Comment and Response
I received this excellent comment via email to my post ‘Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body’ on Sociology Eye Blog (also on this blog), and am very happy to publish it here with my response thereafter.
Dear Paolo,
<<REMOVED>>
by sender’s request for alleged breach of confidentiality.
If you did get it, just forget it.
Here is my response:
Dear <<REMOVED>>
many thanks for your critical feedback, it is always good to have some and also gives me a chance to write more on the topic, without the constraints of the blog post, that is usually tight and fast. And this peculiarity of the medium gives room to mistakes quite often. For instance, as you said (my emphasis):
‘the last paragraph might be interpreted as symbolic interactionism, particularly as you point to the complications of daily life (terms that seem to be ubiquitous in responses to capitalism’s meltdown)’.
There is in my opinion some confusions here as I meant to address exactly the opposite: instead of using ‘complicate’ as adjective to ‘everyday lives’, I should have written in fact ‘complex’, in the sense of ‘differential’, ‘complicating’ and ‘always emergent’, in Delueze’s words ‘rhizomatic’. My apologies for the mistake, I amended this in the post, which is now: ‘He made me think that everyday’s life is a challenging terrain [for the social scientists], more complex, and fluid that we are usually inclined to think [as social scientists]‘. The sense of my post remains as polemics ‘against these increasingly common nightmare scenarios which seem to be so prevalent’ (Thrift 2004), dozens of which you might find in other contributors’ posts, maximalist representations of mainstream quantitative sociology.
On the other hand, though, you encourage me to develop in writing the situation in which I found myself at that precise moment of recording the story: ‘it might be a good idea to explore the interaction between you and him more fully’, as you wrote. This is a valid suggestion. I found symptomatic though that there is no mention at all in your comment to the overwhelming picture on the top of the post. The text there is intended in fact to be just a corollary, an accomplishment to the visual. I use often photographs to open up spaces, to invite the reader to enter the story, to invite them to imagine the lives of the people and the objects pictured in them, as well as their interrelations. More than pages of text, the scene – at least in my intentions – hinted at a usual performance made by the barber in his daily encounters with his clients, friends, people he might just known, and with whom he talks of all the possible subjects, including the economic crisis. There are daily performances, theatrical dramas, and hilarious vignettes unfolding in the life of the barber that written text, even if it not constrained by the 200 words of the blog post, cannot render effectively.
As my supervisor, professor Knowles writes:
‘Sociology has remained firmly focused on text and on narrative: on the written and spoken word. Sociologists listen and map and turn what they see into text. Sociology is effectively visual illiterate: picturing features neither as a technique for recording nor as a tool in social analysis’ (Bedlam on the Streets, 2000: 20).
How often have you found such an intruding scene where two relatively old men chat with vigour of the end of the capitalism, and with such a bodily expression? And doesn’t it happen in fact every day, in the cafés, stations, dole offices, on the buses, ‘as they exist in their hundreds of thousands at the same hour’? This is the ability of critical photography, to ‘pump the aura out of the reality’, to strip bare the objects, to initiate ‘the emancipation of objects from aura’, as Walter Benjamin would have perhaps maintained it (Short History of Photography).
In terms of non-representational theory, it seems to me that there is a drive towards a dialogue between writers, readers and subjects, as the space of rendering the story becomes infused with imagination, both of the author and the viewer, who should work together at making the story:
‘This is the difference, then, between representation and practice. In the one, we know the outcome. In the other, we can only, to insert a Wittgensteinian moment, guess. And this imagination extends to conceptual practice, as well as the realms of percepts, affects, and sensations’ (Thrift cited: 6, my italics).
It has been a pleasure to enlist such an authoritative comment, hope to have more in the future.
Many thanks.
Paolo
Also tagged aura, everyday, non-representational, performance, photography, practice, sociology, visualsociology