Where do you go to find out the history of the development of the ideas that shape how we think? What is the history of art that connects it up with politics, society, movements that questioned the nature of social reality. Where can you go to just talk freely and philosophically about the ideas and the vision the writers and artists and musicians that inspire us?
The title of this elective is the sociological imagination — that’s a term from C. Wright Mills’ book of the same name and part of my PhD was on Mill’s work and it describes the type of insight offered by the discipline the classic tradition of sociology. It is: “the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry.” He also described the sociological imagination as the “vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society”. So to explore it the course examines and combines the classic tradition in social theory and the history of the avant-garde in modern art. It identifies and traces the influence of the ideas that form the basis of how we understand art and culture.
While I was working on it I wanted to design and write the kind of course I would have wanted when I was at Art School. Mills put together another collection of the key theorists you would have to read to understand the development of social theory: so I adapted parts of this to get at the core of the classic tradition in social theory and then combined this with an analysis of mostly 20th century avant-garde art practice which was what I had been doing when I ran an art magazine—going back to look at Cubism, Courbet, Dada out with the formal account. I realised that the people who formed the circles of thinkers and the salons and little groups and magazines overlapped and influenced each other.
This is a brief summary of each of the courses.
To start, the 1938 Orson Welles’ radio version of H. G. Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’ is used as an example of what Walter Lippmann called a Pseudo Reality to introduce his theory of the Stereotype in his 1922 Public Opinion that dealt with propaganda. This is combined with an examination of Henri Bergson and his use of Phenomenology (the study of perception and consciousness) to examine the nature of his influence on the different forms of Cubism. Bergson’s work on intuition, durée réelle (how we experience time) are introduced contrasting the intellectual and intuitive approaches of the early French modernism.
Emile Durkheim — Durkheim’s attempts to establish ‘Sociology’ as a science are introduced via his conception of: Social Facts, Anomie, Consciousness Collectives and Representation Collectives. These are contextualized using the work of Millet, Courbet, Seurat, Gaugin with a focus on Durkheim’s role in the Dreyfuss Affair. The Parisian avant-garde’s magazines are examined: The White Review, Guillaume Apollinaire and Les Soires de Paris along with Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics. The influence of Durkheim is traced through Tel Quel magazine ranging from Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille and Collège de Sociologie to writers such as Foucalt. To conclude there is an overview of how ‘Bohemia Cabarets’ in Monmarte after the Paris Commune of 1871 acted as ‘Anti-Museums’ opposing Bourgeois cultural dominance.
Max Weber — Weber’s sociological imagination is examined in terms of his study of Bureaucracy, Rationality and Authority. This is contrasted to the German Dadaists and Expressionists activities. Weber’s use of ‘ideal types’ is also contrasted to Durkheim to emphasise the Interpretative and Statistical approaches to social theory. The Expressionists (in art and film) are described using the 1911 Blaue Rieter Almanac, Die Brücke and Paula Modersohn-Becker the pre-cursor of Expressionism. Wilhelm Worringer’s (1908) Abstraction and Empathy, is traced to Georg Simmel’s work and the influence of the Heidelberg Circle on the ideas influencing the avant-garde.
Karl Marx — Marx’s sociological imagination is explored via the idea of the role of the Social Philosopher and this is explained as an ideology, a statement of ideals and as a set of social theories. An in-depth focus on Gustav Courbet’s Realism and Andre Breton’s Surrealism also touches on other forms of Realism (and the use of the Manifesto) via examples such as Tatlin, Pevsner and Gabo. The work of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin are outlined in connection with the The Heidelberg Circle and the Frankfurt School. The early Bauhaus and Moholy-Nagy’s argument that artists belonged in the vanguard of social change is contrasted with William Morris’.
Thorstein Veblen — Veblen’s ideas on culture and his socio-economic critique are introduced in the context of the Pragmatist and the Progressive era in the US. Veblen three instinctive aptitudes that relate to creativity at a fundamental level: Workmanship, Parental and Idle curiosity (an impersonal ‘urge to know’ apart from any material benefit to be gained) are explained. The New School for Social Science Research, which Veblen founded, is discussed in relation to the Société Anonyme, initiated by Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp and other small artist’s circles. William Hayter’s Atelier 17 and the New School’s role as a home for the émigré European avant-garde artists who moved to New York in the 1930s and 1940s is briefly described. Additional elements explain Phenomenology and Pragmatism in the US and the relevance of William James.
The Heidelberg Circle — Cultural Sociology is explained within the Heidelberg Circle, as developed by Alfred Weber inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s aesthetical theory. The influence of the work of Georg Simmel on his students including Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács and Karl Mannheim is explored. Marianne Weber’sinfluence is identified along with other artistic avant-garde Circles that overlapped, such as the Stephan George’s or Mallarmé’s Tuesday Salons. Weber’s (1912) ‘The Sociological Concept of Culture’ and Georg Simmel’s (1910) ‘How is Society Possible?’ are contrasted including themes such as (a) The parallels between art and social form, (b) The principles of sociological ordering in art and aesthetic objects and (c) Where aesthetic and social factors are shown to work in combination. Lukács is also considered including his ideas on ‘revolutionary culturalism’, his ‘Theory of the Novel’ and how his early work deals with how three basic concepts combine i.e. Life, Essence and Totality.
Karl Mannheim — An examination of Mannheim’s ground breaking work on the sociology of knowledge is explained as the investigation of the interconnections between categories of thought, knowledge claims and social reality: the existential connectedness of thought. Mannheim’s main themes of Ideology and Utopia, the worldview (or Weltanschauung) together with Mannheim’s influence on Erwin Panovsky’s Iconology. Mannheim also wrote on the problem of Generations and how competition is used as an ideology are set out. The focus is also on ideological interpretations of art and on how the avant-garde became the ‘Lost Generation’ in the inter-war years is also explored along with the rise of elite control of the large art institutions. Eva Cockcroft’s ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,’ Griselda Pollock’s ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ and Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why are there no great women artists? also form the basis of this section. Its focus is on ownership and control of art institutions and the effects of the shift from enlightened patrons to the state and the elite. The ideological role of MOMA in the cold war using Alfred H. Barr’s diagram for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art is explained.
Giambattista Vico — This introduces the origins of social theory in Vico’s ‘New Science’ a study of the mythical origins of the histories of customs and institutions in different nations. It focuses on Vico’s use of fantasia and his explanation of common sense (the judgments made without reflection that emerge from customs shared by an entire society that provide the basis of the structures of the human world). Vico’s understanding of myth as a projection of the needs of the inhabitants of a developing society is explained as containing a worldview. This is related this to the history of ideas and the revolutionary effect of Romanticism (and the Counter Enlightenment) which is set out using the example of the influence of the Sturn und Drang group.
The influence of Structuralism as a new ‘method’ proposed for social anthropology in the late 1950s is examined. Its initial influence was on those who felt that it offered new insights into the analysis of myth. Structuralism in sociology did spark interest in returning to examine social structure and the range of publications that adopted it (and ‘post-modernism’) are explored. Lévi-Strauss’ structural linguistics aimed to discover universal elements in society that were thought to be basic characteristics of the human mind that determined the varieties of social structures. Thus language and symbolic systems should be reduced to logical organisations on the basis of a ‘binary logic of oppositions’. This type of psychological reductionism was in opposition to a historical approach to challenge Marxism. As such it became a weapon in the cold war. The work of Michel Leiris in connection with an ethnographic diary is also explored. Leiris’ participation in the Dakar-Djibouti trans-African ethnographic expedition is presented as an example of hybrid field work: Leiris explored his own motives and emotions together with the customs and rites, and conditions of the various people he and his colleagues lived with for long periods.
C. Wright Mills — The focus is on Mills’ The Power Elite and The Cultural Apparatus and his influence on the counter culture (the combination of radical feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests and the Ecological Movement). Mills invented an avant-garde sociology that challenged mass society’s maintenance of the ignorance of the disempowered. His work had a major influence on the 1960’s New Left similar to Betty Friedan’s the Feminine Mystique that marked the beginning of second-wave feminism—both knew each other. Mills’ type of sociology returned to utopian critique to reenergise the role of the intellectual and could feed into the social struggle of the new social movements of the counterculture in the 1960s. Mills’ was one of the first sociologists to offer a model of power that accounted for the secretive agencies of national security. He also used the term ‘post-modernism’ as a reference to the effects of a mass society where small elites can control a huge mass public.
Cornelius Castoriadis — Castoriadis’ work is a mixture of Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, Sociology, Politics and more: one of his key terms is the social imaginary not unlike our sociological imagination. This section focuses on his essay ‘The Crisis of Culture and the State’ that problematizes the idea of the relationship between the state and culture. We follow it closely as ranges over and combines elements of the course to focus on tragedy in ancient Athens and the need for social cathexis.
New Minds Eye 