchanged by individuals and organizations? Although the category of culture includes a vast array of objects, values, ideas, and relationships, I want to focus in this essay on aesthetic objects, objects like novels and paintings and photographs, in order to identify the types of cultural sociological knowledge of them available to analysts, as well as to consider the stakes in such knowing. The essay makes a case for cultural sociologists knowing their objects from the inside

out as well as from the outside in. Further, I will want to assert that it is only by gaining access to the operations and logics of the inner workings of cultural objects that any cultural sociology can begin to track the meanings and resonance of these objects in the social contexts in which they appear. And finally, I claim that such knowledge of aesthetic objects actually provides insight into the ways that these objects model social reality in their own turn. Human experience of art affects human experience of the world. This essay is thus written in much the same spirit as John Dewey when he wrote, in his book Art as Experience, “Aesthetic experience is always more than aesthetic. In it a body of matters and meanings, not in themselves aesthetic, become aesthetic as they enter into an ordered rhythmic movement towards consummation. The material itself is widely human” (1934: 248). Human materials require a human science. Thus, adhering to the conception of such thinkers as Wilhelm Dilthey that sociology

is a “human science” (2002: 92), with interpretation its signature modality, any analysis of the ways that cultural sociologists can know (or refrain from knowing) their objects of analysis must clarify what “knowing” means. When approaching a painting, for example, does the sociologist examine the painting’s style, its participation in a particular school of rendering, its internal composition, its allegorical allusions? Or, alternatively, does the sociologist look around the painting-at its placement in a frame and a museum, as an object of exchange garnering a certain sum of money, as produced by way of patron’s commissions, as extolled or decried as excellent or repugnant by critics and publics? If the interpretive role of the sociologist is highlighted, questions of style, composition,

representational dynamics, and aesthetic genealogy will be paramount in the sociological analysis. Such emphasis does not mean that the social, economic, or political context in which the work appears is irrelevant. Rather, it means that such contextual concerns cannot substitute for an analysis of the object itself. Diffidence toward an experiential approach to cultural objects, including, importantly,

aesthetic objects, has diverse motives. On the one hand, the “production of culture” proponents are particularly interested in social uptake or rejection of cultural objects and thus “focus on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved” (Peterson and Anand 2004: 1). Studies developed within this framework focus on the contexts of culture and on cultural change, especially rapid change: “Such rapid change exposes the constituent elements comprising a field of symbolic production composed of six facets. These include technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational career, and market” (Peterson and Anand 2004: 1). It is certainly possible to track all of these facets without ever coming into direct contact with the produced objects themselves. And indeed, the production-of-culture proponents do not tend to engage with the produced objects in their analyses. Such avoidance points to yet another reason why some (critical) sociologists of culture eschew experience of the cultural objects at the heart of their studies. These scholars tend to reason that the objects are variable stand-ins for the ideologies (e.g. of class or gender) whose business they do. French sociologist Antoine Hennion takes aim at this critical sociological approach to cultural objects, an approach exemplified by Pierre Bourdieu. Hennion contends: “Direct contact with things, uncertainty of sensations, methods, and techniques used to become sensitive to, and to feel the feeling of, the object being sought-in the sociology of culture, these moments and gestures of taste are either neglected or are directly denounced as rituals whose principal function is less to make amateurs ‘feel,’ than to make them ‘believe’” (2007: 98). For Hennion, by contrast, the pragmatic, sensual modalities by which amateurs attach themselves to the cultural objects of their worlds is of great and complex significance for understanding human relationships to that world and to each other. On the other hand, many cultural sociologists, including Hennion, advocate a

more intimate knowledge of the objects under investigation: some term this approach “endogenous explanation” (Kaufman 2004: 335). And the more Durkheimian of these approaches “ask not why a specific genre of art appears at a particular time and place but what the signs and symbols embedded in that genre say about that time and place” (Kaufman 2004: 337). Whether moving in the more phenomenological direction of Hennion or the more semiotic direction of the Durkheimian approaches, the direct experience of and with cultural objects is highlighted. This essay will push on such intimate knowledge to consider not only how aesthetic objects reflect or refract their times and places, but also to explore how they, themselves, act to temporalize and shape the very worlds in which they appear. The essay manages this task by way of a consideration of several (not mutually exclusive) choices confronting cultural sociologists-preoccupation with content or preoccupation with context; coming in close or keeping a distance from the objects of analysis; utilizing methods and theories developed primarily in the humanities or those developed primarily in the social and natural sciences. Resolutions of these choices can signal the diverse responses to appeals to either highlight or bracket the experience of the objects confronting cultural sociologists.