Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception 3031113047, 9783031113048

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: New Perspectives for the Sociology of the Arts
The Overhaul and Maturity of the Sociology of the Arts
The Sociology of the Arts in Action
Broadening the Sociological View of the Arts
Looking to the Future of the Sociology of the Arts
References
Part I: Reconsidering the Frames of Artistic Production
Chapter 2: Heteronomy and Necessity: How Architects Design for Architectural Competitions
The Commission: The Restoration of Architectural Heteronomy
The Submission: The Conveyance of Architectural Necessity
The Competition: The Production of Architectural Facts
References
Chapter 3: Creative Settings: The Influence of Place on Urban Cultural Creativity Processes
Introduction: Cultural Creativity and Place
Creative Settings
Towards a Sociological Conceptualisation of the Relationship Between Cultural Creativity and Place
Creative Rituals
Creative Frames
Creative Settings
Open Creative Settings
Non-oriented Creative Rituals
Experimental-CFs
Weak Boundaries
Hybrid Milieu
Closed Creative Settings
Oriented Creative Rituals
Professional Creative Frames
Strong Boundaries
Homogeneous Milieu
Dissonant Creative Settings
Double-Oriented Creative Rituals
Hybrid Creative Frames
Conflict Boundaries
Heterogeneous Milieu
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Cultural Creation in Culinary Fields: The Cases of New York and San Francisco
Introduction: Theories of Fields
Culinary Fields
Methodology
The Culinary Fields of New York and San Francisco
The Mode of Production and Innovation in Culinary Fields
Logics of Action
How to Navigate a Field
References
Part II: New Visions on Creative Practices
Chapter 5: The Jolie Môme Theatre Company: A Sociology of Artistic Work in Political Theater
Introduction: Convergences Between Art and Politics
Methodology: The Ethnography of Theatrical Work
Jolie Môme: A Countercurrent Theater
Modes of Collective Operation: The Organization and Division of Labor
The Multiple Capabilities of Actors and Equal Wages
The Material Life of the Troupe
Sources of Income
The Intermittent Employment System
Existing Without Subsidies: Between Autonomy and Insecurity
The Distribution of Power and Collective Decision-Making
Elements for a Foucauldian Analysis of Power in Theatrical Work
The Two Pillars of the Troupe
A Variation in the Exercise of Power
The Director’s Place in the Creative Process
Power Relations Between Men and Women
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Habitus in Dance: The Social and Artistic Skills of a Rehearsal
Introduction: The Rehearsal as an Artistic and Social Practice
Theoretical and Conceptual Perspective
The Communicative Dimension of the Artistic Decision
Artistic Decision as Focused Interaction
The Habitus of a Dance Company
Methodology
The Social Location of Choreographic Instructions
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Representations of the Uncertain: Art, Astronomy, and Dark Matter
Introduction: The Uncertain Object
The Artwork as a Dialogue
The Artwork as a Window into Scientific Uncertainties: Dark Matter
The Artwork as Pieces for Exhibit
The Artwork as an Epistemic Proposition
Conclusion
References
Part III: The Artwork: Expanding the Analysis of Its Materiality and Meaning(s)
Chapter 8: With the Beatles: Generating the Recorded Rock Album Formula
The Beatles, Rock Music and Its Material: The Vinyl Record
The Generative Formula
The Recording Case
Beat Boom Recording Artists
The Recording Art at the Height of Beatlemania
Consolidation of Recorded Rock
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Concrete Materialities: Architectural Surfaces and the Cultural Sociology of Modernity
Materiality and Cultural Sociology
Materialist Architectural Sociologies: Ugly Buildings and Architextures
Places and Their “Faces”: Material Surfaces and Spatial Habitus
Architectural Surfaces: Materials as Agents and Topics of Modernity
Concrete as “Grey” or Drab Modernity
Concrete Rehabilitation: Rethinking Gray, Revaluing Brutalist Buildings
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: The Literary Classic and the Underappreciated Significance of Indexical Expressions
Introduction: The Classic as an Object of Sociological Study
Indexical Expressions: Distinguishing Between Meaningfulness and Meaning
Methods and Data
Indexical Expressions and Patterns of Meaningfulness in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Macondo: A Fictional Colombian Village Becomes Universal
Lived Experience
Universalization
Artistic Commensuration
Entrenched Criticism
An Imitated Opening: “Many Years Later, as He Faced the Firing Squad…”
Lived Experience
Universalization
Artistic Commensuration
Entrenched Criticism
Remedios’s Ascent to Heaven: Indexing a Character and a Literary Event
Lived Experience
Universalization
Artistic Commensuration
Entrenched Criticism
Magical Realism: Universalizing a Literary Genre
Lived Experience
Universalization
Artistic Commensuration
Entrenched Criticism
Conclusion
References
Part IV: Deepening Reception Analysis: Aesthetic Experience, Evaluation and Critique
Chapter 11: Objects, Emotion and Biography or How to Love Opera and Football Jerseys Again
Introduction: How to Restabilize Attachment to a Cultural Object
Objects in Cultural Sociology
Data and Methods
What’s in an Opera?
Opera as a Stabilized Object
Disrupting Opera
Re-establishing Opera, Anew
What’s in a Football Jersey?
Jersey as a Totem for Football
How Is Authenticity Destabilized?
Restoring Authenticity
What Does Love Have to Do with All This?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 12: How Contemporary Art Is Evaluated: The Artistic Quality Criteria of the Quebec Arts and Letters Council
Introduction
Art and Professional Salaries
The CCA and the CALQ
The Allocation of CALQ Scholarships
Methodology
Theoretical Framework: Critical Sociology
Categories Used to Evaluate Artistic Quality in the Field of Visual Arts
Out of Time, Out of Place: The Non-contemporary Category
The Voiceless, or the Beginners: The Junior’s Category
“I Like It, but…”: The Grey Zone
Potential Fellows: The Meritorious Category
The Rewarded Quality: The Meritorious Plus Category
Quality by Unanimity: The Exceptional Category
What Is Excellence in Contemporary Art?
Conclusions
References
Chapter 13: A Sociology of Art, Protest and Emotions: Disrupting the Institutionalisation of Corporate Sponsorship at Tate Galleries
Protest and Institutional Disruptive Work: Bringing in Arts Sociology
Emotions and Interaction Rituals: Artistic Protests Put into Action
BP’s Sponsorship of the Arts: Tate Galleries
Art Protests in Action: Liberate Tate’s Activism, 2010–2016
Liberate Tate’s Performances, Interaction Rituals and Emotions
Conclusion: Art, Protest and Emotions—A Sociological Agenda
References
Index

Citation preview

SOCIOLOGY OF THE ARTS

Sociology of the Arts in Action New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception Edited by Arturo Rodríguez Morató Álvaro Santana-Acuña

Sociology of the Arts Series Editors

Katherine Appleford Kingston University London, UK Anna Goulding University of Newcastle Newcastle, UK Dave O’Brien University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Mark Taylor University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

This series brings together academic work which considers the production and consumption of the arts, the social value of the arts, and analyses and critiques the impact and role of cultural policy and arts management. By exploring the ways in which the arts are produced and consumed, the series offers further understandings of social inequalities, power relationships and opportunities for social resistance and agency. It highlights the important relationship between individual, social and political attitudes, and offers significant insights into the ways in which the arts are developing and changing. Moreover, in a globalised society, the nature of arts production, consumption and policy making is increasingly cosmopolitan, and arts are an important means for building social networks, challenging political regimes, and reaffirming and subverting social values across the globe.

Arturo Rodríguez Morató Alvaro Santana-Acuña Editors

Sociology of the Arts in Action New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception

Editors Arturo Rodríguez Morató Departamento de Sociología University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain

Alvaro Santana-Acuña Department of Sociology Whitman College Walla Walla, WA, USA

ISSN 2569-1414     ISSN 2569-1406 (electronic) Sociology of the Arts ISBN 978-3-031-11304-8    ISBN 978-3-031-11305-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: izusek // GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Sociology of the Arts in Action “A well-designed collection of essays by a new generation of social scientists that highlights the ubiquity and considerable diversity of artistic productions, emotions and appreciations.” —Pierre-Michel Menger, Collège de France, author of The Economics of Creativity. Art and Achievement under Uncertainty “With a treasure trove of studies ranging from food, dance and architecture, to opera, literature, and soccer, this collection provides the most wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the vibrant and diverse new sociology of the arts. The editors’ decision to focus on Spanish-speaking authors is a much-welcomed intervention to open-up narratives, traditions and empirical cases that have been forced to live in the margins of the dominant Anglophone academic discourse. All in all, a must read for any scholar working in cultural sociology and the sociology of the arts.” —Fernando Domínguez Rubio, University of California, San Diego, author of Still Life. Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum “This book arrives at the perfect moment in the evolution of research on culture. Our predecessors carved out the field of inquiry, built theories and methods, and expanded our definition of the arts; the moment to globalize the canon has arrived, and this book is an accelerant for that process. The twelve scholars authoring this volume work on topics both of enduring importance and recent popularity; use many methods of inquiry to explore their topic matter; and form part of a cohort of multi-lingual scholars who are essential to our future vibrancy as a discipline. Published first in Spanish, the book also poses a challenge to scholars: to find and share the strongest research with as many readers as possible. I rejoice in their accomplishments, and will be eager to teach this book to all students of culture.” —Jennifer C. Lena, Associate Professor and Program Director of Arts Administration at Columbia University, USA.

Contents

1 New  Perspectives for the Sociology of the Arts  1 Arturo Rodríguez Morató Part I Reconsidering the Frames of Artistic Production  45 2 Heteronomy  and Necessity: How Architects Design for Architectural Competitions 47 Ignacio Farías 3 Creative  Settings: The Influence of Place on Urban Cultural Creativity Processes 69 Matías I. Zarlenga 4 Cultural  Creation in Culinary Fields: The Cases of New York and San Francisco 93 Vanina Leschziner Part II New Visions on Creative Practices 115 5 The  Jolie Môme Theatre Company: A Sociology of Artistic Work in Political Theater117 Marisol Facuse vii

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Contents

6 Habitus  in Dance: The Social and Artistic Skills of a Rehearsal143 Dafne Muntanyola-Saura 7 Representations  of the Uncertain: Art, Astronomy, and Dark Matter165 Paola Castaño Part III The Artwork: Expanding the Analysis of Its Materiality and Meaning(s) 189 8 With the Beatles: Generating the Recorded Rock Album Formula191 Cristián Martín Pérez-Colman 9 Concrete  Materialities: Architectural Surfaces and the Cultural Sociology of Modernity213 Eduardo de la Fuente 10 The  Literary Classic and the Underappreciated Significance of Indexical Expressions239 Alvaro Santana-Acuña Part IV Deepening Reception Analysis: Aesthetic Experience, Evaluation and Critique 269 11 Objects,  Emotion and Biography or How to Love Opera and Football Jerseys Again271 Claudio E. Benzecry 12 How  Contemporary Art Is Evaluated: The Artistic Quality Criteria of the Quebec Arts and Letters Council295 Marian Misdrahi

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13 A  Sociology of Art, Protest and Emotions: Disrupting the Institutionalisation of Corporate Sponsorship at Tate Galleries319 Marta Herrero Index341

Notes on Contributors

Claudio  E.  Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University, USA. His book The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012) and honorable mention for the ASA Distinguished Book award (2014).His new book, The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry, is based on a five-year ethnographic research on fashion, creativity and globalization, following how a shoe is imagined, sketched, designed, developed and produced in between the US, Europe, Brazil and China. Paola  Castaño is Sociologist of Science and a research fellow at the Egenis Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, the University of Exeter, UK.  Her main subject of research is science on the International Space Station, with a focus on experiments in plant biology, biomedicine and particle astrophysics and assessments of value about the station. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, and her work has been funded by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Free University of Berlin and the British Academy with a Newton International Fellowship held at Cardiff University. Marisol Facuse  received her Doctor of Sociology of Art & Culture and Master of Sociology of Art and the Imaginary from the University of Grenoble, and Master of Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Concepción, Chile. She is also an associate professor in the Department of Sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Chile and the Coordinator of the Sociology of Art and Cultural Practices Study xi

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Group. Her main research work is on political theater, popular culture, immigrant music, cultural hybridization, museums and museology. Ignacio Farías  is Professor of Urban Anthropology in the Department of European Ethnology at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. His research interests concern current ecological and infrastructural transformations of cities and the associated epistemo-political challenges to the democratization of city-making. His most recent work explores the politics of environmental disruptions, from tsunamis over heat to noise. He is also interested in doing urban ethnography as a mode of city-making performed with others (designers, initiatives, concerned groups, policy makers) and by other means (moving from textual to material productions). Eduardo de la Fuente  is an adjunct senior lecturer at the University of South Australia and a fellow of the Manchester University Institute for Place Management. He has served as a treasurer, secretary and acting president of the ISA Research Committee for the Sociology of the Arts. Eduardo has written on art and aesthetics, music and sound, space and place, landscape and the built environment, and on the past and future of a cultural sociology. He coined and promoted the concept of a “new sociology of art” and, in recent and current work, has been focusing on material and aesthetic textures. Marta  Herrero is Lecturer in Business of the Creative and Cultural Industries in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television, and Interactive Media at the University of York, UK. Her background is interdisciplinary, working across sociology, management and organizational studies and art history. After completing a PhD in Sociology of Modern Art Collections at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, she gained a postdoctoral fellowship from the Irish Research Council. Since then she has held academic posts at the University of Plymouth and The University of Sheffield, Management School. Vanina  Leschziner is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her primary areas of interest are social theory, cognition, culture, social action, organizations, evaluation and creativity. Research on these topics has been published in the book At the Chef’s Table: Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants (2015), as well as in Annual Review of Sociology, Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Social Psychology Quarterly and Sociological Forum, among other publications. Leschziner is currently working on a book titled

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Culture and Creativity (with Claudio Benzecry, under contract with Polity Press). Marián  Misdrahi holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Montréal, Canada. As a specialist in cultural sociology, her research has focused on contemporary arts evaluation, thematic in which she has produced several specialized articles, in addition to having coordinated a special issue in the journal Sociologie et Sociétés (47(2), 2015). On the other hand, she has worked as a researcher on homelessness and mental health, the racial profiling of young offenders and violent extremism. She taught sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the University of Montréal. Currently, she teaches at Dawson College in Montréal, Canada. Dafne  Muntanyola-Saura is Professor of Sociology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. She has been a postdoctoral scholar at Université de Nice and a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Cognitive Science at University de California, San Diego (UCSD). Her research crosses over the disciplinary boundaries of cognitive science and sociology of the arts and covers interactions in professional and artistic settings with a strong theoretical component. Her methods include video-aided ethnography and social network analysis. She has worked in hospitals, visual arts, dance, Olympic synchronized swimming and filmmaking. She is the co-coordinator of the Sociology of the Arts Board at the European Sociological Association (ESA). Cristián  Martín  Pérez-Colman  was born in Buenos Aires but lives in Madrid. He holds a PhD in Sociology and is Professor of “Ethnomusicology” at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He also teaches “Sociology of Music” at the Universidad Alfonso X el Sabio. Arturo Rodríguez Morató  is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, former vice president for Research of the International Sociological Association (2006–2010) and former president of its Research Committee on Sociology of the Arts (1998–2002). He is the co-editor of a special issue of Cultural Trends and has previously co-edited other issues of the International Journal of Cultural Policy and City, Culture and Society. He coordinates a major research project on the values of culture in Europe.

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Alvaro Santana-Acuña  is Associate Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, United States. He is the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (2020) and the co-editor of La nueva sociología de las artes: una perspectiva hispanohablante y global (Gedisa, 2017). His next book is titled The Nation of Triangles. He is the recipient of research awards from the American Sociological Association. Matías  I.  Zarlenga  holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and graduated in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds a position as an associate researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina, and a professor at the National University of Tres de Febrero, Argentina. He is a member of the Centre for Studies on Culture, Politics, and Society (CECUPS) at the University of Barcelona. He has participated in several funded projects at the national and European levels. His research interests include sociology of art and culture, cultural policy and urban sociology.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 11.1

Design work on models of the environment. Source: Author Revision of the project presentation sheets. Source: Author Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author Two Boca Juniors’ players posing during the 1983 National Championship. To the right, the Boca Juniors jersey for the 2012/3 season Fig. 11.2 Counterfeit jerseys of Boca Juniors for sale during the team’s 2012 tour to Mendoza

55 58 153 156 158 159 282 285

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Typology of creative settings Table 5.1 Division of Jolie Môme company work Table 12.1 The evaluation process according to the quality profile of the candidates

73 125 302

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CHAPTER 1

New Perspectives for the Sociology of the Arts Arturo Rodríguez Morató

A prominent characteristic of the arts in contemporary society is their complex delineation and fuzzy contours, and therefore their ubiquity. The arts—their values, characteristic practices and works of art—are found everywhere today, not only in well-defined art institutions but also in the most diverse places, some relatively unsuspected, such as in the kitchens of famous chefs, the workshops of fashion designers or the urban spaces used by the creators of street art. The expansion and diversification of the social sphere of art has been constant for decades. As is known, this expansion was produced by the successive avant-garde movements, which gave way to a postmodern dynamic that removed the barriers between high and popular culture, and their worlds and symbolic repertoires. Thus, street art came to be regularly present in galleries and at art auctions, like other forms of outsider art (Zolberg & Cherbo, 1997), while design and other creations previously devalued due to their supposedly decorative or artisanal character, such as ceramics or textile art, gained prominence in those same spaces and in art museums. And thus, artistic events of all kinds,

A. Rodríguez Morató (*) Departamento de Sociología, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_1

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instead of concentrating and isolating themselves, began to spread along the entire social space, occupying all kinds of places. The postmodern drift has not been exclusively responsible for this artistic proliferation. In reality, it was due to more complex and far-reaching social transformations, which have given a peculiar centrality to artistic activity in contemporary society. Firstly, it was due to the post-industrial social transformation, which led to a general increase in income, leisure time and levels of education of the whole population. It was also caused by the de-structuring of the modern artistic model described by Bourdieu (1992), with the rapprochement between the artistic and commercial poles of the artistic field, the fragmentation and the increasing flexibility of cultural industries and, inversely, the growing commercialism of the institutions of high culture (Rodríguez Morató, 2012b, pp.  323–324). But postmodern cultural dynamics, known for being characteristically striking, have given a particular visibility to art today and have contributed greatly to disseminating aesthetic sensibilities and patterns of aesthetic work in multiple fields that were initially far removed from fine arts. The recent enthronement of creativity—the notion of eminently artistic roots and meaning—as a leitmotif and paradigm of socioeconomic progress in advanced societies (Florida, 2002; Reckwitz, 2017) gives an idea of the gravitational power that the artistic model exercises in today’s society. The arts, therefore, permeate other social practices and influence their conformation, they expand and diversify. At the same time, however, and as a result of the same process, the arts are also desecrated, losing purity and autonomy. To different degrees, artistic dynamics are intertwined with those of multiple non-artistic actors whose interests are completely unrelated to any art logic. And the artistic practices themselves are often redefined as hybrids or, more generally, are understood in their inherent institutional hybridity. In this way, the arts have become a paradigm of social complexity. On the other hand, the field of artistic work constitutes a laboratory of precariousness and uncertainty that characterises contemporary society (Menger, 2009). And beyond its own sphere, the dynamic of artistic appreciation, founded on originality, as it has been projected in the increasingly wide and expansive space of the cultural sector, has given rise to a peculiar form of wealth (Bandelj & Wherry, 2011) and a specific economic logic (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017). With all this, it can be said that the arts have not only greatly increased their importance in twentyfirst-century society (Alexander & Bowler, 2014) but have also acquired a salient sociological relevance.

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In this context, the sociology of the arts is currently experiencing a significant boom. This academic area has had a long history of heterogeneous national developments, throughout which it has suffered multiple ups and downs, successive disciplinary identity crises and advances and setbacks in its place within the sociological community. These different evolutions can be traced through some of the many presentations and introductions that have been published, with increasing frequency, in different countries: in France (Moulin, 1986; Heinich, 2001; Pequignot, 2013), the USA and the UK (Zolberg, 1990; Inglis & Hughson, 2002), Germany (Danko, 2012), Brazil (Quemin & Villas Bôas, 2016; Bueno et  al., 2018) and Spain and the Spanish-speaking world (Rodríguez Morató & Santana Acuña, 2017). But in recent decades the disparate processes of national consolidation of the discipline have given way to a broader and deeper consolidation. Sociology of the arts publications have diversified, covering the most diverse fields and aspects, from the production to the reception of works of art, institutions and policies, as well as all kinds of artistic forms, not only the traditional fine and popular arts but also those corresponding to multiple creative practices of less institutionalised artistic identity, such as fashion or cuisine. These publications have proliferated, in turn, in all kinds of academic media: in the most reputed sociological journals of the discipline, in the form of articles and special issues, in specialised journals such as Poetics, Cultural Sociology or Sociologie de l’art, and in books published by the most prestigious publishers. During this time, central paradigms of analysis, such as those by Becker or Bourdieu, have also been consolidated. In addition, these same paradigms have exerted an important influence in many other fields of sociology, particularly Bourdieu’s paradigm. Besides, other academic areas, such as the sociology of organisations or economic sociology, have regularly incorporated artistic themes into the repertoire of their work. On the other hand, since the creation in 1979 of the research committee on the sociology of the arts at the International Sociological Association, specific academic associations have multiplied and strengthened, both in Europe and the USA. The result of these developments has been a profound transformation of the sociology of the arts, which has operated in two ways. On the one hand, the specialism has matured, now accumulating its advancements and findings in a less prejudiced way, regardless of schools and orientations. And on the other, the dynamics of exchange between specialists has become increasingly global, in terms of themes, approaches and, progressively, influences too.

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This book provides a presentation of the discipline, focused on its most innovative developments. More than a standard presentation, conceived on the basis of different existing theoretical options (Inglis & Hughson, 2002) or around the various problems and empirical fields of research (Alexander & Bowler, 2014; Quemin, 2016), this collection of essays is first and foremost a telling exponent of the effervescent theoretical creativity and empirical expansion that currently characterises the sociology of the arts. Such creativity is present in the increasingly predominant approach to a sociology of the arts in action, one developing an ongoing dialectic of empirical analysis of cases and theoretical elaboration from them, in an ever-expanding area of inquiry and from a theoretically open-minded attitude. This is the perspective that is developed here. The book is an adapted version of a previous Spanish volume on cutting-edge developments in the discipline authored by a diverse set of early and mid-career Spanish and Latin American sociologists characterised by their international careers, and it provides a broad vision of the current potential of this specialism. In order to properly understand and appreciate the contribution that the book makes to this vibrant field of study, there are, however, some key factors to consider in some detail in this introductory chapter. To begin with, it is important to appreciate how the field of the sociology of the arts has been shaped in recent decades—through successive renovations, to reaching full maturity—as the same factors responsible for its evolution now determine its progress and future. In addition, it is also important to clarify the nature of the new stage in which the discipline currently finds itself, as well as to consider the relative prominence that sociologists of Hispanic origin are acquiring within it, since this book is based precisely on their contribution. Therefore, the discussion to follow will pay attention to these two issues. Then, in relation to what has been said, we will also present the content of the book, explaining its origins, commenting on its meaning and interpreting its various chapters. Finally, from a programmatic perspective, we will reflect on the possible and at the same time desirable horizon of future development for this discipline.

The Overhaul and Maturity of the Sociology of the Arts After a long and tortuous history, in recent decades, the sociology of the arts has reached productive maturity. This stage of development is the result of two successive overhauls of the discipline that have profoundly

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contributed to its transformation, one of them taking place in the 1960s and the other beginning thirty years later, around the 1990s. In both cases, the change meant a redefinition of the discipline with respect to three fundamental parameters: the capacity to focus on the specificity of its object (artistic creation), the relationship with the humanities and its location within sociology. The first overhaul constituted a radical break with the previously practiced sociology of the arts. The various traditions of sociology of music, sociology of art or sociology of literature, which had been developing since the beginning of the twentieth century, had developed within the aesthetics and humanities dedicated to these different arts and adopted the problems and typical assumptions of these disciplinary frameworks. In these academic settings, the scope and consistency of the sociological perspectives applied were very limited. Jean-Claude Passeron, referring critically to this humanist sociology of the arts, gave the key to understanding such limitations: “It was always—he would say—knowledge [...] subordinated to a primordial presupposition, kept out of the reach of any empirical questioning and protected from all impertinent curiosity: that of the value of works of art that are called to play an aesthetic role in the history of culture” (Passeron, 1986, p. 450). In the middle of the last century, the main protagonists of the fragmentary sociology of the arts of the time—Hauser, Antal, Francastel, Lukács, Goldmann, Adorno—developed their work predominantly within a humanist framework, far from academic sociology. For this reason, they focused their attention on the analysis of these privileged works and were also subjected, at the same time, to a series of important collateral conditions: to the strict separation between a consideration of the artwork from an internal or an external perspective; to stay within the parameters defined by the relationship between works of art and global society, thus condemning themselves to a weak or null empirical operationalisation of the social referent; and, ultimately, to form part of the hagiographic discourse of celebration of the artistic fact. By the late sixties, however, these approaches were beginning to decline. A new sociology of the arts, led by professional sociologists, and formulated from very different parameters, linked to empirical social research, was emerging and would become fully dominant in the following decade. Thus, a new paradigm of the sociology of the arts was constituted, explicitly detached from the humanist perspective, and even opposed to it, in the seminal formulations of Becker and Bourdieu; a paradigm manifestly

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inscribed, on the contrary, within the framework of academic sociology (substantively linked to other fields of this discipline, such as the sociology of education or the sociology of occupations). In this paradigm, analytical primacy shifted from works of art (and from classical works in particular) to the space of social relations in which they are generated. On the other hand, the social space under consideration was no longer the abstract image of society as a whole, but the concrete space of relationships directly or indirectly involved in artistic production; that was the primary focus of attention. Due to the above, in addition, the link between the artwork and society was redefined, so that the artwork was understood to be configured in this case from those same relationships, not disconnected from them, and the opposition between internal and external analytical perspective was deactivated. Finally, the aesthetic values would no longer be the independent variable of the analysis, much less an objective to be achieved through it, but would form part of the reality to be analysed. Between the 1970s and 1980s, the work of a large number of sociologists, especially French and American, promoted the new empirical sociology of the arts developed within this paradigmatic framework (beyond Becker and Bourdieu, among many others: Richard Peterson, Paul DiMaggio, Robert Faulkner, Diana Crane, Vera Zolberg, Wendy Griswold, Raymonde Moulin and Jean-Claude Passeron). Since the 1990s, a more subtle qualitative transformation of the orientations and predominant parameters in sociological work on the arts has taken place. This transformation, which crystallised at the beginning of the new millennium, has represented a second renewal of the sociology of the arts, which has culminated in its current maturity. The new stage is not defined by a radical break with the previous stage, institutional or discursive, as was the case of the renewal of the sixties, but rather it represents a qualitative transformation of the orientations and the predominant parameters in the sociological work on the arts. It is a transformation that results from the interweaving of three trends of change of the discipline, which has started to appear already in the previous decade, if not before: on the one hand, a trend of change of a disciplinary nature; on the other, a line of thematic and analytical evolution; and finally, an evolution of the social and political context in which it operates. To begin with, the disciplinary evolution of the sociology of the arts led to a certain impasse in the institutional development of the discipline. The relative maturity reached by the new sociology of the arts from the 1970s onwards resulted in the generation of analytical paradigms that would

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reach a large academic projection in the following decade in many areas of sociology (particularly those of Becker and Bourdieu). This maturity and influence encouraged at the same time in its protagonists the ambition to promote a broader sociology of culture, capable of articulating around the inquiries about the arts and on the basis of the sociological research parameters developed in that field, the set of subspecialties that dealt with the analysis of symbolic production in contemporary society (from the sociology of science to that of communication or religion). Already in the 1970s important initiatives emerged in this regard. This is the case for the production of culture perspective, which Richard Peterson began to promote during these years through various meetings and publications (Peterson, 1976). And this is also the case of the disciplinary project that Pierre Bourdieu sponsored at the same time from his Centre de Sociologie de l’Éducation et de la Culture. This ambition of articulating differing cultural fields was later expressed in the creation in 1986 of the culture section of the American Sociological Association (Zolberg, 2005, p.  342), which over time would become the second largest section of the association. But the fruits of these efforts of the sociology of the arts were to become ambiguous. The proliferation of analysis on the cultural dimension in multiple areas of the sociological discipline (in the sphere of organisations, social movements or gender, for example) or, in a more general formulation, what has been called the cultural turn in sociology, takes place in the nineties. But, at the same time, the attempts to articulate a sociology of culture promoted in previous decades—those of Bourdieu and Peterson, in particular—seem at this point exhausted or unsuccessful. And in reality, on the other hand, the position of the sociology of the arts within the sociological discipline, although already fully consolidated, seems at this point also stagnant.1 Why does the expected apotheosis of the sociology of the arts not take place in this circumstance? The culturalisation of sociology that has occurred has not been due to the push of the sociology of the arts only. This has acted as a major trigger, but other forces have been even more decisive. One of the most fundamental was the revival of sociological 1  Zolberg (2005) even registers a certain regression in the United States, but this is offset by the significant expansion of the discipline in Europe at the same time, with the creation of the Network on the Sociology of the Arts of the European Sociological Association and with an important growth in particular in the UK, as well as with the rise of certain specific areas, such as the sociology of music (Shepherd & Devine, 2015, p. 14).

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theory, now centred on the cultural key. The influence exerted by culturalist sociological theory has gone in a direction contrary to that advocated by the new sociology of the arts: favouring a vision of culture as a general dimension of social reality, instead of a vision focused on particular institutional spaces of symbolic elaboration. The most significant case in this regard is that of Jeffrey Alexander, who carried out an energetic crusade since the late 1990s against the sociology of culture based on a specialised vision of culture: against Bourdieu especially but also against the perspective of the production of culture, neo-institutionalism or interactionism (Alexander & Smith, 1998); and, more broadly, against specialised sociologies of culture, including the sociology of the arts (Alexander, 2003, p. 5). Alexander’s questioning, who reproached these perspectives for the lack of vision of culture as an autonomous instance of determination of the social, influenced the delegitimisation of the attempt to articulate a programme of the sociology of culture from the sociology of the arts, achieving at that time to consolidate the use of the term “cultural sociology” (and its associated perspective) instead of “sociology of culture.” The ambiguous position in which the sociology of the arts found itself in those years and the interplay of tensions and expectations that this position implied pushed the discipline towards a certain re-centring, towards a deepening of its discursive specificity. This trend was allied to the drift of its own internal development, which had long been moving towards a refocusing of the works of art. The issue of artwork, central to the old humanistic sociology of the arts, had in principle been bordered by the new empirical sociology of the arts, in order to concentrate on other dimensions of artistic life that seemed more sociologically relevant at that time (mainly the audience, the art professions and markets, or the organisational dynamics of production and distribution); also because these dimensions were more easily operationalised from a classical sociological approach. But the issue soon re-emerged, conveniently reconceptualised. Around 1985, it timidly reappeared in an important colloquium held in Marseille, in the form of a question: “Is the sociology of artwork possible?” (Moulin, 1986). The incipient thematisation of artwork in the mid-eighties reflected a confluence of the various lines of research that were being developed at that time, to the extent that each one of them, with greater or lesser intensity, was already beginning to inscribe the subject in its own work horizon. The sociology of art audiences did so by shifting their attention to the question of reception (Griswold, 1987). The sociology of artistic

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production followed a similar process by approaching it as a dynamic of accommodation to a series of organisational constraints (Peterson, 1985) or as a process of adjustment between discursive resources, professional circumstances and public interests (Griswold, 1986; Brain, 1989). The issue also arose when, from critical structuralism, there was an attempt to exhaust the explanatory potential of Bourdieu’s model of the field of symbolic production to account for the uniqueness of a specific creative project (Bourdieu, 1988), or when the construction of meaning and aesthetic value was investigated from the paradigm of mediation (Akrich, 1986). In this way, the significant and evaluative dimension of artwork became common to the various lines of research and schools of empirical sociology of the arts in that decade. Research into artwork continues along these same lines during the following decade, expanding to other constructivist perspectives (Heinich, 1992; DeNora, 1997).2 However, at that time, a very significant change of dominance takes place when some go from considering works of art as products to focus on the practical contexts of their use (Acord & DeNora, 2008). This is an approach that had already been pointed out in the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation since the previous decade, in connection with the models of analysis that Bruno Latour and Michel Callon were developing for the field of sociology of science and technology. Working at that Centre, it is Antoine Hennion who mainly applies those models to the artistic field in these years, in a series of works devoted to musical mediation in different areas (in the production of pop music, on the radio, in music schools). When, in the second half of the nineties, his inquiry focuses on the practices of the music lover and on the simultaneous co-­ production of the artwork and their tasters (Gomart & Hennion, 1999), is when they reach greater projection. This is significantly enhanced, on the other hand, when associated with the related research that Tia DeNora begins to publish at approximately the same time in England on the use of music in different contexts of everyday life (DeNora, 2000). The joint effort of Hennion and DeNora, both capable academic entrepreneurs and surrounded by a favourable institutional environment (in the case of DeNora, effectively supported by her colleague Robert Witkin), will then make it possible to establish a version of sociology of the arts in the academic landscape characterised by considering the artistic material from the 2  In France, the research group OPuS (Œuvres, Publics, Société), created in 1999 by Alain Pessin, has further reinforced the attention to the artwork in subsequent sociology of the arts.

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point of view of its capacity for generating the social, a substantial change with respect to the sociology of the arts until then in place, which focused its analysis, in an inverse way, on the determination or social organisation of artistic production. The approach of these authors will equate them in this sense to some extent to the old humanist sociology of the arts, but only apparently, since their perspective of analysis will be empirically contrasted, not purely theoretical; and it will be, above all, local and situated, and therefore contingent, not abstract, macro sociological and deterministic, as happened in the former. This was a first preview of the announced change; an advance that was meant to introduce the possibility of art-sociology together with the established perspective of the sociology of the arts (De la Fuente, 2007). This innovation was welcomed by Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues, who understood it to be assimilable within the parameters of their cultural sociology (Eyerman & McCormick, 2006; Alexander, 2008). Their endorsement will be important for the academic legitimation of this position, which is, however, ambiguous with respect to Alexander’s disciplinary project.3 The decisive reinforcement of this change, which means at the same time its redefinition as a general transformation of the dominant research orientation within the sociology of the arts, will actually come from another side: by the incorporation of other positions previously disconnected or far removed from Hennion and DeNora’s to the renovation movement and the approach of the different positions towards each other. A fundamental incorporation occurs immediately and is that of interactionist orientations. In the book Art From Start to Finish, sociologists Howard Becker, Robert Faulkner and Pierre-Michel Menger, together with various other specialists (musicologists, economists, artists), set out to explore in detail what a work of art consists of as a social product (Becker et al., 2006). Their analysis, which largely assumes Hennion and DeNora’s approach to the materiality and agency of artwork, introduces another parameter of essential importance: the procedural perspective. Later, other orientations of a structural nature, in principle detached from these approaches, have also taken these on. The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture (Hanquinet & Savage, 2016) 3  DeNora defends that her work is at the forefront of cultural sociology, but at the same time she does not hesitate to frame it in continuity with the tradition of empirical sociology of the arts and, in particular, like Hennion, in direct contiguity with Becker’s interactionist approach (Acord & DeNora, 2008), both contradictory affiliations, as has been said before, with Alexander.

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does so programmatically, affirming at the same time the relational perspective and aesthetics as guiding principles of the analysis. The incorporation of these two fundamental research orientations has definitively forged the new dominant formula of the sociology of the arts, but it has also revealed, at the same time, the essential continuity in the change produced. The new perspective, in any case, implies important changes, among others a preeminent attention to the materiality of the artistic object and its aesthetic character, which brings the sociology of the arts closer to work in philosophy, psychology, sociology of science and anthropology of material culture, among other disciplines (Acord & DeNora, 2008, p. 227; Born, 2010). Finally, it must be taken into account that the new focus of interest and the new predominant orientations that emerge in the thematic and analytical development of the discipline also result from the new stimuli, both ideological and practical, that it has received from the social and political context in which it has developed in recent years. In this regard, changes in culture and cultural policies have played a significant role in the obsolescence of the old perspective and in the consolidation and articulation of the new one. There are new themes, such as artistic globalisation or digitisation, that have arisen naturally in counterpart to very visible changes in reality. But the cultural transformation in recent decades has been broad and profound at the same time (Rodríguez Morató, 2012b) and has come to favour the paradigm shift in the sociology of the arts in more indirect ways as well. The cultural order has become more fluid, its contrasts have been largely deactivated, the repertoires (high culture, popular culture) have been unstructured and the correspondences between social strata and lifestyles have been destabilised. All this has eroded the credibility of the classical, deterministic structural perspective, and has favoured the emergence of other more complex and dynamic relational perspectives. On the other hand, for a long time, the artistic paradigm has been projected in many areas of social life outside of art and the aestheticisation of the most diverse practices and goods has taken place. These phenomena logically tend to translate into an extension of the application of the perspectives of the sociology of the arts to these multiple fields (gastronomy, outsider art, design, etc.). In addition, the social transformations that have enhanced the projection of the artistic paradigm and increased the socioeconomic importance of cultural activity, have changed the social perception of culture, which has gone from being considered a marginal and irrelevant field for development to being conceived as a factor of central importance and

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dynamising character. It is the outline of a new postmodern cultural order: that of the culture society (Rodríguez Morató & Zolberg, 2003; Rodríguez Morató, 2012b). The vision of art as an active and generative element, which characterises the renewed sociology of art, is fully congruent with this perception and is, therefore, reinforced by it. The transformation of the cultural order has its counterpart, moreover, in the field of cultural policy, which undergoes a change of coordinates of similar significance (Menger, 2010; Rodríguez Morató, 2012a). In the eighties, a rethinking of cultural policy already took place, which replaced its traditional objectives of the redistribution of cultural capital with other economic ones: these are culture-led urban regeneration policies (Rodríguez Morató & Zarlenga, 2018). Culture is thus conceived as an investment that can generate benefits rather than as an expense. In the following decade, there was a redefinition of the cultural field encompassed by politics, incorporating the so-called creative industries (advertising, design, fashion, etc.). In this context, a vision emerges that emphasises creation, paradigmatically concentrated in the arts, as the driving force behind the entire society and economy. By the year 2000, finally, an ideology of creativity as a social panacea is developed and to some extent also a demand for knowledge about the dynamics of creation (although the prevailing economistic vision leaves sociologists aside, paradoxically). The ideology of creativity, but increasingly also the practical stimuli derived from it, support the advance of the renewed sociology of the arts.4 Above all, the perspective of creativity provides the legitimising context that frames the research horizon in which the sociology of the arts currently works: the horizon of creation.

The Sociology of the Arts in Action Eduardo de la Fuente (2007) was the first to echo the renewal of the sociology of the arts that took place between the 1990s and the beginning of the following decade. Under the label of the new sociology of the arts, he highlighted a number of important disciplinary innovations: “firstly, a 4  These incentives are very diverse, ranging from the funding of research and scholarships, to the provision of academic positions related to this topic, in which sociologists of the arts profiles fit well. In this regard, a particularly significant case was the election of Pierre-Michel Menger as Professor at the Collège de France (2013), occupying a chair whose profile is Sociologie du travail créateur.

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reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of art to non-art ‘stuff’; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a contingent social fact” (De la Fuente, 2007: 409). These new predominant approaches in the sociology of the arts from the turn of the century, which de la Fuente identified in his early balance, undoubtedly constituted some of the most characteristic features of the new configuration of the discipline. The longer historical perspective that we now have and the broader analysis of this transformation that we have outlined here allow us to highlight the refocusing of the discipline on its discursive specificity as a structural key to the new stage. The new attention given to artwork and artistic creation from the 1980s reintroduces an aesthetic perspective in the discipline, as we have seen. This new interest in the formal aspects, values and meaning of artwork leads, for its part, naturally to focus on the agency of artistic objects, their own materiality and the practical and procedural nature of their creation. Through these routes, sociological work on the arts, which finds stimulus and inspiration in particular in the sociology of science and technology, meets and interweaves with other multiple disciplines that also work in this field, such as aesthetics, history of art, anthropology and the psychology of art, cultural studies or semiotics. In this way, a dynamic interdisciplinary exchange is constituted as a distinctive feature of the new stage of the sociology of the arts. On the other hand, the interest in artwork and artistic creation, insofar as it is relocated in the broader frame of the creativity perspective and the culture society, favours a systematic thematic enlargement of the field of study. Among the new topics addressed are, for example, outsider art (Zolberg & Cherbo, 1997) or self-taught art (Fine, 2004). Diverse expressive practices are increasingly investigated from the perspective of artification (Heinich & Shapiro, 2012; Shapiro, 2019). All kinds of functional productions endowed with aesthetic value are also studied from other perspectives (Molotch, 1996, 2003; De Nora, 2000). These works add to the continuing tradition of popular art studies, many of which have grown at the confluence of the British tradition of cultural studies and sociology (Willis, 1990). In addition, the connection to other multiple fields of sociological research on culture is also expanded in parallel. In this sense, there is a proliferation of work that comparatively analyses the domain of art and other diverse domains: artistic objects and scientific objects (Hennion &

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Latour, 1993), music fans and drug users (Gomart & Hennion, 1999), artistic evaluation repertoires and other repertoires of cultural evaluation (Lamont & Thevenot, 2000), aesthetic discourse and political discourse (Mukerji, 1997; Ikegami, 2005; Zubrzycki, 2013), architects and philosophers (Collins & Guillén, 2012) or iconic meanings in art and other more mundane areas of social life (Alexander, 2008). The proliferation of objects of inquiry is further enhanced by the growing and increasingly global expansion of the community of practitioners of the discipline. The greater diversity of cultural and institutional contexts from which sociological work on the arts arises, the variable distances from which it is linked with the established disciplinary discourse and the increasingly intense connection of the international sociological community favour a new dynamic of exchange, in which shared theoretical assumptions are less important. The confluence of a common interest in creation also facilitates the opposition and dialogue between work that address very different aspects and perspectives, favouring their mutual fertilisation. In this way, eclecticism crystallises as a new predominant attitude in disciplinary dialogue and the result is that a new dynamic of progress in the discipline emerges: that of the sociology of the arts in action. It is a dynamic that is far from the traditional pattern prevailing in other stages of development of the discipline, in which disciplinary progress operated fundamentally within the margins of different schools and traditions, a pattern of progressive accumulation of evidence that was allowing for the refinement and development of theories of paradigmatic vocation, by their successive contrast with new empirical fields of inquiry. On the contrary, the characteristic formula of the sociology of the arts in action consists of the constant and creative rearticulation of concepts, models and analytical approaches coming from different theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields, all of them configured in contrast to novel problems and new fields of empirical study. These constant and varied analytical trade-offs, theoretically motivated at times but also instigated in other cases by social or political causes, produce a particular theoretical effervescence, which is characteristic of the discipline in its present stage. The current stage of the sociology of the arts, which we have just characterised as the sociology of the arts in action, is directly linked to the innovations introduced in the discipline around the turn of the century, which de la Fuente identified and called with the label new sociology of the arts (De la Fuente, 2007). The new disciplinary dynamic that has emerged since then also results from other factors, such as the increasing

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globalisation of the discipline or the predominant theoretical eclecticism that currently prevails in it. In this way, a productive empirical-theoretical dialectic has been consolidated, open to all kinds of influences and far from any form of doctrinal rigidity. This is the hallmark of the new stage, in which the potential of previous advances reaches its culmination. The maturity reached by the sociology of the arts in recent times has also translated into a significant increase in its disciplinary standing within the broader scope of the sociology of culture/cultural sociology. At the height of 2005, Vera Zolberg registered an incipient enhancement of interest in artistic themes within that universe. Commenting on the Blackwell Companion for the Sociology of Culture (Jacobs & Hanrahan, 2005), she stated: “there is a ‘new’ cultural sociology with the aesthetic dimension at its core” (Zolberg, 2005: 342). Fifteen years later, the presence and influence of the perspectives coming from the sociology of the arts has only strengthened in this disciplinary context, favoured by the boom it has experienced in its current key. A new militant eclecticism has also made its way into cultural sociology on both sides of the Atlantic, which has facilitated the prominence of the sociology of the arts within it. This prominence and the new eclecticism that fosters it can be seen both in the SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Inglis & Almila, 2016) and in the recent manual published by Lyn Spillman, What is Cultural Sociology? (Spillman, 2020). But this higher profile goes beyond a mere question of amount of attention given. Vera Zolberg (2005) advocated “re-aestheticizing the culture concept” as a key strategy for advancing the study of culture. In this regard, she noted: “Working through the issue of agency and structure, for example, has been stalemated by its overdetermined nature. Recasting that issue as one of artistic creativity suggests an exciting possibility of resolving the stalemate” (Zolberg, 2005: 347). Similarly, Tia DeNora and Sophie Kryzs Accord (2008) proclaimed that the sociology of art was in a position to show the way to solve a fundamental challenge of cultural sociology: the articulation between the analysis of explicit culture and implicit culture (Accord & DeNora, 2008, p. 224). A step further in the same direction, Hanquinet and Savage (2016) have advocated developing a relational and aesthetic cultural sociology that places the sociological analysis of artwork and cultural production and consumption in its own centre, from the assumption that in the culturalised current societies this area, intrinsically protean, is a privileged terrain for shaping the social. In this way, it can be said that in recent years the sociology of

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the arts has not only come to occupy a central place in an increasingly ductile and open cultural sociology but has also become a primordial vector of innovation overlooking its future development. The current dynamism of the sociology of the arts is also verified through the renewal of its themes and areas of interest, a renewal that, as we have said, responds to both internal and external stimuli. Some of these are characteristic. One of them is the theme of artistic globalisation and cosmopolitanism. This phenomenon, so prominent today, has been studied in depth by various sociologists of the arts in recent years. With respect to other generic and usually inaccurate analyses of cultural globalisation, produced in the last decades of the twentieth century in other academic areas, sociological and non-sociological, the sociologists of the arts who have subsequently dedicated themselves to the subject, especially since the turn of the century, have provided a much clearer view of the phenomenon. They have investigated in different fields and in relation to varying aspects: on the proliferation of related genres within the global framework of contemporary popular music (Regev, 1997, 2013), the interrelation between markets and policies in the global expansion of film and audio-­ visual creation (Crane et al., 2002; Crane, 2014), that same interrelation and its effects on the hierarchisation of visual artists and art galleries (Crane, 2009; Quemin, 2002, 2013, 2021), as well as on the articulation between local and global markets in the same field (Velthuis & Baia Curioni, 2015; Velthuis & Brandellero, 2018), and on editorial globalisation (Sapiro, 2009, 2010). Through the growing number and diversity of their studies, these and other sociologists dedicated to these issues have provided an extensive body of empirical evidence and have been able to develop increasingly penetrating analysis of the phenomenon of artistic globalisation in all its aspects. In recent times, moreover, some of these works have developed an ambition of theoretical elaboration, particularly in connection with Bourdieu’s legacy (Sapiro, 2013, 2015; Buchholz, 2016, 2018; Regev, 2019). Responding to an internal logic of development, other topics of current interest for the discipline revolve around artistic works. One is the issue of their resonance and meaning, as artistic icons or literary classics (Alexander, 2008; Santana-Acuña, 2020). Another is that of agency, an aspect that has been considered for some time now and whose investigation has progressed through a permanent counterpoint of analysis of artistic works and

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diverse cultural objects. In these analyses, the art work or cultural object is conceived dynamically, as mediations that contribute to shaping the identities of the subjects linked to them in the very process through which these subjects define and experience them (Hennion, 1993; Zubrzycki, 2013), or as models that guide and legitimise action and social order (Mukerji, 1997, DeNora, 2000; Molotch, 2003; Wagner-Pacifici, 2005). In connection with the work on artistic and cultural agency, evolving on relatively equivalent parameters, of interdisciplinary dialogue and between cases of different nature, the theme of materiality also appears prominently, a theme that deepens the disciplinary decentring of sociological work on the arts (Griswold et  al., 2013; Zubrzycki, 2017; Domínguez Rubio, 2014, 2020). Finally, an important additional perspective is that of the cycle of creation and existence of the work (Becker et  al., 2006; Childress, 2017). Another focus of interest in the current sociology of the arts is that of (e)valuation. This is a topic that has been intensely developed from Bourdieusian parameters and also in opposition to them. The Bourdieusian problem par excellence is that of distinction, which has a double face: that of cultural consumption and that of cultural production. Both are part of a model of cultural dynamics that is conceived in an integrated manner, based on the idea of a homology between the functioning of both spheres (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). The Bourdieusian problematic of cultural consumption started from the analysis of artistic reception (Bourdieu & Darbel, 1969) but ended up taking shape in the broader framework of a general sociology of cultural practices (Bourdieu, 1979). Later, the most influential questioning also arose in a restricted area, that of the analysis of musical tastes, with the idea of ​​“omnivourness,” enunciated by Richard Peterson (Peterson & Simkus, 1992). Since then and up to the present, the contrast between the models of distinction and omnivourness has generated a continuous debate, which is still open and has served to promote multiple investigations and analyses. Most of these developments, however, are located beyond the artistic field, in the broader space of lifestyle, which is why we are not going to pay attention to them here.5

5  Hanquinet and Savage (2016) provide an up-to-date overview of those discussions and contributions.

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On the side of cultural production, on the contrary, the works focus mainly on the arts, understood in a broad sense, so they are unequivocally located in the field of the sociology of the arts. In their review of the post-­ Bourdieusian sociology of valuation and evaluation for the field of cultural production, Beljean et al. (2016) refer to a wide body of work on artistic evaluation that is situated at various distances from Bourdieu’s classical model. Some empirically deepen and nuance the orthodox perspective (Friedman, 2014). Others problematise it more clearly by pointing out its anomalies regarding the supposed radical contrasts between the poles of restricted production and large production (Craig & Dubois, 2010; Kersten & Verboord, 2013). And others distance themselves even more widely by focusing their attention on some of their most significant blind spots, such as the subjective dimension of the evaluation, linked to the identity of the evaluators (Chong, 2013; Leschziner, 2015), the evaluation practice itself, its devices and dynamics (Heinich, 1999, 2005; Velthuis, 2005; Anand & Jones, 2008; Moeran & Pedersen, 2011; Moeran & Christensen, 2013; Gerber, 2017), or the agency of artistic objects and materials in evaluation (Hennion, 2001, 2015; Benzecry, 2011; Sgourev, 2021a). In the areas furthest from the gravitational field exerted by the classic Bourdieusian problem, a series of issues linked to the appreciation of the arts are currently constituted as privileged objects of analysis, grouping around them, eclectically, a diversity of contributions from different approaches, including the Bourdieusian approach, as well as from other sociological subfields, in particular, from economic sociology and the sociology of organisations. These include topics such as categorisation processes (Bielby & Bielby, 1994; Zuckerman et al., 2003; Rao et al., 2003, 2005; Slavich et  al., 2020; Sgourev, 2021b), the constitution of artistic genres and disciplines (Peterson, 1997; Lopes, 2002; Lena, 2012, 2019; Heinich & Shapiro, 2012; Shapiro, 2019) and, very particularly, the topic of consecration and legitimation, on which numerous articles and monographs have been published in recent times (Baumann, 2007; Peist, 2012; Lizé & Misdrahi, 2015; Lizé & Renard, 2016; Childress et  al., 2017; Coman & Opazo, 2020; Alexander & Bowler, 2021; Schmutz & Dowd, 2021). In connection with evaluation, another issue that has become important lately, in the context of the rise of the ideology of creativity, to which we have alluded earlier, is that of innovation and artistic creativity. It is not an issue that has traditionally attracted attention in this field. The most

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accredited sociological models of the social space of creation, those of Becker (1982) and Bourdieu (1992), did not focus precisely on innovation.6 Until the 1990s, there were hardly any significant contributions on this subject, apart from the classic work on the Impressionists and other subsequent movements by White and White (1965). From that date, however, valuable papers on the subject began to appear (Peterson, 1990; Sarfatti Larson, 1993; Rachlin, 1993; DeNora, 1995; Sussman, 1997; Guillén, 2006). These first works dealt with very diverse and specific cases of artistic movements or famous creators. Since then, works on particular figures or movements have not stopped being published (e.g. Sgourev, 2013; Opazo, 2016). But what characterises the new dominant way of approaching this topic is the growing theoretical ambition of the new analyses, which are often based on the comparison of cases and are occasionally oriented towards the integration of disparate theoretical frameworks. Once again, Harrison White (1993) and Richard Peterson (Peterson & Anand, 2004) have been pioneers in this regard. Since the year 2000, but especially in the last decade, there has been an explosion of work in this field and many have adopted the new key. The new impetus comes largely from contributions originating in the field of sociology of organisations, where the subject of creativity has aroused great interest, associated in particular with the study of creative industries (Godart et al., 2020). In this field, where artistic innovation appears as a general paradigm of innovation, numerous meetings have recently been promoted and multiple publications have been generated. In them, analysis on different aspects of artistic innovation are compared with others referring to different areas of cultural industries (Jones & Maoret, 2018; Strangaard Pedersen et al., 2020; Cattani et al., 2022). But beyond these circles, most of the authors of the works on artistic themes that participate in them also publish in traditional forums of the international sociology of arts, such as the journals Poetics or Cultural Sociology. Their work is articulated to the mainstream sociological literature on the arts, although they make other connections too. Their integration in the discourse of the sociology of the arts is, in this regard, growing. 6  Bourdieu, however, made the concept of the creative project and the innovative figure of Baudelaire his leitmotif in his first theorisation of the field of symbolic production (Bourdieu, 1966). The symbolic revolution led by Manet would later be his last analytical challenge (Bourdieu, 2017). But between one moment and another, there is no doubt that his model did not favour the analysis of artistic innovation.

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The sociological works on artistic innovation that have proliferated in recent times are of various types, without being grouped especially by their academic territory of origin. Patriotta and Hirsch (2016) distinguish two major orientations between them: a structural orientation, of studies that pay fundamental attention to the social boundaries that are crossed to achieve the success of innovation, and another institutionalist orientation of work that predominantly takes into account the change in symbolic boundaries (Lamont & Molnar, 2002). Those of the latter coincide with those previously presented in relation to the subject of consecration and legitimacy, because innovation necessarily incorporates this element, and they also partially overlap those cited in relation to the categorisation and constitution of genres or, to another scale, with the literature on evaluation mechanisms and valuation processes. Work with a structural orientation, which Patriotta and Hirsch (2016) link to Becker (1982), conceives innovation in relation to the interaction patterns of the creator and in particular as a change in their position within the space defined by the current chains of cooperation, for which it acquires centrality and its practice and projection are altered. Among sociologists who adopt a structural prism, network analysis specialists pay particular attention to the position of the actors within a core/periphery structure and the way in which changes in these positions are shaped (Cattani & Ferriani, 2008; Bottero & Crossley, 2011; Sgourev, 2013; Jones et al., 2016), or they are interested in the position within groups (Accominotti, 2009) or in the configuration of groups of collaborators (De Vaan et al., 2014). Others attend preferably to the dynamics of innovative groups, underlining the importance of certain types of interactions, such as apprenticeship (Collins & Guillén, 2012), or that of the evolutionary processes of groups (Farrell, 2001; Parker & Corte, 2017). The sociology of the arts has become strongly globalised in recent times, as mentioned above. The origin of its practitioners has been diversifying more and more. One of the dimensions of this diversification is due to the growing participation of sociologists of Hispanic origin in the disciplinary progress, including many of the authors of this book. The presence of this Hispanic component in the current panorama of the discipline is a surprise, because traditionally it had been almost completely absent. For many decades, a whole series of political and academic circumstances strongly impeded or weakened the development of this academic specialty in Latin America and Spain, which severely limited the Hispanic contribution to the discipline and its impact on the international scene (Rodríguez

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Morató, 2017). In recent years, however, there has been a rapid expansion in the number of specialists from these countries. This is a peculiar generational boom. A new generation of sociologists of Hispanic origin specialising in this field has emerged. Educated in many cases outside their countries of origin, in renowned centres of excellence, and today mostly established abroad, in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany or Australia, where several of its members develop successful academic careers, this generation is gaining considerable prominence. Young sociologists of Argentine, Chilean, Spanish or Uruguayan origin, such as Claudio Benzecry, Vanina Leschziner, M.  Pilar Opazo, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Marta Herrero and Eduardo de la Fuente, are playing a significant role at this juncture of the discipline. The leading role of these early and mid-career sociologists is explained by their particular affinity with the new approach to the sociology of the arts in action, which places them at the forefront of current disciplinary development. It is an affinity that is largely sustained by their status as migrant scholars. As is well known, academic migration tends to foster scholarly creativity, giving rise to unusual combinations (Kupferberg, 1998). This condition creates a productive distance from established knowledge frameworks, linked to specific national traditions and characteristic objects of analysis, while also posing a stimulating contrast to past experience. The peculiar estrangement of the new generation of Hispanic sociologists of the arts predisposes them, in this sense, to theoretical eclecticism, interdisciplinarity, the search for new objects of study, and it also stimulates them to creative innovation, precisely the features that characterise the sociology of the arts in action. This affinity between the approaches that are currently predominant in the discipline and the intrinsic dispositions of these sociologists contributes to giving them the visibility that they currently enjoy. That same affinity, moreover, also makes them the most suitable exponents of the new orientation that we present in this book.

Broadening the Sociological View of the Arts Through the contributions of a select group of sociologists of Hispanic origin who are currently working on the frontiers of the discipline, this book seeks to provide a vivid portrayal of the effervescent dynamic of theoretical creativity and empirical expansion that characterises the

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discipline today, rather than offer an analytical synthesis of their best-­ established findings. The panorama that the book offers is extremely rich and diverse, both in terms of the fields of artistic practice covered (opera, rock, visual arts, dance, theatre, literature, architecture, high cuisine), and of thematic areas addressed (universes of creators, reception and taste, artistic institutions and organisations, creative practices and professional practices, evaluation and assessment practices). A peculiar hallmark in most of the work presented is the global vision they provide. It is indeed very significant that in most cases the objects of study chosen are far from the cultural coordinates of origin of the authors (restaurants in San Francisco and New York, the Beatles, a French theatre group, a London dance company, some protest actions at the Tate). When this does not fully occur, it is a question of a crossed gaze (such as that of Matías Zarlenga, when studying centres of artistic production in Barcelona) or of gazes deployed from a distance (such as that of Ignacio Farías, based in Germany, when he studies some Chilean architecture offices or that of Claudio Benzecry, established in the United States, when he analyses cultural objects in Buenos Aires). In one case—that of Alvaro Santana-Acuña’s chapter on One Hundred Years of Solitude—the global perspective is even more defined as it is a study on the international career of an artistic work, even though it is precisely an archetypally Hispanic one. The various studies presented here are structured in four parts, covering the sociology of arts’ most characteristic thematic areas: production, creation, artwork and reception. In them, the entire arsenal of resources of the discipline is mobilised, but not with the aim of reproducing or consolidating the discipline but to make it advance. In this sense, the range of theoretical paradigms evoked is rich and wide. It contains analyses that take as their key reference several of the most important theoretical frameworks currently handled in the discipline (Bourdieu, Becker, Peterson, ANT), combining them in innovative ways in connection with the work of many other influential contemporary specialists (De Nora, Hennion, Lamont, Menger and Born, among others), and also establishing links to less frequent theoretical frameworks (such as Collins’) and others from different fields (economic sociology, microsociology, ethnomethodology, semiotics and cultural history). In the first part, dedicated to artistic production, Ignacio Farías starts by considering a disciplinary concurrence device to analyse the process of architectural production. This angle of vision allows him to reveal the

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peculiar creative logic that operates within this characteristically heteronomous sector of artistic practice. Taking the actor-network theory and its reference authors (Callon, Latour, Hennion) as a fundamental analytical framework of reference, Farías recreates the dynamics of adjustment between the architectural imagination, the devices of the professional practice, the representations of the characteristics of the environment and the rules of architectural competitions. In doing so, he unveils the artificial heteronomy that architects actively recreate when faced with the challenge of a competition. In this way, revealing the paradoxical creative heteronomy of architectural practice, Farías implicitly calls on the reader to question the limitations of a Bourdieusian scheme that establishes a simple opposition between an autonomous logic of artistic creation and a heteronomous one. In the second chapter, Matías Zarlenga outlines a theory on the role of place in processes of urban cultural creativity, developed from an observational analysis of the predominant practices in a series of spaces for artistic creation of different types, located in a Barcelona neighbourhood characteristically oriented to innovation. It is an effort to cover an existing gap in the sociological analysis of artistic production, which has paid very little attention until now to the spatial dimension in which it takes place. Reworking notions borrowed from Goffman and Randall Collins, in particular, Zarlenga develops a comprehensive taxonomy of analytical categories to understand how the spatial arrangements of places where artistic creation takes place condition interactions, practices and outcomes of creation. The articulation and further specification of these various categories (rituals of creativity, creative scenarios, creative frameworks) shows their analytical potential, helping to interpret the connection between the different configurations of spatial parameters and the different dynamics of creation that occur in the different cases. In the following chapter, Vanina Leschziner addresses the study of the social space of high cuisine, a field that has some important structural parallels with the case of architecture presented above. As was the case in the former, the case of high cuisine is characterised by its eccentricity with regards to the parameters of the spaces of artistic creation most commonly analysed in the discipline: those of the classical arts. And just as happened to Farías, this eccentricity of her object serves Leschziner to critically contrast Bourdieu’s standard theory on the field of symbolic production and to advance a different analytical framework. In her case, however, the point of reference is Bourdieu’s theory, which she initially endorses. But

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the evidence of its anomalies, with regards to the structuring of the field and its innovation dynamics, gives Leschziner the opportunity to incorporate multiple other perspectives, some of them from the sociology of organisations and others from interactionism and pragmatism, in addition to some important Marxist notions. With their help, Leschziner develops a fully original theorisation, introducing new concepts such as “mode of cultural production” and “self-concept,” which profoundly transform the initial Bourdieusian analytical framework. This supplementary elaboration, somewhat similar to the one carried out by Zarlenga in the previous chapter, thus allows her to account for how the different patterns of creation correspond to different configurations in the field of artistic production. The second part is dedicated to creative practices. In Chap. 5, Marisol Facuse proposes to analyse the singularity of artistic-militant practices, understanding as such those oriented to the struggles for social transformation. Taking Jolie Môme, a French militant theatre company, as a case study, Facuse explores, with the help of Becker and Foucault, how the interrelationship between the artistic and the political is concretised. Once again, the focus on an eccentric object for the traditional sociology of the arts, located in a border territory of the social space, allows to outline and test a hybrid and original analytical device. Considering, in particular, how the internal division of labour is established, as well as the modes of operation and decision-making within the group, and the distribution of power and authority, Facuse gives an account of the way in which the domains of art and politics are interconnected in this case. She shows how their social spaces and their characteristic logics are intertwined, to what extent contradictions emerge between them or are subordinated to each other, and on the contrary, cooperation and convergence dynamics are produced. In the following chapter, Dafne Muntanyola deals with the study of a collective artistic practice, but her analysis does not address the general organisation of the group and its relations with the environment, as in the case analysed by Facuse. Instead she focuses on the act of creation: in her case, of a collective choreographic work. She conducts a micro-­sociological inquiry into these practices, seeking to reveal the underlying order of interaction and decision-making dynamics in the creative process. This deals with a level of social reality rarely studied in relation to creation, which Muntanyola takes from a methodological approach of cognitive ethnography. Multiple perspectives are articulated in her theoretical approach, especially Goffman’s interactionism and Schütz’s sociology of

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intersubjectivity, the main perspective being that of habitus, in an interpretation of a notion that goes back not only to Bourdieu but also to Mauss. Based on this theoretical-methodological background, the analysis of the collective choreographic practice carried out by Muntanyola allows her to identify an order of interaction that questions the common individualistic vision of creativity and the dominant individualistic phenomenological theorisation in dance studies. In the last chapter of this second part, Paola Castaño explores a space of contact between artistic and scientific practices. In this sense, it is an inquiry similar to the one undertaken by Facuse in Chap. 5, with respect to politics. But this parallelism is only partial, because in this case the aim is not to properly understand the structural parameters of the interrelation between the two spheres, but rather to understand the logic and possibilities of their intertwining. Another reason for this is that the case studied and the approach used are very different. The case that Castaño studies is that of a collaborative process between an artist, a scientist and an art historian, faced with the common challenge of understanding and representing a characteristically uncertain object, dark matter. This process gave rise to multiple results, ranging from the production of specific artistic work and an exhibition to a variety of intellectual and academic contributions. It is an extraordinary case of collaboration due to the very theme around which it develops: uncertainty. This peculiar focal object causes the destabilisation of the different discourses and disciplinary habitus of the actors, which equalises their positions in the exchange and encourages their openness to exploration and transformation, thus giving rise to an innovative type of collaboration. Regarding the focus of the study, it uses an ethnographic approach of the sociology of science, with its contingent and processual vision of practice and its emphasis on following the actors. Thus, the inquiry into the process of interdisciplinary collaboration considered did not focus, as usual, on identifying the range of rationalities that are confronted or on analysing the negotiations and compromises that take place, but rather on registering the similarities and converging reflections that are raised. It is the process of translation and tuning which takes place that has been interesting to analyse, insofar as it revealed the peculiar heuristic and transformative potential of collaboration. The third part of the book is dedicated to the analysis of the artwork. In Chap. 8, Cristián Martín Pérez-Colman studies the musical work of the Beatles in the crucial transformation that it undergoes in the mid-1960s. This case gives him the opportunity to test the Bourdieusian concept of

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generative formula and ultimately allows him to reframe it, relocating it within a broader analytical context. The purely structural and strategic conception of artistic proposals that Bourdieu develops, with his notion of a generative formula, quickly reveals its analytical limitations when confronted with a terrain such as that of popular music of the twentieth century, in which the change of the technological environment where the artwork is created decisively affects its shaping. In his detailed analysis of the transformation that crystallises in the most transcendental innovation carried out by the Beatles, which consists in having turned musical records into works of art, Pérez-Colman focuses on the double dimension, organisational and technological, through which their practice is restructured to give rise to a new creative paradigm. The expansion and reconfiguration of the Bourdieusian concept that Pérez-Colman intends to achieve, when considering this exemplary case, thus passes through the displacement of the analysis to the field of creative practice and by considering it in dynamic connection with the organisational, material and technological environment within which it takes place. This rethinking is carried out thanks to the incorporation into the analytical approach of the parameters of Peterson’s production of culture perspective and actor-network theory. This produces a novel and promising theoretical synthesis, presented here in the form of a concrete analysis paradigm. In the following chapter, Eduardo de la Fuente also seeks to broaden the vision of the artwork from its materiality. But in his case, not so much from its genesis as from its impact on the structures of human existence. This change of perspective also corresponds to a different analytical objective. De la Fuente addresses the analysis of the materiality of the artwork as a prism from which to interpret its deepest meanings, those that link it to its contexts of existence, spatial and temporal, then serving as revealing keys to those same contexts. It is not the actual meaning of the artwork that fundamentally worries him, but rather its symbolic potential with respect to the broader material and social realities to which it is linked, such as the time or the place in which it is located. For the rest, his elaboration also passes through carrying out a theoretical synthesis, but this is conducted through a radically different analytical strategy, exploratory rather than systematic, and incorporating very different ingredients. The central object that De la Fuente scrutinises is the modern architectural surface and concrete in particular. The theoretical perspective that he builds to analyse this results from assembling the new “materialist sensibility” present in recent cultural sociologies of art inspired by action-network

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theory and the Yale Strong Program’s emphasis on “iconicity” as involving both aesthetic power and symbolic depth. For him, however, this perspective is not so much an a priori of the analysis, a category to be mechanically contrasted in its application to the object, but rather a starting point and a stimulus to carry it out. In his analytical strategy, the object acquires a decisive role. De la Fuente methodically applies himself to “thinking with the object,” not “about it.” Therefore, the originality of his approach does not lie exclusively in the theoretical device built for the analysis; the choice of the object is equally decisive. In this case, it is the materiality of the architectural surface, a microscopic dimension of the artwork, which opens a peculiar analytical horizon by itself. His originality is encrypted, thus, to begin with, in the articulation between the constructed theoretical angle and the strategically chosen object. But neither exclusively, since the analysis carried out by De la Fuente does not automatically follow from this articulation. The analytic development that he carries out is profoundly idiosyncratic. It consists of a heuristic spiral elaboration, arising from the first ingredients already mentioned, but progressing by successive reflections on a selection of heterogeneous analytical contributions from different fields (differing branches of cultural history, urban sociology, anthropology or semiology). Through their successive appropriation, De la Fuente builds an itinerary that illuminates his own vision of the object and its ultimate meaning. As a whole, therefore, what De la Fuente offers is an original methodology for analysing the social world through the materiality of the artwork, a methodology whose analysis clearly shows its potential. Alvaro Santana-Acuña also chooses a strategic object for his analysis. In his case, the legendary novel by Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude. As a contemporary archetype of classic literary work, the analysis of the universal projection of this novel allows us to face a crucial limitation of the most established approaches of the sociology of the arts (Peterson, Becker, Bourdieu), which restrict their consideration of works to the context of their production. In doing so, they appear relatively incapable of explaining the extraordinary spatial and temporal scope of the classics. Addressing this blind spot of the sociological analysis of art, through the case of García Márquez’s novel, gives Santana-Acuña the opportunity to go beyond the traditional paradigms of the discipline. He aims to analyse the uprooting and transcendence of the artistic work. The theoretical framework that Santana-Acuña builds to address the analysis of the peculiar issues that the classical work raises is situated in the

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context of the new sociology of the arts (Hennion, Witkin, DeNora, Born, Benzecry, De la Fuente or Domínguez Rubio), which, when considering the work, are interested in many ways in their disconnections, not solely in their roots. The key to his approach, however, comes from semantics and semiotics. It is from there that Santana-Acuña extracts the central category of his analysis: indexical expressions, which allude to a layer of meaning that transcends the original contexts of the object’s existence. Its main originality lies in this amalgam of the sociologically constructed issue of the uprooting of the cultural object and the analytical prism adopted borrowed from linguistics, a characteristically interdisciplinary amalgam. The immediate objective of Santana-Acuña’s analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude is to identify the patterns of significance shared by a multiplicity of audiences, in different cultural and national contexts. However, the ultimate goals of his work are more ambitious and go beyond the case of the classical novel. The robust evidence that Santana-Acuña is able to present on the universal significance of One Hundred Years of Solitude serves as a powerful basis for advocating the adoption of a new model for analysing the meaning of cultural objects in general, capable of distinguishing multiple layers of meaning with diverse degrees of universality and permanence. This evidence also allows him to claim to have overcome the dichotomy between the internal and external analysis of the literary work, which the category of significance intrinsically questions. In the fourth part of the book, devoted to the study of reception, the focus shifts to illuminate the realm of actors connecting with and reacting to art objects. Claudio Benzecry, in its first chapter, takes two exemplary cases, very different from each other, one of an artistic nature and the other not, in which the cultural objects to which the actors are linked experience substantive changes. Firstly, the case of an audience of opera fans accustomed to high quality standards, who, due to a radical decrease in economic resources, are confronted with a totally disfigured offer with respect to their previous experience. Secondly, an audience of football fans who go through a similar situation. These are cases in which, having broken the link previously built between audiences and their objects of devotion, a new link has to be built. In reality, as in the previous study by Santana-Acuña, it is about studying cases of cultural uprooting, in this case not because of the cultural and temporal distance that separates audiences and objects, but because of the deconfiguration of the object itself, which problematises the link and forces a new local reconfiguration of it. However, the analytical approach changes, shifting from focusing on the

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configuration of layers of meaning of the object to focusing on the dialectic of co-production between actor and object and on the procedural dynamics of destabilisation-stabilisation. The contrast between these two cases helps Benzecry analyse the dynamics of this relationship: the procedural logic that leads from the destabilisation of the link to its new stabilisation and the role that pre-­ existing cultural structures play in the process. This methodical contrast between both cases, representative of two universes of differing cultural legitimacy and characteristics, allows Benzecry to identify uniform patterns and different courses of evolution, thereby outlining a general model of procedural dynamics, in principle applicable to all the processes of rupture and transformation of the fundamental bond of cultural reception. But this analysis does not restrict its relevance to the understanding of these processes. Benzecry conceives it above all as an opportunity to test the applicability of the different cultural sociology theories on the object. He distinguishes, in this regard, two great traditions. First, he identifies an structuralist tradition, whose origin dates back to Durkheim, and encompasses a multiplicity of contemporary conceptions, from Bourdieu to Collins or Alexander, in which the meanings of the object and the links with its receivers are stable. He then distinguishes a second tradition, to which he adheres. It is an interactionist tradition, represented by Becker, Hennion or DeNora, in which meanings and relationships between actors and objects are intrinsically precarious, subject to a permanent working and reworking. In the analysis of the cases, Benzecry predominately mobilises the conceptual resources provided by this second tradition (strategy, assemblage, attachment, stabilisation), while also appealing to others that refer in some way to the first one (self-narratives, chains of equivalences, partial objects). In doing so he tests its diverse applicability, and above all explores the possibility of its integration. In this way, his study aims to advance an ambitious theoretical synthesis between both traditions, which understand the different conceptualisations as gradients of cases. This is his ultimate goal. An essential facet of reception is evaluation, which has multiple dimensions (private and public) and is structured through a multiplicity of processes (formal and informal). Not in all areas of artistic creation the dynamics of evaluation operate equally, being those that most depend on public subsidy those in which more formal mechanisms predominate and where they acquire greater relevance. In Chap. 12, Marian Misdrahi addresses the analysis of a competitive public grant-making mechanism in

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the visual arts field, where this form of public support is often decisive for the survival of creators and their ranking. Her study is part of the sociology of the arts as well as the sociology of evaluation. Therefore, its theoretical frameworks, methodology and objectives are marked for this particular hybrid character. The fundamental theoretical perspective from which Misdrahi conceives his analysis is provided by Boltanski and Thevenot’s sociology of critical capacity. This vision is articulated to Becker’s art world theory and is complemented by the model provided by Nathalie Heinich on the value regimes of contemporary art. Her analysis combines, among other minor ingredients, a typological construction inspired by Becker, an examination of the dynamics of justification developed within the framework of the evaluation and the value regimes evoked. Regarding the objectives, interests relating to the sociology of evaluation, such as those linked to the study of peer evaluation, are combined with others framed within a sociology of the arts perspective, as the most immediate to understand the functioning of the evaluation mechanisms of contemporary art and the broadest to help identify the notion of excellence that currently governs the field of contemporary art. Beyond the understanding it brings to a topic of crucial importance which has hardly been studied, Misdrahi’s study, even though exploratory in nature, shows the potential of theoretical and methodological hybridisation as a way of advancing the sociological analysis of the arts. The final chapter by Marta Herrero is somewhat unique. She studies the case of an activist group whose acts of protest forced the Tate Galleries to forgo the important funding they received from BP (formerly British Petroleum). As acts of protest and rejection against an artistic institution, these performances constituted a peculiar form of negative reception and their analysis therefore fits within this section; although in a special way, since the criticism in this case is to the institution, not to specific artistic work. Nevertheless, the case has a complexity that makes its analysis serve as an appropriate end to the book, since the protest of the group in question, Liberate Tate’s, constitutes an artistic action, related to the work of conceptual art proliferated since the late sixties under the label of institutional critique. From this point of view, the analysis carried out is also about the frames of artistic production, the artistic practice itself and its meanings. In this sense, the chapter also refers to the other parts of the book. The complexity of the case also corresponds to its analysis, in which various perspectives and theoretical frameworks intersect. Herrero appeals, first, to the organisational perspective on institutional disruption, a notion

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linked to institutional theory. From this perspective, the artistic and, more particularly, the museum field, appear as an organisational field among others. But for Herrero this field constitutes a particularly revealing terrain, because here belief constitutes a more fundamental and at the same time fragile basis than in other fields, so its rupture is especially subversive. The disruption in this case must therefore be more transparent and effective. A second frame of reference evoked is that of work on the sociology of art focused on the role of art within social movements, such as that of Ron Eyerman. This work offers a vision of the keys for effectiveness in the use of art as a tool for confrontation and collective mobilisation. The third frame of reference, decisive for the structure of Herrero’s argument, is that of Randall Collins’ theory of interactions rituals. From the combination of these various prisms, the analysis that Herrero carries out of the case and its most significant episodes, allows her, on the one hand, to propose a vision on how to incorporate the theory of interaction rituals into the sociology of anti-establishment art. On the other hand, it also allows her to assess the capacity of institutional critique to produce disruption within artistic fields and thereby set a benchmark in this respect for other organisational fields experiencing similar tensions. In this way, her work shows, like many others presented above, the analytical potential offered by the intersection of theoretical perspectives, beyond the strict limits of the sociology of the arts, and the projection in other fields of sociology, to which sociological work on the arts can aspire. Taken as a whole, the various chapters offer a broad overview of the multiple fronts on which the discipline is currently advancing, covering its fundamental thematic areas and touching on many of the issues that we previously pointed out as the most current ones (from globalisation to meaning and materiality of the works, evaluation and creativity). Above all, they reflect the characteristics of this innovative stage in which the discipline becomes a sociology of the arts in action. This highlights the theoretical eclecticism and synthetic ambition of many of the contributions, which are not restricted to the limits of the discipline, not even those of cultural sociology, but often go beyond these academic spaces, incorporating keys from other branches of sociology and social and human sciences. This theoretical promiscuity without borders and this tendency towards interdisciplinarity do not imply, however, a tendency towards disintegration, as the contributions of the various authors intertwine, evoking common points of reference and in many cases gravitating towards each other.

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In the various chapters the theoretical and methodological creativity of the elaborations stand out, qualities that quite often appear closely linked to the specificity of the cases addressed. The objects of study tend to play a strategic role in the advancement of theory and thus acquire a greater role than usual in the course of the research process. As expressed by Eduardo de la Fuente in his chapter, it is about “thinking with, and not just about” the object. The choice of the object becomes crucial, in this sense, because it already contains the potential of the new vision to be developed. This translates into a propensity for the originality of the cases chosen, which leads the empirical investigation towards unexplored terrain and extreme or exemplary cases (the broken objects that Benzecry is interested in, the uprooted objects that Santana-Acuña considers, the hybrid and open object that Castaño analyses), thus propitiating the expansion of the empirical field analysed. On the other hand, the confrontation with these objects, from the assumptions of theoretical eclecticism and synthetic ambition previously mentioned, leads to establish as a predominant pattern a dynamic relationship between objects of study endowed with important research affordances, unprejudiced theoretical bricolage and imaginative analytical developments, with more or less definite and explicit theoretical implications. The characteristic effervescence of the current stage of the sociology of the arts, which this book exemplifies, is encrypted in this dynamic.

Looking to the Future of the Sociology of the Arts The sociology of the arts is at a very promising point in its development, with well-established bases and references and in full international expansion, developing a dynamic of constant theoretical innovation and thematic expansion and increasing its relevance in the context of cultural and general sociology. In the direction in which it is currently moving, and maintaining the modes in which it currently operates, its progress in the immediate future seems assured. The discipline does, however, have some significant challenges ahead of it and how it tackles them can go a long way towards determining its longer-term development and strength. Here we are going to point out, to finish, some of the main ones. A natural and desirable line of evolution of the sociological work on the arts concerns progress in the integration and convergence of its different literatures, some of them still insufficiently connected to each other, either by the gravitational force exerted by certain academic fields, such as

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organisational studies, or by the language barriers imposed by different national traditions. In this introduction we have drawn attention to the intrinsic connection and the natural fit, within the framework of the sociology of the arts, of contributions that are formulated outside the central spaces of the discipline, sometimes going unnoticed. It is a fit that is essential for the fruitful development of the discipline, but that in no case needs to be exclusive. This book, on the other hand, is a forceful demonstration of the possibility and relevance of strengthening the integration between work or authors that refer to different linguistic universes. Looking ahead, however, there is still progress to be made in both directions. Another line of evolutionary progress in the discipline consists of increasing comparative work in this field, still relatively scarce, and expanding it to different scales. In other fields of sociological work, national comparisons have been very fruitful and here they could be too. But without a doubt in this case the most natural type of comparison, which should be fostered, is the one that concerns the different sectors of artistic creation, which outside of some very specific theoretical frameworks, such as the Bourdieusian, are not usually contrasted rigorously. This kind of comparison is particularly promising. And together with these expansions of the sociological work on the arts currently carried out, another similar, equally promising one would be to develop research that articulates different facets of artistic life; to produce work that, for example, integrates the various facets of the cycle of creation, such as that of Childress (2017), in different creative fields. A challenge of strategic importance, which should also be considered in parallel to the previous developments, is that of addressing analytical problems of explicit public relevance. One of these problems could be that of artistic innovation, which could be done by contrasting the way in which it operates in different sectors of creation and integrating at the same time the different analytical dimensions that can be recognised in the process (organisational, evaluative, politico-institutional). Another problem of the same nature that could be addressed would be that of artistic evaluation and assessment, in which processes of valorisation, categorisation and legitimation that operate in different areas (cultural consumption, cultural production, cultural administration) are intermingled. In the previous cases, a fundamental key to integrate would be that of cultural policy, a research field that has traditionally been marginal to the sociology of the arts, but which in recent times is attracting attention (Alexander & Rueschemeyer, 2005; Alexander, 2018; Mathieu & Visanich,

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2022). In the case of artistic innovation, on the other hand, an equally essential context to consider would be the spatial and urban context. It is an object of study that, like cultural policy, had been little considered in the past by the discipline, but whose importance has become increasingly clear, in relation to the renewed role that the arts play in cities (Currid-­ Halkett, 2007; Lloyd, 2010; Wherry, 2011; Phillips, 2013; Silver & Clark, 2016; Rodríguez Morató & Zarlenga, 2018). These two extensions of sociological work on the arts correspond to the public importance that the arts have acquired in today’s society. In this sense, it is also surely time for the discipline to go beyond its strict academic framework and to seek to strengthen itself in the public space as well. In parallel to continue advancing our academic lines of research, we should also foster what Michael Burawoy would call a public sociology of the arts and a policy sociology of the arts (Burawoy, 2005). Finally, the discipline can aspire to recover the old ambition of the art-­ society analysis of the old humanistic sociology of the arts, no longer based on the obsolete notions of correspondence and homology, which refer to simplistic and outdated social ontologies, but from new parameters, based on the perspective of practices and processes (Reckwitz, 2002; Glauser, 2005). These new parameters allow us to rethink the link between art and society as a complex and changing relationship, constituted by intricate multilevel connections and assemblages, with influences and effects in both directions, a relationship that includes important escalation processes with respect to dynamics of organisation and social configuration (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999; Menger, 2003; Reckwitz, 2017) as well as valuation logics (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017) originally rooted in the arts. Advancing along this path, the new sociology of the arts in action would thus be able to contribute to elucidate the keys to social creativity, a perspective frustratingly blocked today by its neoliberal perversion.

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PART I

Reconsidering the Frames of Artistic Production

CHAPTER 2

Heteronomy and Necessity: How Architects Design for Architectural Competitions Ignacio Farías

It is not easy to compare works of architecture. The difficulty lies in the fact that, as a general rule, architecture responds to unique situations defined not only by singular contexts and specific programs but also by the extremely heterogeneous set of actors who impose particular conditions and restrictions on each work: legal regulations, building materials, client expectations, theoretical discussions, ethical commitments, budgetary limits, etc. In such conjunctures, the question of innovation in architecture becomes somewhat redundant, as most projects involve unique solutions to specific problems. The concept of “singularities” (Karpik, 2010) captures the situation very well, as it implies that works of architecture constitute multidimensional goods, whose value cannot be measured nor compared adequately by means of pricing or other unidimensional metrics. In fact, even though there are rankings of architects and offices based on the number of publications and pages dedicated to their works in the best international journals, the quality of architectural works is mostly

I. Farías (*) Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_2

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evaluated through other media and formats, such as expert reviews, career awards, biennials and, most notoriously, architectural competitions. Architectural competitions are events in which usually an institution invites architects to submit designs for a future architectural work, which are then evaluated and awarded by a jury composed of experts and interested parties. There are, of course, several types of architectural competitions. These may vary according to the type of client and whether this is a public or a private entity. In many countries, architectural competitions are mandatory for the commissioning of public works. In these cases, it is also common that the competitions are open and, in principle, any architect can submit a proposal. Less common, though often more prestigious, are closed competitions, where architects are invited and sometimes even remunerated for their participation. Another highly variable parameter concerns evaluation procedures, as proposals can be evaluated anonymously or finalists may be invited to pitch their proposals to the jury. Beyond these and other differences, one key operation that characterizes architectural competitions is the equalization of the initial situation. Those who participate in them face the same task, receive the same information, work towards the same deadline and have the same restrictions. Robert Gutman, one of the first sociologists to study architectural practices, observed that “the basic intention of the design competition method […] is to bring architectural markets closer to the condition that economic theory calls ‘perfect competition’” (quoted by Larson, 1994: 470). A major obstacle to that rapprochement was, in Gutman’s view, that only 1 or 2 percent of the more than 13,000 offices active in the late 1980s in the United States participated in national competitions. Beyond the problem of unequal access, architectural competitions offer a good case to understand competition not so much as a natural or given principle that structures social fields (Bourdieu, 1993), but rather as a possible result or, even, a hard to reach objective achieved by means of precise socio-spatial and socio-technical arrangements (Callon & Muniesa, 2005). Architectural competitions are not instances of actualization of a universal principle or logic, but singular events in which conditions for the comparability of architectural projects are manufactured by means of formal and procedural investments in the neutralization of difference. The question we must answer is not simply what characterizes competition as a general form of social coordination and then draw conclusions about the case at stake, but rather how competition is manufactured and practised in

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architectural competitions. Whereas the first question can be answered in abstract terms, the second cannot. Indeed, it seems reasonable to distinguish between two operations that constitute all competitions: evaluation and selection. Competitions can thus be understood as processes of selection between alternatives according to more or less complex evaluation criteria.  They vary according to which of these operations takes precedence. Sports championships, for example, necessarily lead to the selection of a winner without a substantive evaluation of his or her performance. In football, this separation between performance evaluation and selection process leads to all kinds of moral dilemmas: unfair winners, moral triumphs, etc. Similarly, in singing, gymnastics or ice dancing competitions, the evaluation (based on the awarding of points by a jury) is subordinate to the selection procedure, so that even when all participants receive a bad evaluation, the competition inexorably leads to the selection of a winner, the least bad. Architectural competitions are at the other end of the spectrum, where evaluation is what matters. In fact, as often happens, they can be declared void if none of the proposed projects satisfies the jury. When a winner is selected, the jury must justify its decision not only by attesting to the correct execution of the selection process but also by making public the reasoning behind the evaluation. The importance that evaluative practices have in architecture contests has led to their interpretation as a key historical institution in the process of differentiation of architecture as an autonomous field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993). In the words of Hélène Lipstadt, “when architects enter competitions, architecture, at least provisionally, resembles an artistic field, for there is a field effect shown by a high degree of autonomy, disinterest, and the creation of an upside-down world” (Lipstadt, 2003: 391). Similarly, Magali S. Larson (1994) describes architectural competitions as discursive events that have the potential to change architectural doxa—that is, the principles of architectural judgement—as they would reinforce the belief in the autonomy of architecture among the participants. In this chapter, I present an alternative interpretation of architectural competitions based on the ethnographic study of design practices (and the beliefs that articulate them) as they unfold in the weeks, days and nights that precede the submission of projects for competitions. Specifically, I rely on fieldwork conducted in two prestigious Chilean architectural offices, Elemental S.A. and Klotz Asociados, which in the spring of 2009 were busy working on their submissions for two international

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competitions: an art museum in a Swiss city and a city hall in a German city. The study of both processes suggests that competitions are not emancipatory events in which economic disinterest or the search for artistic autonomy would prevail, but rather they are problematic events, in which architects must try to revert a situation that limits their abilities to elaborate proposals of good quality. It is precisely because of the high risks of developing unsatisfactory proposals that when architects decide to participate in competitions they do not do so selflessly. A key premise for the following analysis is the empirical observation that architects do not enter competitions to carry out experiments or explore the limits of architectural design, but with the clear aim of winning the competition. Accordingly, two types of practices become crucial: practices aimed at producing an accurate interpretation of the commission (so that they can respond with a winning project) and practices aimed at conveying the proposal in such a way that the jury would  acknowledge its necessity. As we shall see, an ethnographic description of these practices leads us to a conclusion in opposition to what is stated in the literature, namely, that design practices for architectural competitions are characterized by an incessant search for heteronomy and necessity. Heteronomy conceptualizes a condition of dependence on external actors and factors. It is, of course, the opposite of autonomy and presupposes the primacy of a principle of subordination, as well as the imposition of restrictions on autoregulation. As we shall see, the search for heteronomy on the part of architects is also key to transforming contingency into necessity, that is, to presenting an architectural proposal as the only possible solution.

The Commission: The Restoration of Architectural Heteronomy Architectural projects are usually commissioned by a client. The word “commission” underlines the distributed nature of the architectural project, the idea that clients and architects participate in a common mission. Various sociological studies of such collaborations suggest that neither the design problem that gives rise to a commission is autonomously defined by the clients, nor are the design solutions exclusively elaborated by the architects, but rather it is a process of co-production of problems and solutions, of questions and answers (Cuff, 1992). Additional co-designers proliferate in architectural design processes, including politicians and urban

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planners (Kwartler, 1985), technicians and engineers (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2009) and even non-human actors, such as building materials (Houdart & Chihiro, 2009), design tools (Yaneva, 2005), construction budgets (Kjaer & Mouritsen, 2007) among other human and non-human agents that influence and co-design architectural projects in heterogeneous ways. In this context, design processes do not exhibit an autonomous and self-referential dynamic but are marked by heteronomy (or the absence of autonomy), as Jeremy Till (2009) suggests in  his book Architecture Depends. Dependence on heterogeneous actors and factors is not an obstacle or a limitation for architecture but precisely what makes design processes possible. Indeed, as Latour (2008) observes, to design is always to redesign. In practice, design is not concerned with building a world ex nihilo but with improving an existing configuration that has become problematic. Architectural competitions are clear exceptions to such commission-­ based architectural practice, as they involve a double separation of the client and the participants. Firstly, the clients does not participate in the co-production of the commission: architects cannot reach them, know them, interpret them, understand them, challenge them, seduce them and/or be convinced by them. Secondly, the clients are not the ones who have the last word on the winning project, as the selection of the winning project is left in the hands of an expert jury which, although it can understand the problematic situation that the commission originates from, is not directly affected by the decision taken. The question is then how do architects participating in a competition deal with such a strange institution. There is nothing surprising about the answer, as architects deal with it in the same way that people deal with other exceptional or catastrophic situations: by trying to recompose the situation, to return to normality. Rather than seizing the opportunity to design in a radically autonomous way, without the pressures of clients and their restrictions, competitions give rise to a series of practices aimed at producing a “normal” commission, that is, re-establishing the heteronomous condition of architecture. Restoring this normal situation does not simply require the imagination, intuition or inspiration of architects. Reconstructing the client’s problematic situation, as well as the set of conditions and restrictions imposed on the project, is not a discursive-interpretative process that can be studied by only taking into account the webs of meaning that surround a given practice. What is decisive are the sociomaterial mediators, that is to say the material artefacts (by definition partial and incomplete) that

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constitute the problematic situation which has given rise to the commission and that, in this way, mediate not only between clients and architects, but also between the different states of the same project: between the present and the possible, between the context and the content, between the past and the future. We shall begin with these artefacts, understanding that their physical manipulation during design processes is a way of exploring, testing and getting to know the non-architectural aspects of the commission. Undoubtedly, the rules of the competition are a key mediator (Pérez Oyarzún, 2007; Vásquez, 2007). In addition to setting general conditions for the competition, the rules enumerate all the institutional, normative and programmatic requirements with which the project must comply, including, for example, the relevant urban regulations and ordinances, the budgetary framework or the environmental certificates that the building must attain. It is also common for the rules to include extensive tables specifying the minimum spatial requirements for the intended uses, as well as photographs, sketches and maps of the building site and its surroundings. The rules, we could say, establish the starting point for the unfolding of architectural design processes. Yet, taking into account the non-linear nature of design processes (Houdart & Chihiro, 2009; Yaneva, 2005; Callon, 1996), this starting point does not simply designate a point in time but a temporal cut that moves with the project and is redefined as the process advances. In fact, far from functioning as a purely technical and stable document, the rules operate as a mediator of the client, to which it is possible and necessary to return with problems and questions that arise in the development of the project. An example of this is the proliferation of printed copies of the rules in practically every table and meeting dedicated to the project. The copies are underlined, commented on and annotated according to different criteria in successive phases of the process. Marks, crosses, arrows, drawings, sums, loose words, page numbers, exclamation or question marks, comments and coffee stains accumulate on the margins. The rules thus become a key tool in the construction of the commission, they complexify the problem and generate ideas. At the end of the process, in the last days and nights before submitting the project when little can be changed, the rules also operate as a controlling device. For a whole afternoon, for example, I observed (and constantly interrupted with my questions) Carlos, an assistant in one of the offices, who, equipped with a set of freshly printed rules, checked that the information included in the plans to be submitted

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corresponded with the technical and spatial specifications for the different architectural programs. His task was to establish and assess the relationship between the textual and numerical inscriptions included in the rules and the visual and planimetric inscriptions included in the posters of the submission—a visual artefact to which we will return in the following section. The difference between good and poorly crafted rules is tested throughout the project, according to their ability to answer questions and problems, to test design ideas and, ultimately, to mediate the complexity of the client and commission. This is exactly what Daniel explained to me, when he compared the competition rules for the art museum with a “preparatory study” done by a private consultant for a cultural centre he was also working on: It’s the difference between a customer who knows what he wants and a customer who doesn’t know what he wants: “Hi, I want a house”. “And how do you want your house?” “Look, I really don’t know.” Then you ask him: “What’s important to you?” You have to start doing a sort of therapy: “Do you like cooking? Is the kitchen an important space to you? When you get together with friends, do you need a representative public space? Do you care about the bedroom?” And that’s the kind of question you have to ask in the case of the cultural centre. The preparatory study gives only ambiguous goals, such as the development of local culture, community activities, the enrichment of local cultural heritage, the value of I don’t know what. But you have to make a building, something that is ultra concrete […] So: how do we do it? (Field Notes, October 21, 2009)

According to Daniel, well-formulated rules should explain what the client really needs. They should define the architectural program, not simply as a list of requirements but as an analysis of the problem and objectives of the construction project. It is about constraining the space of possible projects and thus contributing to shaping the form of the required project. Yet, even well-formulated rules, such as those for the art museum in Basel, cannot anticipate all the questions that emerge during the design process. For this reason, it is customary for participants to be allowed to submit written questions to the competition organizers, which are also answered in writing in a document that is sent to all participants. This second document not only makes it possible to clarify specific aspects of the commission (the set of conditions and restrictions imposed on the project) but

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also provides clues about the possibilities and alternatives which are being explored by other participants. Despite this, it sometimes happens that architects decide not to take into account all the requirements, conditions or restrictions established in the rules. This was the case of the project for a new city hall in a German city  developed by the second office studied. What the architects saw as problematic here was not the lack of information about the commission but, on the contrary, the excessive prefiguration of the project. The rules not only included copies of already approved building permits but also visualizations of the volume of the building to be designed. In the lead architect’s opinion, the problem was not just that the competition thus became a competition for facades, but that the pre-given volumetric proposal was based on an erroneous assessment of the situation giving rise to the commission. He explained that if one followed the rules the new building would completely cover one side of the old consistorial building; a work of historical value that had originally been conceived to be visible from its four sides and especially from the site where the new building was to be located. Faced with this, the only possible answer was to breach the rules and propose a partially sunken building, in order to keep the space open in front of the old consistorial building. Rules, as we have seen, are multiple. Their multiplicity does not just arise from the different roles they play in the various moments of the design process but also from their ability to lead to differing or even contradicting conclusions. In the latter case, an alternative problematization of the commission was also possible by the inclusion of other mediators. In particular, gathering data online about a citizens’ association and other actors opposing the new city hall competition, as well as working with physical models of the urban environment, confirmed and strengthened the position taken by the architect, to the point of imagining that it was very likely that other participants would also propose a partially sunken building. The models of the urban environment, commonly sent by the competition organizers to the participants, are a second key mediator. In the two cases observed, submissions were to include a physical model of the proposal, which would be exhibited to the jury inserted in a model of the urban environment similar to the one sent to the participants. In the case of the art museum, the need to deliver a model on a certain scale (1:500) caused the entire process of volumetric exploration to occur on that scale

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Fig. 2.1  Design work on models of the environment. Source: Author

(see Fig. 2.1), which contrasts significantly with the practice observed in other offices of making constant changes of scale in order to visualize different aspects of the building (Yaneva, 2005). Moreover, the model’s lack of details regarding social context, functional uses, building materials and the architectural style of the museum’s surroundings led the architects to focus exclusively on the volumetric relationships between the proposed and the surrounding buildings. Over a couple of weeks the architects tested more than fifty small polystyrene foam models, which were constructed, commented on and evaluated in terms of their relationship to the model of the urban environment that had been provided. The goal, Daniel explained to me, was to propose a building that would enter into a “powerful dialogue” with the environment through the volume and the construction materials, that is, the proposed building should respond to the surroundings but not fully, so that it would not disappear. The first models had three main volumes that responded more or less directly to the opposing three corners. During the process, the proposal was reduced to two volumes: a larger, lower volume that responded to one opposing block; and a taller, narrower volume that responded to the block where the old museum is located. As Hennion observes (cf. Hennion & Farías 2015), models as material artefacts do not just delimit the space of architectural exploration but are also capable of resisting and modifying the intentions and fantasy of their creators. Precisely because they materialize the exteriority on which the design

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process depends, models allow those who work with them to change their minds, to be incoherent. Finally, a different set of mediators gathered or manufactured by the participants refer to the various actors and factors on which the project depends. One example of this was briefly mentioned above, as architects gathered data online about local actors opposing the foreseen city hall. Another, rather different example consisted of five quick sketches drawn on the whiteboard of one of the offices studied (see Fig. 2.1). Although I could not observe any situation in which architects would talk about these sketches, when I asked what they represented, they told to me that they had  made them when working on the models for the museum. The sketches represented the type of proposals that they imagined some of the other participants would make—all of them very famous architectural offices, winners of the Pritzker Prize. Although the architects insisted that such sketches had no relevance and that they were made amid laughter and jokes, the fact is that they remained on the whiteboard until submission day. In short, the rules and the models, rumours and speculations, delimit in various ways the space of the possible. Such constraints do not constitute obstacles to the design process but are the starting points sought and produced by the architects themselves in order to give shape to their proposal. The uniqueness of competitions does not seem to lie in the supposed autonomy of the design process. On the contrary, the degrees of freedom and indetermination that result from the absence of the client are rather an obstacle to be overcome. Thus, reconstructing the problem that originated the commission, making the client present and, more generally, restoring the heteronomic condition of architecture are the main practical challenges that competitions impose on architectural practice.

The Submission: The Conveyance of Architectural Necessity A key feature of competitions is that the entire design process converges in the submission of a small set of posters that must convey the project, explain the key decisions and convince the jury in absence of their authors. This contrasts significantly with the usual architectural practice of presenting a project to the client and/or other interested audiences, where the physical presence and performance of the architect play a key role. In such

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situations, the project’s visual mediators, whether digital or paper, function as flexible resources used by the presenter in different ways according to the audience’s reaction (cf. Cuff, 1992). In the case of competitions, the situation is very different: the project’s visual mediators do not function as flexible resources but as fixed and stable propositions that can be interpreted in various ways by the members of the jury, over which there is little control. For the same reason, reducing the interpretative flexibility of the posters, so that the project is conveyed in a controlled, univocal and definite way is a major practical challenge for architects. It should not come as a surprise that one of the greatest investment of time and work that architects make is in the conception, design and correction of submission posters, as well as in the design of each of its textual and visual components: manual sketches of the building; photo-realistic 3D renders of the building in the urban context, as well as of its interior spaces; floor plans, lateral views and cross-sections; as well as technical drawings of various systems, such as electricity, fire protection, evacuation or heating. Text boxes explain the main design decisions. As the list suggests, the posters do not convey a singular perspective on the project but a dense and multifaceted representation of the building in action. Consider the following situation observed in one of the offices where I did fieldwork (see Fig. 2.2). Early in the morning, six posters were hanging on a wall, arranged in two rows of three, one on top of the other. Standing in front of them, I found Alberto, Daniel and Vicente discussing three problematic issues. First, the large size of the renders on the three top posters could give the false impression that they were trying to fill up the space. The posters required more white, not being “too heavy” and giving a “lighter” impression. Second, the main partner, who was abroad and had had checked the posters on his computer, had sent an e-mail during the night stating that the submission lacked “hierarchy”, that is, a clear visual arrangement of the most and least important elements on the posters and the relations between them. For Vicente and Daniel, this did not imply changing the decision of using smaller renders but rather defining more clearly which elements were placed on which posters. One of the options discussed was for the top row of posters to be more conceptual and thus include “more powerful” renders, texts and manual sketches, while the bottom row of posters could expand and specify the concepts of the top row through plans, sections, technical drawings and other more detailed information. Thirdly, the proposed “hierarchy” required that the posters be hung in the same order as they were hung in the office.

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Fig. 2.2  Revision of the project presentation sheets. Source: Author It was impossible to know how the competition organisers would hang the posters. The architects speculated that, if the posters were hung side by side, the competition would need at least 130 metres of wall to present all the submitted projects. This seemed unlikely, but the hanging of the posters continued to be a source of uncertainty. If the competition organisers did not hang them as they were hung in the office or if they designed them to be hung in any possible way, the submission would lose its “hierarchy” and with it the ability to communicate the proposed project in a clear and univocal way. A few days later, the architects decided to incorporate in the lower right corner of each poster a small diagram showing how it should be hung.

The problem of “hierarchy” offers important clues to understanding the challenge posed by the competition format. On the one hand, the fact that it is necessary to “hierarchize” suggests that the design and elaboration of visual mediators occur in multiple, lateral and non-­hierarchical ways (cf. Houdart & Chihiro, 2009; Yaneva, 2005; Callon, 1996). The project is a multiplicity of representations that can be ordered and

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stratified in different ways depending on the situation: a presentation for a client, a working meeting with engineers, another with interior designers, another with building companies, etc. The kind of information hierarchy required for a competition responds to the anomalous situation, in which a set of anonymized posters encounters a group of people, the jury, who have to compare multiple projects and select a winner based on these posters. Unlike publications of works in architectural journals, the aim here is not only to seduce the public aesthetically but also to demonstrate the necessary character of certain design decisions and the extent to which the project is a logical and coherent consequence of such decisions. In this sense, the posters operate as demonstration devices that articulate in a specific and hierarchical way multiple modes of architectural representation: visual, textual, technical, etc. It is a question, then, of producing evidence through the precise alignment of heterogeneous inscriptions (Latour, 1999) about the necessity of the project as the only possible solution. The production of necessity not only guides the design of the submission but also the elaboration of each one of its components. The case of the sketches is particularly interesting. It goes without saying that the architect’s sketch does not constitute the starting point of the design process but is yet another moment, yet another transformation, in the elaboration of visual mediators. According to the architects I met in my fieldwork, the inclusion of sketches on the posters was not intended to give the impression of capturing a moment of original inspiration but was rather a way of signing the delivery, of pointing out to the jury that it is not just another office project but one to which special attention has been devoted. The sketch indicates that the chief architect not only visited the site but also “thought with the sketch.” As one of the architects explained to me, when “sketching” one does not simply illustrate but rather the architect is obliged to immerse herself in the place and think with it. What is relevant is not that the sketch is made at the beginning, middle or end of the design process but its capacity to make evident the necessity of certain design decisions. “The sketch doesn’t lie,” he explained. Renders produce evidence in a very different way. They offer photo-­ realistic visual compositions of the built architectural work “in action” or, rather, in interaction with objects, artefacts, users, lighting, weather, etc. Such composition work involves a major investment, as it requires dedicating long hours to the selection and retouching of each of the dozens of visual objects that are incorporated into the image, paying attention to

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their colours, shadows, appearance, etc. Generally speaking, generating a render requires three successive operations. The first operation is the construction of a three-dimensional digital model of the work and its environment. Once this three-dimensional model has been created, views of the digital object are selected or, rather, “tested” since at this stage the capacity of different views to adequately represent the projected work is not yet known. Interestingly, choosing the right view requires more than digital work. Multiple views are printed out and interacted with in order to choose and even modify the images. The latter was the case with one of the rendered images of the museum, as the architects decided to manually modify the lines of perspective to make it more realistic. As one architect explained to me, the mathematical projection of a central perspective, which is what these programs do, would not correspond with the human perception of space, which would be characterized by slight curvatures at the extremes of the visual field. Thus, especially when it comes to broad perspectives, it would sometimes be necessary to “naturalize” the image, that is, to correct the deviations of the technical representation of space from its human perception. The second operation consists of adding materiality to the selected views. Each of the elements of the building and its surroundings—walls, floors, ceilings, windows, glass, asphalt, sidewalks, terraces, etc.—is edited independently defining its materiality and giving it a specific texture. This also requires visual effects capable of generating a certain atmosphere through the use of lighting and shadow. Although with each new layer of added materiality, the render gains in realism, the result can still be a very abstract representation of space, to the point that sometimes it is not possible to recognize what space it is and from which angle it is represented. This is exactly what happened with a render of the foyer of the museum. Alberto, one of the partners in the office, looks closely at a render included in the posters for the competition and asks what it is supposed to represent. Daniel says: “It’s the foyer!”. Alberto looks closely to the floor plan of the foyer, included in the same poster, trying to understand which part of it and from what perspective is represented. He then asks Daniel whether he is sure that the render represents the foyer. Daniel points to another floor plan, also included in the poster, and indicates from which point we would be looking at the foyer. Alberto, in silence, looks closely at the image and says: “No! I don’t see it”. Humberto, a technical drafter has just arrived and observes the situation with interest. Laughing and in a mockingly  desperate tone he

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repeats: “I don’t see it, I don’t see it”. A couple more architects have now gathered around the group. Someone comments that the render looks like an abstract painting and that it would be necessary to put people in to have some reference. I say I wouldn’t even know where people should go in. Humberto jokes that people could be falling in space. Daniel finally acknowledges that the renders are still too abstract and look like the background of a cartoon series. “Tom and Jerry could pass through here”, someone says from behind. (Field Notes, September 8, 2009)

A good render, they explained to me later that day, must have “weight” (in Spanish, “peso”), it must be able to represent the materiality of the architectural work and, in particular, the different weights of its various elements. A render with “weight” would reveal whether the architectural work could actually be built as the render projects it. The “weight” of a render (and the reality effect it brings) is achieved through a third key operation, consisting of populating the render with objects, artefacts and humans in a photo-realistic composition. The aim is not only to give weight to the building but also to recreate the atmosphere, the situations and the world that the work entails. The render thus makes a concrete proposal about the human and non-human entities and the relations among them that the building summons—something that is especially important for interior spaces, as otherwise it is difficult to perceive their size: “[Let’s] have a piano hanging from the ceiling!”, Vicente suggests and asks Sophie if she knows any contemporary artists whose work could be put in the exhibition hall they are rendering. Both spend then half an hour searching in Internet for an artwork that could help to demonstrate how the projected exhibition hall could work. In the process, dozens of images are stored in a new folder, while they engage in a conversation about whether artists have more freedom to work than architects. Vicente reviews the stored images and decides that it has to be an artwork that is already part of the museum’s collection, so that the jury could relate to it. (Field Notes, September 8, 2009)

The aim of these renders is not just to compose spectacular images but to represent the new museum in a realistic way. What is at stake is not a possible world but a plausible one. As such, these renders offer political compositions. They compose worlds in which certain kinds of actors and

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activities are foreseen in certain spaces and underscore the necessity of such compositions. If the aim of the sketches is to naturalize certain design decisions and the aim of the renders is to populate these designs with actors and activities from the social world that the projected work evokes, what could then be the role of floor plans, sections and technical drawings? Aren’t these just “technical” inscriptions and thus excluded from the ontological politics of sketches and renders? During my fieldwork, one of the main practical challenges associated with these visual inscriptions was how what the architects called their “technical density” affected their legibility. By “technical density” they meant the multiple types and layers of information that are represented in one visual inscription. Interestingly, in many cases such informational saturation resulted from unintended redundancies generated in the very process of making such visual inscriptions. When preparing a floor plan, for example, architects would make various marks and annotations relating to all sort of aspects, even including the need for new graphic elements. These marks and annotations are also useful to check if the proposal meets the requirements of the project, as established in the competition rules. Thus, the floor plans get filled with information that may end up being redundant or unnecessary. One morning, a couple of days before the submission of the museum project, I couldn’t find Daniel, the architect in charge of the project. Someone told me that he would arrive a bit late today, as he had stayed late “cleaning” the floor plans. As with the “hierarchization” of the components of the submission, the aim of “cleaning” the floor plans was that they convey themselves to the jury as self-evident and capable of communicating the proposed spatial arrangement in an immediate and effortless form. This was not always easy, as in the case of some equivocal interior walls of the museum: “Forget the scale, the important thing is that it looks good” was the expression used by Vicente in a conversation with Daniel about a floor plan on which it was impossible to appreciate the different thickness of two types of wall. According to Vincent, the floor plan had to be able to express the difference in strength between the two walls, as this was crucial for understanding how the building worked. An even more difficult challenge was how to represent the envisaged removable walls, which were intended to provide flexibility in separating and merging two exhibition spaces. The problem was how to make their remov-

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able character visually evident on the floor plans: “What do you mean by removable?” Rodrigo asks. “Are they sliding walls?” Daniel explains that they don’t have rails but that they could be taken out. “Then they would have to be like segmented lines”, Rodrigo proposes. Both contemplate the floor plan in silence. “Or with a hash”, Daniel says. “The other option,” Rodrigo points out, “is to make a partially displaced segmented line, as if it were moving somewhere”. Daniel is not convinced: “The last option [would be] to put annotations … annotations for all these things that are not evident in the drawing. To explain in the margins”. Rodrigo doesn’t agree: “The solution has to be through drawing!” (Field Notes, September 9, 2009)

The conversation lasted more than two hours and happened shortly after Daniel returned that day. Daniel had asked Rodrigo to help him review the results of the cleaning he had done the night before. The reason he asked Rodrigo was that he was not part of the team that had developed the proposal for the museum. If it was a question of making sure that the floor plans were self-explanatory, then a fresh pair of eyes were necessary (on the diversity of epistemic positions within architectural offices, see Farías, 2015). The conversation demonstrated not only that technical density can negatively affect the legibility of visual inscriptions but that a floor plan that is too empty can also be extremely problematic: Pointing to the exhibition space on the top floor, Rodrigo asks Daniel why he put a skylight window in the middle of the space and if it couldn’t be bigger. “No,” says Daniel. “It’s not a skylight. It’s a piece of furniture, a bench.” Rodrigo thinks it’s a good idea to put in benches, as they are something that can “dress” the rooms a little more, but that it is not recognisable. Daniel explains that he has been looking for less abstract ways to represent the benches, but without success. The problem, he adds, is that he can’t put benches in every room either, because he needs free space in the rooms for sculptures and installations but then the rooms looks too empty. Rodrigo suggests checking how the floor plans of other museums are normally drawn, because one imagines them empty but actually they are full of things. Daniel doesn’t respond and they both look at the floor plan in silence. From his desk close-by, Vicente, who had followed part of the conversation, comments: “You know what I’ve noticed about these exhibition halls? Contemporary spaces, the most flexible ones, have grids on the ceilings, for all the jerks that like to hang all sort of shit … just saying, in case you want to scratch the floor plan on all sides”. He then approaches Daniel and Rodrigo, looks at the plan of the top floor and asks: “And what about

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this space? Does it only have that skylight window?” (Field Notes, September 9, 2009)

According to these architects, the problem with a floor plan that is too empty is the feeling that the space has not been thought through properly, that it has not been “resolved”. As with the renders, the intention is that the floor plan should offer an immediate understanding of the space and of the functioning of the building, thus allowing the members of jury to imagine themselves in its interior and to explore it as if it were an existing and functioning space. To make it real, it is necessary to strike a balance between technical density and legibility, which may well involve drawing a thicker line than the scale indicates, or populating it with more illustrative drawings that allow, for example, a bench to be recognizable as such. Thus, the floor plans do not just  seek to suggest a possible layout but rather to provide visual evidence of an existing architectural fact.

The Competition: The Production of Architectural Facts The restoration of heteronomy and the conveyance of the necessity of design decisions are, as we have seen, key strategies to revert the exceptional situation that characterizes architectural competitions. Such strategies relate directly to the two key features of architecture highlighted by the architectural theorist Fernando Pérez Oyarzún in his reflections on competitions. “The first is the fact that architectural work is dependent on surrounding circumstances […] A second type of circumstance has to do with what was identified already by Aristotle as a factor inherent to artistic effort, the fact that it produces not necessary solutions, but possible solutions” (Pérez Oyarzún, 2007: 10). According to Pérez Oyarzún, these features have decisive consequences for the results of architectural competitions. Firstly, since many of the external circumstances are not known to the participants, even the best architects end up proposing deficient projects. Secondly, as a consequence of this indeterminacy, architecture competitions are “workshops of the possible”; institutions in which unexpected possibilities open up. In historical terms, he argues, such indeterminacy and openness would be what distinguish architectural competitions from the rest of the professional practice.

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While this might be true for the results of competitions, as we have seen, the implications of these features for the practice of designing for competitions are very different. Indeed, the fact that architectural projects heavily depend on surrounding circumstances means that the participants attempt by various means to acquire knowledge about these circumstances in order to transform an autonomous situation into a heteronomous situation. In addition, when preparing their proposals, the participants try to convey their projects not as possible but as necessary architectural solutions. Competitions thus give rise to a form of indirect competition, where the participants do not seek to outperform their competitors in terms of shared parameters, but rather to present their projects as ultimately incomparable. By means of the precise composition of the submission posters and their various visual and textual components, the participants seek to make evident the necessity of their design decisions, to demonstrate that these are derived from the surrounding circumstances and, in this way, indirectly disqualify design proposals that have not arrived at the same decisions. Importantly, this does not occur by means of a dishonest manipulation of the visual inscriptions of the project in order to give the false impression of its necessity. Rather, the intense work of trying to understand the surrounding circumstances and design the project accordingly often results in the participants convincing themselves of the absolute necessity of each one of their design decisions. On several occasions I observed how these architects suddenly and for no apparent reason experienced a kind of revelation about the inevitability of winning the competition. Suddenly, someone would start singing, “We are going to win, we are going to win, la la la,” or they would express their astonishment at how well thought out the project was. At the end of the investigation, I asked the partner of one of the offices where those certainties came from: You do know when you do a good project and when you do something that is not so good […] Now, the competitions … My experience tells me that they are like lottery tickets, but with fewer participants […] The chances that there are very good projects and even better than ours are surely are very high. But, then, there’s the jury and the decision of the jury. The best project submitted is not always going to win … Too many things have to be aligned for you to win a competition, but less than [those that have to be aligned] to win the lottery … It’s harder to win the lottery. (Interview, November 1, 2009)

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The answer is interesting insofar as it draws a clear distinction between the architects’ own assessment of the project and the jury’s rather contingent decision; a distinction that, in the event of a negative decision, allows the architects not to call into question their own work. As Kreiner (2009) has observed, what usually prevails is the belief that neither success nor failure in architectural competitions can be explained by the design decisions made by the team, but rather by the contingency of the jury’s decisions. For example, the disappointment that I observed when the news came that one of the projects had not made it into the second round was not accompanied by doubts about the carefully articulated architectural fact the architects had produced but by a general questioning of the competition as an evaluation mechanism. When the team compares the project developed with the winning project or the finalist projects, it is not in order to learn what they might have gotten wrong but to understand what the jury possibly got wrong. Indeed, despite being disqualified early from the competition, the submitted project was not only quickly published on the office’s website but was also published without making any major distinctions between it and other built projects. This should not come as a surprise if one considers that the history of architecture is rich in projects designed for competitions that, despite not having won, being disqualified or never built, have become architectural facts of great influence for the careers of their authors and for the history of architecture in general (Larson, 1994). Such a situation suggests that architectural projects do not simply represent possibilities. They are architectural facts whose existence is sustained in networks of visual inscriptions and that, as such, they do not exist purely in the realm of the imaginary and the possible. They have a concrete material and visual reality consisting of drawings, plans and models which continues to exist after the competition and gives them the capacity to promulgate an architectural fact. Accordingly, the effort to restore the heteronomous condition of the commission, as well as to respond to it with necessary decisions, is a way of taking responsibility for the production of an architectural fact capable of lasting in time.

References Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. Columbia University Press. Callon, M. (1996). Le travail de la conception en architecture. Situations. Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, 37(1), 25–35.

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Callon, M., & Muniesa, F. (2005). Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices. Organization Studies, 26(8), 1229–1250. Cuff, D. (1992). Architecture: The Story of Practice. MIT Press. Ewenstein, B., & Whyte, J. (2009). Knowledge Practices in Design: The Role of Visual Representations as ‘Epistemic Objects’. Organization Studies, 30(1), 7–30. Farías, I. (2015). Epistemic Dissonance: Reconfiguring Valuation in Architectural Practice. In A. B. Antal, M. Hutter, & D. Stark (Eds.), Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites of Dissonance (pp. 271–289). Oxford University Press. Houdart, S., & Chihiro, M. (2009). Kuma Kengo. An Unconventional Monograph. Éditions Donner Lieu. Hennion, A., & Farías, I. (2015). For a sociology of ‘maquettes’: an interview with Antoine Hennion. In Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie (Eds.), Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements (pp. 70–85). London, NY: Routledge. Karpik, L. (2010). Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities. Princeton University Press. Kjaer, A.  B., & Mouritsen, J. (2007). Budget-Variances and Circulating Accountability: Mobilising the Budget in a Construction Project. In Managing the Construction of Buildings. Copenhagen Business School. Kreiner, K. (2009). Architectural Competitions  – Empirical Observations and Strategic Implications for Architectural Firms. Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 21(2/3), 37–51. Kwartler, M. (1985). Zoning as Architect and Urban Designer. New York Affairs, 8(4 Special Issue – Real Estate Development and City Regulations), 104–119. Larson, M.  S. (1994). Architectural Competitions as Discursive Events. Theory and Society, 23(4), 469–504. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2008). A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk). Keynote Lecture in conference ‘Networks of Design’ of the Design History Society in Falmouth, Cornwell. Lipstadt, H. (2003). Can ‘Art Professions’ be Bourdieuean Fields of Cultural Production? The Case of the Architecture Competition. Cultural Studies, 17(3), 390–419. Pérez Oyarzún, F. (2007). Behind the Competitions. ARQ, 67, 10–17. Till, J. (2009). Architecture Depends. MIT Press. Vásquez, C. (2007). The Architectural Program in Competition Rules. ARQ, 67, 26–31. Yaneva, A. (2005). Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design. Social Studies of Science, 35(6), 867–894.

CHAPTER 3

Creative Settings: The Influence of Place on Urban Cultural Creativity Processes Matías I. Zarlenga

Introduction: Cultural Creativity and Place How do places affect urban cultural creativity? Although the sociological analysis of this question is relevant, sociology has barely addressed it. One reason for this absence is due to the fact that traditional sociological models of artistic-cultural creativity are built within disciplinary boundaries that tend to underestimate the spatial dimension of cultural creativity in their analysis (Becker, 1984; Bourdieu, 1996). Sociology has traditionally paid more attention to understanding the influence of social structure/ interactional order and valuation/evaluation mechanisms than the spatial aspect of creativity.

M. I. Zarlenga CONICET-National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, Buenos Aires, Argentina Universitiy of Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_3

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It is possible to distinguish at least two traditions of sociological research on creativity: the school of social networks and the institutionalist theories (Bottero & Crossley, 2011; Patriotta & Hirsch, 2016). The first tradition is based on research that analyses the importance of organisational structure and social networks in creativity processes as the school of collaborative circles (Farrell, 2001; Parker & Corte, 2017); emergentist theories linked to organisational aspects (Padgett & Powell, 2012) and group dynamics (Sawyer, 1992, 1999, 2003); cooperation networks (Becker, 1984); and face-to-face interactions (Collins, 1987, 2002). Institutionalist theories focus on the evaluation and valuation mechanisms that participate in the creativity process, such as evaluative dissonance theories (Stark, 2009); the sociology that analyses the artistic dynamics of evaluation (Moeran & Pedersen, 2011), the sociology of values (Heinich, 2017) and Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu, 1996). The relevance of territorial influence on creativity processes has been addressed outside sociological perspectives, especially by economic geography, urbanism and urban planning. These perspectives focus on the impact of the territory on creativity and innovation processes in the fields of cultural and creativity industries, science, technology and art. Most of these studies analyse how urban features such as infrastructure (Musterd & Murie, 2010), the concentration of actors and organisations in the so-­ called creative fields (Scott, 2010) or the cultural environment (Currid & Williams, 2010) of a city or region impact creativity and innovation dynamics. Recently, sociology has been interested in the local and territorial structuring of creativity at different scales by analysing the impact of place (micro scale) on artistic creativity processes (Zarlenga, 2013; Zarlenga & Capdevila, 2018); the role of spatiality, architecture and laboratory resources (meso scale) in the processes of scientific innovation (Gieryn, 2002, 2006); and the influence of the urban environment on the dynamics of cultural and artistic creation (Molotch, 1996, 2002, 2003; Rodríguez Morató, 2001). The main objective of this chapter is to analyse the influence of place in urban cultural creativity processes, but it also seeks to offer an alternative theory that clarifies some invariants that structure the specific dynamics of social interaction in which cultural creativity is defined, and to explore some hypotheses of how these affect and are affected by place. The case study of our analysis is the artistic activity that takes place in different arts organisations in the Poblenou neighbourhood (Barcelona).

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The arts organisations analysed in this chapter are La Fundició, La Nave Espacial, Hangar and La Escocesa. Poblenou neighbourhood is relevant not only because it has a high proportion of artistic, cultural and creative activities but also because it is a place historically affected by different social and urban processes. These processes are connected, on the one hand, by the formation of an art scene in the 1980s (Valera, 2009), and, on the other hand, with the creation and development of a creative district promoted by the 22@ plan at the beginning of this century. 22@ was an urban and economic plan that aimed to turn the old industrial area of Poblenou into a new district of industries linked to creativity and knowledge (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2000). This plan had a significant impact on neighbourhood networks (Marrero-Guillamón, 2003) and old industries (Mur & Clusa, 2011), affecting the artistic activity of the district (Aparici, 2011; Casellas et al., 2012; Martí Costa & Pradel, 2012; Paül i Agusti, 2014).

Creative Settings Towards a Sociological Conceptualisation of the Relationship Between Cultural Creativity and Place The elaboration of a sociological conceptual framework regarding the influence of place on cultural creativity processes implies situating our research in a theoretical horizon that allows us to formulate key concepts to understand the reality of our phenomenon. Some neo-Durkheimian theoretical approaches, which put at the centre of their reflection the notion of interaction ritual, as a key social mechanism for the understanding of not only the solidarities and emotions that allow for the generation of social bonds but also cultural creativity processes (Collins, 2002), are relevant for this purpose. The interaction ritual will be a central element in the construction of our conceptual framework. Based on this notion, we will articulate a series of concepts, including frame and setting, which will allow us to explore the impact of the place on urban cultural creativity. Creative Rituals Following Randall Collins’ work (1987, 1989, 2002), we understand cultural creativity processes as a succession or chain of creative situations generated from face-to-face interactions with a common focus on some or several aspects of artistic creation. These interactions can be circumstantial

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or permanent, sporadic or prolonged in time, more or less standardised, etc. Besides these features, what is important is the interaction focused on certain aspects of the creative work. These can be central (such as the definition of a type of design, a concept or an aesthetic idea) or incidental (such as the resolution of minor issues, technical doubts, etc.). They can also refer to purely technical aspects (ways of doing things, available resources, tools, etc.), aesthetic (a certain style or trend), conceptual (the definition of a piece of work), and even include evaluative issues (valuation or appreciation discussions). In our analysis, we call these types of rituals Creative Rituals (henceforth CRs) to identify them as the first link in a longer chain of creation. Creative Frames CRs can be held recurrently by the same type of people, forming more or less organic and consolidated groups of creators. To analyse a creative situation where two or more people collaborate in a type of ritualised interaction (regardless of whether or not they belong to a consolidated group of creators) we use the notion of frame (Goffman, 1974). Following Erving Goffman’s work, the frame of any activity is understood as a context and an interpretative scheme that defines a social situation. Goffman (1974) uses the notion of frame to understand certain aspects of a range of activities from a symbolic (what the actors perceive in a situation), organisational (the rules that regulate their behaviour), and limit or status (the place and type of relationship that a certain activity establishes with its environment) point of view. In our analysis we will use the notion of Creative Frames (henceforth CFs) to define the perceptions, rules and limits affected by the recurrence of interaction rituals focused on certain aspects of cultural production. Creative Settings Cultural creation can be understood as the result of multiple fragile micro-­ situations that are defined in a time continuum and are concatenated and related to each other through their participants. However, in these situations, the place can be defined in the same way: as the setting where CRs are celebrated and made available for the participating actors of the rituals through an accumulation of material, including social and symbolic resources. In this way, CRs occur in a specific place, of an irreducible nature, which we call Creative Setting (henceforth CS). The concept of CS will allow us to explain the relationship between CRs and place from a

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situational perspective. Based on Thomas Gyerin’s (2000, 2002) definition of the double conditioning of place, we can understand CSs as a spatial reality, conditioned and conditioning by social interactions focused on some aspect of cultural creativity. From our perspective, on the one hand, we understand CRs as reciprocal actions that configure and define CSs when, by regularity and repetition, the place where the rituals are held acquires a certain sacrality associated with cultural creation. This means that for the participants of the ritual themselves, and others who have not participated, the place is presented and represented as a special space. The highest point of sacralisation is where the space cannot be used for practices other than those pre-established and consecrated by the rituals, acquiring a certain exclusive or closed character. On the other hand, we can affirm that the CSs participate in the configuration of CFs. In this sense, CSs are presented as a reality that has a certain form, and resources (material and human), that define their environment. CRs incorporate these elements of the setting and return them through perception and behaviour patterns that end up defining CFs associated with the place. Throughout our analysis we will reveal the existence of various types of CSs that are defined according to the purpose and orientation of the CRs held there. Thus, we will distinguish between open, closed and dissonant CSs. Each type of CSs define, in turn, different CFs, and we can differentiate, in a general way, between experimental and professional ones (see Table 3.1). Table 3.1  Typology of creative settings Creative rituals (CRs)

Creative settings (CSs)

Creative frames (CFs)

Oriented-­ CRs

Open CSs Weak boundaries Hybrid milieu Closed Strong CSs boundaries Homogeneous milieu

Experimental-­ Potential for experimentation CFs and generation of new cultural content Professional-­ Potential for the generation CFs of cultural formats registered within specific conventions of the cultural production sector Hybrids-CFs Potential for generating new and disruptive cultural content and formats

Non-­ oriented-­ CRs

Double-­ oriented-­ CRs

Dissonant Conflict CSs boundaries Heterogeneous milieu

Goals

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Open Creative Settings Open CSs are spaces permeable to the celebration of various types of encounters related, directly and indirectly, with cultural creativity. The CRs that define this type of setting focus on different technical-­professional aspects of cultural creativity that are not clearly oriented towards a specific artistic purpose that transcends the ritual itself. Non-oriented Creative Rituals The first type of Open CSs is observed in arts organisations with low levels of bureaucratisation and those which are permeable to the problems of the local community. This is the case for community-based arts organisations such as La Fundició and La Nave Espacial. The first organisation has a total of 11 residents dedicated to the production of visual arts. The second specialises in circus arts and does not have a defined number of permanent artists, as it is has an open-door policy and an unregulated space. It is estimated that more than 20 artists practice regularly in this organisation. The level of professionalism varies: from young people just starting their studies to professionals working in major circus companies. In these types of organisations, the spaces become places where CRs focus mainly on technical aspects of artistic creation: learning a way to do things, using specific tools, exchanging knowledge, etc. If we analyse CRs from a synchronic perspective, their orientation and purpose are defined in the here and now of the situation. For example, when two artists dialogue about a certain painting or sculpting technique, the immediate focus and purpose of the dialogue is defined by the situation itself. However, it can be observed that the artists participate in similar or different CRs over time. From a diachronic perspective, these kinds of reciprocal interactions constitute a chain that define orientations and purposes that go beyond the here and now of the situation (Collins, 2002). In this sense, each of the reciprocal interactions that focus on some aspect of artistic creation can be understood as part of a broader process oriented towards a specific creative purpose, such as the development of an artistic project, participation in an art exhibition, competition for a grant, etc. A lack of a specific creative orientation turns open CSs into hybrid spaces where CRs are held which are not necessarily for artistic purposes.

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Experimental-CFs CRs that define open CSs stabilise a type of CF that we call experimental. CFs are experimental because creators perceive and regulate their interactions focused on aspects of creativity as if they were a test, a practice or a preparation for future productions. As CRs are not oriented to define creative purposes, the forms of interaction and the mental schemes that regulate the situation are relaxed and more open to experimentation and testing. In community-based arts organisations such as La Fundició and La Nave Espacial, the experimental-CFs structure types of interaction where reciprocity and community relations between artist and neighbours prevail. For this reason, we call communities of this type of experimental-CFs following the notion of community coined by Tönnies (2002). The experimental-­CFs of community type are based on durable relations where sentimental, affective and personal bonds prevail. Community-based experimental-CFs direct creative processes towards local problems. For example, the neighbourhood appears in content and form in many of the artistic productions of the artists from La Fundició. The sculptures made by the administrator of the space are abstract figures of iron and stone that recall the industrial past of the neighbourhood. The photographs taken by one of the centre’s artists show the negative consequences of the process of transformation of the Poblenou neighbourhood caused by the 22@ Plan. The purpose of artistic production is not to take local content and register this in the global art domain. On the contrary, it takes the problems of the neighbourhood as an element of local vindication. Weak Boundaries One of the main characteristics of arts organisations such as La Nave Espacial and La Fundició is that the boundaries that spatially and functionally separate each of the parts of the organisation are diffused. In the case of La Fundició, an arts organisation set up in an old factory in Poblenou, its architecture is divided into two large open spaces. The first of these spaces is located at the entrance to the organisation and functions as a place for reception, work and exhibition. The second of the spaces, of similar size, has a bar and a permanent exhibition space for visual and audio-visual arts. Other spaces for creative work are distributed on the

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upper floor. In the case of La Nave Espacial, it is located in a unique space virtually divided into three areas. In the front part, there is a space for selling food. In the central area, you can find a small amphitheatre for circus performances. At the back is the larger space dedicated to the practice of circus activity. According to the architecture of the place, at least three sectors can be distinguished in this type of arts organisation defined by their function: spaces destined for creation, exhibition and recreation. However, artists do not have individual places for work. Their work is often located in shared spaces that can be used for other functions at different times. The unclear spatial boundaries of the places where they work have important consequences when it comes to prefiguring interactions that focus on some aspect of creativity. Firstly, the unclear nature of a space’s boundaries gives artists a greater capacity for agency to change the environment and adapt it to their needs. Secondly, it gives artists greater flexibility in the type of encounters that can take place. Because the architectural spaces are not compartmentalised and functionalised, places for creation and exchange with other artists (whether or not they belong to the organisation) become more frequent. This favours the opening and experimentation of the CRs held there, defining the CSs as open and the CFs as experimental. The time boundaries of a place allow different situations of interaction to take place in the same space over time. Goffman mentions several examples of organisations that have spaces that function as backstage and frontstage areas, causing a variation in the behaviours and attitudes of the acting teams. In the organisations that Goffman analyses, such as restaurants and offices, these variations are usually more or less temporally regulated. In these cases, a clearly established use or function prevails in the space, which is altered in special situations (Goffman, 1959). In arts organisations such as La Nave Espacial and La Fundició, this temporary variation in the use of available spaces exist, not as exceptional situations, but rather as permanent ones, typical of organisations where the central function is not clearly established. Thus, the mixture of activities that take place over time is added to the diffuse character of spatial demarcation. In La Fundició, for example, the mixture of use of time has to do with its dual character: a centre of artistic creation and a place where a cultural association with strong local and neighbourhood connotations such as La Raspa operates. Based on Bernstein’s (2003) work, in our case study, we can affirm that

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the weak boundaries of a place make the celebration of CRs, that configure open CSs tending to the generation of experimental-types of CFs, possible. Hybrid Milieu Arts organisations not only delimit the spaces of creation but also provide them with attractive resources. Following Goffman, we call the different types of resources available in places where creative interactions occur a milieu. In our study, and with an analytical purpose, we distinguish three types of resources present in a milieu: material, human and symbolic. The human resources refer to the type of professionals existing in an organisation. This type of resource may be stable (their permanence within the organisation is indefinite or non-prescribed) or temporary (their permanence is limited or sporadic). They may also play a central or support function for an artistic creation and be subject to different selection and recruitment processes. Material resources have to do with the physical conditions of a milieu. These resources can be fixed (such as the size and quality of the space available to an organisation) or mobile (linked to the furniture and objects available). Finally, symbolic resources refer to certain elements of the organisation (both human and material) that actors may perceive as prestigious or allude to a certain type of identity. An arts organisation can be thought of as a large theatre set that contains an indefinite amount of CSs that are established according to the type of the CRs that are held there. In addition to defining the limits of CRs, the organisation, or more specifically the team of actors in charge of organisation management, select and stabilise the group of artists that will work there. The mechanisms for selecting artists are usually diverse. In arts organisations such as La Nave Espacial and La Fundició, which are characterised by the establishment of flexible time and space boundaries, there is no fully established criteria. However, in these types of organisations, which are more community-based, selection is made through personal affinity and a certain common ideology, such as commitment to the local community. The main asset of this type of organisation, in terms of available material resources, is the existence of the workspace itself. These organisations do not have any type of economic support for artists (scholarships or contracts). Nor do they have specific technical materials for use, beyond those provided by the artists themselves, which are usually shared. From a symbolic point of view, these organisations are characterised by a combination

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of elements that have a double value: artistic and community oriented. For example, in La Fundició, there are many sculptures and artistic photographs that evoke the industrial past of the neighbourhood and which are on permanent display. In addition, at certain times, a replica of a tank used by the Iberian Anarchist Federation (IAF) during the Spanish Civil War is exhibited during local cultural events. The name and logo of the centre refers to the original use of the space: foundry. In summary, the decoration reinforces and defines an organisational identity by bringing together artistic and community elements. We term the human, material and symbolic resources that define the milieu of organisations such as La Fundició and La Nave Espacial a hybrid milieu. This is defined by the arrangement of a set of signs and resources that are not entirely tied to a specific activity (in this case, making art). This lack of specificity does not mean a lack of unity. A unity, fusion or hybridisation of the resources exists due to the purpose of this kind of organisation, which is combined with other elements that gives the milieu a certain ambivalence or eclecticism. A hybrid milieu condenses divergent elements that, due to their opposition, can be activated in different ways. If the CRs define the CSs, an organisation (apart from prefiguring spatial and temporal boundaries where these types of rituals are held) provides them with resources that the team of artists can use in their reciprocal interactions. The artist is embedded in the milieu and at the same time uses it. A hybrid milieu (or not entirely defined) makes defined artistic orientations difficult.

Closed Creative Settings Closed CSs are places where single-type CRs are held. In this kind of rituals, professionals participate in hierarchical relationships with a clear and precise purpose linked to artistic goals. CSs are usually defined by servicebased interactions between artists with a professional purpose linked to the art world. Oriented Creative Rituals A first type of closed CSs are found in arts organisations with a high level of bureaucratisation and professionalisation. An example of this type of organisation is Hangar. Hangar is an artistic residency space for creators specialising in visual arts. Managed by the Foundation of Visual Artists of

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Catalonia and falling under the framework of Barcelona City Council’s Factories of Creation Programme, Hangar specialises in research, pre-­ production, production and post-production in the visual arts. It currently has a system of residencies for artistic exchange and has a total of 19 resident artists working on individual or collective projects in different spaces: individual workshops, technical and technological laboratories, etc. The resident artists are usually young people in the process of professionalisation, selected by a jury of experts from the organisation. The selection of artists through this mechanism gives a certain professional homogeneity to the group of artist residents. This situation makes Hangar an organisation where numerous CRs focus on technical-professional aspects of creativity, whether technical, aesthetic, conceptual or evaluative. Therefore, Hangar becomes a creative ecosystem that provides technical and human resources for artistic creation. The segmentation and functionality of Hangar’s spaces tend to inscribe interactions focused on aspects of creativity as service exchanges between highly qualified professionals in the organisation. Attention is focused on the creative project of the artist-in-residence on which micro-rituals of technical, aesthetic, evaluative and conceptual assistance are structured. In this sense, creative interactions are less frequent between artist-members of the organisation (in a horizontal sense) and more frequent between artists and technical assistants or the managers of the space (in a vertical sense) with a defined professional-aesthetic purpose. A closed CS is not a one-dimensional space which makes the existence of another type of interaction outside those pre-established by the organisation impossible. However, this is highly unlikely. On the one hand, the distribution of the artist in the space, their selection and time of residence prevent the formation of community or friendship dynamics among artists. On the other hand, the mission of the centre itself serves as a guide when it comes to selecting artists and directing their activity in a professional sense. This situation generates less awareness of the peer group and a greater identity with the organisation itself. Professional Creative Frames The emerging CFs in these types of closed scenarios are of a professional nature. This means that the artists perceive and regulate their actions according to a principle of rational calculation among certain available resources for the achievement of a specific objective (Weber, 1978). As

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CRs are oriented towards a specific purpose, CSs emerge as the places where this purpose is achieved through a more or less pre-established chain of focused interactions. This situation structures mental schemes in which there is a certain demand and rationality during the development of a specific artistic creative process. The space and time for experimentation exists, but they are not the dominant axes of the process. We call this type of professional CFs aesthetic because the orientation that guides the purpose of the actors in each creative situation they participate in is artistic. In this sense, the professional-aesthetic CFs inscribe and place the artistic macro-world in a micro-situational world. This implies, among other things, an adjustment of the aesthetic formats according to the rules and conventions that dominate the art world (Becker, 1984), aiming mainly at a specific buyer or niche artistic market (Bourdieu, 1996). By means of dialogue, advice, support and aid, conjectures are established on what the current state of art is, what is missing and what is left over, which are the most prestigious places to work or exhibit, etc. The professional-aesthetic CFs define and guide a type of artistic production that formally suits the expectations of the art world. While in spaces such as La Fundició the neighbourhood appears through artistic production as a place which has endured struggle, in Hangar artists have used the neighbourhood as a formal element in their artistic productions, following the rules and conventions of the art world. The local dimension of the place thus becomes a formal element for creation. Strong Boundaries Hangar is located in a former textile factory. It currently has clearly defined spaces for research; production, post-production and the exhibition of video art; individual workspaces for artists-in-residence; a residence for exchange artists; and common spaces. It also has an important space for the organisation’s administrative activities. We call strong limits (Bernstein, 2003) the spatial delimitation of organisations such as Hangar due to the existence of clearly defined spaces for creation, production, post-­ production, consulting, exhibition, etc. This type of boundary conditions and determines the CRs held there. The physical barriers that compartmentalise and delimit each space function as a limit that frames and defines the type and mode of interactions that must be held in each of the places available in the centre. In addition to the physical limitations of the space, the actions carried out by the organisation’s management to reinforce and

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guarantee each of the functions defined by the spatial limits must be added. These actions have to do with normative aspects (such as the attribution of a function to each space according to a pre-established plan and organisation chart); situational aspects (such as the assignment of a team in charge of managing the space and orienting the type of activity carried out there); and temporal aspects (schedules of use), etc. Space barriers are complemented by equally strong time constraints. In this type of organisation, the times are usually clearly pre-established: from the period of residence for the artists (which is usually stipulated by competition or contract), to the period of use for each space. Unlike community arts organisations such as La Nave Espacial and La Fundició, each of the spaces is governed by the time of use-non-use. The spaces are used at a moment in time for which they were designed or they are not used. There is nothing in-between nor temporary engagements that hybridise the space with different types of functions or activities beyond those prefigured by the organisation. On a symbolic level, the rigidity in the limits of space and time of an organisation attempts to create a creative “environment” or “atmosphere”. Many analysts consider the existence of a “creative environment” to be of vital importance and conducive for creation. This type of environment is characterised by open interactions that enable processes of cross-­ fertilisation between different sectors and areas of activity that occur in places such as bars, cafes, etc., the so-called “third places” (Lloyd, 2002), and certain types of neighbourhoods or cities (Currid & Williams, 2010). The directors of organisations such as Hangar often miss the absence of this type of dynamic among the artists in residence. The reason for the absence of “cross-fertilisation” in creative processes in this kind of organisation is due to the lack of spaces that favour less functional and less oriented interactions. However, the existence of clear spatial and temporal barriers generates a greater efficiency in the realisation and format of projects in accordance with the codes and conventions of the artistic activity developed. Homogeneous Milieu Hangar has a homogeneous milieu in most of its spaces. This type of milieu brings together similar elements that reinforce the creative orientation of a team of artists. CRs held in homogeneous milieus usually define their orientation more clearly. CSs thus tend to be closed and oriented

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towards a purpose that the stage environment reinforces thanks to its univocal character. There is no space for diversity, only for carrying out an activity that the medium helps to define. Sharing a space with artists in the process of professionalisation, selected by a team of experts, adds to the availability of material resources for artistic creation and reinforces the idea of professionalism of the artistic team, which helps to configure professional CFs oriented towards aesthetic or artistic purposes. Hangar frames a plurality of clearly delimited closed CSs. These scenarios have specific elements linked to the development of artistic activities. At the level of human resources, a homogeneity can be observed in terms of the type of activity and professional level of their creators. In Hangar, for example, we find young visual artists specialising in digital art or video art during the process of professionalisation. The existence of artists of the same professional level and creative orientation is possible for two reasons. Firstly, due to the existence of a team of experts (external and/or internal to the organisation) in charge of the selection of artists and projects in residence. Secondly, due to the availability of specific selection mechanisms, which work in accordance with the goals and objectives of the organisation. In this way, the team in charge of the organisation, or those acting on its behalf, functions as a sieve that allows the entry of artists who meet certain artistic requirements and excluding those who do not. These small selection procedures, in which a team of experts decide the entry of a certain type of artist according to certain pre-established rules, end up working as a homogenising element of the available resources. The artists chosen as residents are diverse in different aspects, but they are equal in fundamental aspects of their artistic activity, such as their training, artistic orientation, the quality of their work and their prestige. The specificity of human resources is complemented by the material resources of the organisation. In addition to the existence of functional spaces for the different stages of the artistic projects (work spaces, video laboratories, interactive robotics, etc.), there are also material resources that range from technical equipment suitable for each of the different stages of the artistic projects, to economic support (such as grants) for the development of an artistic activity. The elements that characterise the organisation’s milieu refer exclusively to the art world. However, regardless of these elements, in terms of decoration, the centre’s stages are presented as minimalist spaces. In the various spaces in the centre there are a few traces of extra-artistic activities or personal traits of a particular artist. They are places where the resident artists pass through according to the

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needs of their artistic projects. Even the individual workspaces have the same austerity in their facades. All the spaces present themselves as places of passage. Their sole purpose is to support artistic creation.

Dissonant Creative Settings In our analysis we observed that there are both open and closed subtypes of CSs. These subtypes are defined by a greater or lesser degree of opening or closing. On the one hand, there are the working spaces with a community feel and a considerable degree of openness. On the other hand, there are the arts organisations with a significant degree of complexity. As we move towards the openness side, the functionality, orientation and purpose of CRs become more diffuse. On the contrary, when we move towards the closed side these qualities are clearer and more precise. However, within this range there are intermediate areas that are difficult to classify, as they share the characteristics of both types of settings. These intermediate CSs are defined in the workplaces of organisations that have undergone major changes to their structure and purpose, but which still retain active residual elements from their recent past. This situation generates the overlapping of different types of CRs in the same place, which complement each other in a conflictive manner and define different orientations and creative purposes. We call this type of place dissonant CSs, understanding by dissonance the conflictive co-presence between new and old elements, orientations and categories linked to artistic production. Double-Oriented Creative Rituals A first type of dissonant CSs can be found in artist organisations such as La Escocesa, with 20 creators and differing levels of professionalism. In this type of organisation, two organisational dynamics coexist that coincide with two historical moments of the space. A communal past (similar to La Nave Espacial and La Fundició) and a professional present (similar to Hangar). In this type of organisation, different open CSs coexist and overlap, and tend to close and segment as the organisation itself becomes more professional and complex. The recurrence of CRs with different purposes (community or professional orientation) based on friendship or professional dynamics generates numerous problems among the artist themselves that

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translate into organisational rivalries and conflicts. It is not the lack of definition of CRs that generates this type of conflict, but rather the overlapping and simultaneous coexistence of divergent creative logics in the same workplace. These dichotomic logics are generated by the recurrence of CRs with different orientations and purposes that group together and oppose artists from different backgrounds. At this point, open CSs should not be confused with dissonant CSs. Open CSs are defined by CRs which are not clearly oriented. Dissonant CSs are the product of the complementarity of two (or more) different types of CRs with divergent orientations that coexist in the same time and place. Hybrid Creative Frames The double orientation of CRs structure different CSs that participate in the configuration of hybrid CFs. On the one hand, we find artists who guide and regulate their behaviour in professional terms. This means that they foster creative situations structured by rules and conventions in the art world. On the other hand, we find artists who regulate their relationships according to community-experimental CFs, with a strong empathy towards local issues. The coexistence and stabilisation of these two types of CFs separate artists into two different groups at the same place and time. This unstable and conflictive organisational situation can enhance artistic creativity. The instability added to the mix of creative dynamics often leads to new and disruptive content and forms. CSs function as social places, in which artists spend their time according to the quality of social interactions that take place there, whether on a professional, community or friendship level. These types of interactions function as place “warmers”. This means that the place, supported by these interactions, is loaded with symbolic content and rises as an emblem of a type of solidarity. If the rituals are intense enough, the place is “warmed up” in a metaphorical sense and is presented as a refuge for creation. However, in spaces like La Escocesa, there is a variation according to the level of professionalism and the type of workspace that defines the modalities of permanence. This means that subjectively, or within their mental schemes, the more professional artists tend to favour artistic-professional interactions over other types of interaction. This situation can lead to conflicts between different types of artists.

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Conflict Boundaries Originally, La Escocesa occupied three buildings in an old textile industrial complex. The spaces were used for artistic production and there was no clear distinction or division of space beyond the places of artistic work. Today it occupies only one building, which is divided into 22 individual workshops, two common spaces (the kitchen and a multi-purpose room), an exhibition space and another one dedicated to administration. Between the first moment of spatial distribution and the second there was a change in the organisation of the centre. From the point of view of spatial limitations, there was a shift from a large and undifferentiated organisation to a smaller, delimited and specialised organisation. Analysed from a temporal point of view, one passes from a simple and less professional organisation, which configures lax spatial limits, to a more complex and professional type of organisation with more precise limits. However, the coexistence between artists who have been at the organisation from the beginning, the new artists who entered selected by a jury, and the management team, is conflictive. Unlike Hangar, where the spatial and temporal limits are prefixed by the management team, in La Escocesa, these limits become an arena of conflict between artists and managers of the centre. The dispute may be over simple issues such as whether an artist should be allowed to occupy a certain space or whether his or her place of work should be extended to more complex issues, such as the artistic and extra-artistic use of the different spaces of the organisation. It is not that the spatial boundaries of the organisation are diffuse. Quite the contrary. What is in question is the authority capable of defining and legitimising spatial boundaries. The same thing happens with the temporal limits. The limitation on the use of space by a new artist-in-residence is limited, according to the new regulations of the organisation. On the contrary, the artists who have been present since the beginning remain, until now, for an indefinite time. This situation generates conflicts between the artists themselves. With regard to the symbolic limits of the space, we also find a double significance. On the one hand, there are the artists who propose a greater permeability of the organisation towards the problems of the neighbourhood and, on the other hand, those who support a more professional orientation of the organisation.

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Heterogeneous Milieu A heterogenous milieu is configured by the coexistence of spaces and elements designed for professional work and other purposes but used differently by the artists according to their backgrounds. In this type of milieu, the activation modes by the actors in their focused interactions are key. Thus, we find that artists who regulate and orient their creative behaviour according to the artistic-community criteria make a different use of the space to artists who orient their behaviour according to the artistic-­ professional criteria. The heterogeneous milieu is similar to the hybrid milieu in terms of the coexistence of human resources at different professional levels and orientations, or with elements from different origins that decorate the site. However, the divergent resources do not tend to lean towards fusion or hybridity but towards a conflictive and heterogeneous coexistence. Conflict emerges from the unresolved juxtaposition of elements that correspond to different moments and organisational dynamics and their modes of activation. In the case of La Escocesa, this tension can be seen in the existence of human and material resources that refer to a more communal past and a more professional or institutional present. Artists of different professional levels live together at La Escocesa, selected through three different admission processes, due to the different stages the organisation went through. Firstly, there are the artists who enrolled in the initial stage when there were no restrictions on admission, except for the payment of rent. Second, there are the artists who joined during the formation of the artists’ association when there was a community affinity that played a predominant role in determining membership. And thirdly, there are the artists who were admitted when the manager was chosen to manage the organisation. In this last stage, which coincides with the presentation of the project for entry into the Barcelona City Council’s Factories of Creation Programme, admission is through professional selection criteria, applied by a jury of experts. The diverse modalities of an artist’s admission result in the existence of artists who have not only different levels of professionalism but also different artistic concerns and orientations. Unlike a hybrid stage environment, where artists from different backgrounds and levels of professionalism tend to complement each other based on common criteria that cross and go beyond artistic practice itself (such as community or friendship-based dynamics), in a milieu like La Escocesa they juxtapose and come into

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conflict. These conflicts range from defining the type of orientation of the centre and the modes of management to the perceptions of space. La Escocesa also has material resources linked to artistic and non-­artistic activities. The resources linked to artistic activity range from financial support for the promotion of artists (such as grants), to the existence of materials and tools for artistic use. For its part, the organisation has individual workspaces and a collective exhibition room where temporary exhibitions of the resident artists are held. All these material resources define a specific medium oriented towards artistic creation. However, the centre has many common spaces. On the ground floor, for example, there is a kitchen where the artists share meals and a large common space that serves as a distribution hall, where there is sometimes a tennis table. On the upper floor there is a lounge area with armchairs and tables and a large terrace frequented by artists. In Hangar this type of space also exists, although it is not so frequently used as in La Escocesa. The diversity of backgrounds and frameworks that shape the perceptions and modes of interaction between the artists define a differential use of the spaces and their elements.

Conclusion This chapter has proposed an alternative conceptual framework to explore the influence of place on the urban cultural creativity process from a sociological perspective. Based on an empirical analysis of cultural creativity processes in visual and performing arts in Poblenou (Barcelona), we have drawn up a sociological conceptual framework that highlights the importance of the spatial and social dimensions of the creativity phenomenon. The starting point of our research was the creative situation. From this approach we have constructed sociological categories that allow us to study in detail how the reality of the place is present in each of the situations in which two or more people interact with a common focus on some aspect of cultural creativity. Our research allowed, first, to better understand the complex dialectic between social interaction, place and cultural creativity; second, to construct a typology of CSs according to the characteristics of place and the type of social interactions that take place there; and third, to elaborate sociological categories that are both specific and flexible enough to analyse the impact of place on other areas of cultural production. The starting and ending point of our research is the situation. The encounter, ephemeral or prolonged, between two or more people whose

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focus is some aspect, central or marginal, of cultural creation. Following the fundamental contributions of Randall Collins (1987, 1989, 2002) we define the interactions that take place in this type of encounter as Creativity Rituals (RCs). From this perspective, we understand the processes of cultural creativity as the chain of CRs, which occur over time and in specific places. From a synchronic point of view, we point out that the reality of CRs is defined in the here and now of the situation. In this sense, the focus of the ritualised interaction structures defines the reality of the creative situation. For example, the dialogue between two artists on certain formal or technical aspects of an artistic project defines the specific purpose of the situation, its here and now. From this perspective, all creative situations can be understood as structurally similar: a type of ritualised interaction that focuses on some aspect of creation. However, we also point out that, from a diachronic perspective, artists participate in different creative situations that globally define creative projects. Collins (2004) uses the notion of chains to define the connections between different rituals of interaction. However, when analysing creativity processes in philosophy and architecture, Collins pays more attention to generational linkages, based on master-disciple interaction, which define creative lineages than to other types of linkages (Collins, 2002; Collins & Guillén, 2012). In our analysis, on the contrary, we use the notion of chain to define the process of a creative project as a whole. This distinction allowed us to frame each of the creative situations in which a creator participates within a broader horizon, thus being able to define creative orientations and purposes that exceed the here and now of the situation. In this sense, from our perspective, referring to cultural creativity processes means thinking about the CR link that defines a creative project as a whole. Throughout the chapter, we define Creative Settings (CSs) as the place where CRs are recurrently held. CS became a key concept to understand the relationship between social interactions, associated to creative processes, and the place where these occur, from a situational perspective. Based on the contributions of Thomas Gieryn (2000, 2002), we define CSs as a conditioned and conditioning reality by social interactions which focus on some aspect of cultural creativity. In this sense, CSs represent the spatial reality of CRs. If CRs occur repeatedly in a place, this place becomes a CS. However, for this to happen there has to be a process of assimilation of the place. The place is presented as a series of resources (material and

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social) that CRs incorporate and transform changing their key, in forms of perception and patterns of behaviour that guide the creators’ interactions. In this way, CRs occur in defined places but end up being redefined. The result of this process is the emergence of Creative Frameworks (CFs) associated with the place. In this sense, CSs are presented as a double reality. On the one hand, a reality configured by the recurrence of CRs; on the other, a reality that participates in the configuration of CFs. The concept of CF is a derivative of the frame notion elaborated by Erving Goffman (1974), which throughout our research we have used to analyse creative processes. Goffman uses the notion of frame to understand certain aspects of a strip of activity from a symbolic point of view (what the actors perceive of a situation), organisational (the premises or rules that regulate them), and of limit or status (the place and type of relation that a certain activity establishes with its environment). In our analysis, the notion of CF served to define the perceptions, rules and limits that emerge as an effect of certain CRs associated with the place or CSs. The notion of CF also allowed us to distinguish different types of creative processes and levels of analysis in our research. Thus, we were able to differentiate, on the one hand, CSs according to the orientation and purpose of the CRs and the type of CFs that they configure. On the other hand, through the notion of frame, we were able to understand how certain regulations, at the level of arts organisations define modes of perception and interaction patterns that condition creative situations. As a result of the analysis, we define three types of Creative Settings (CS): open, closed and dissonant. These types of CSs permit us to understand the influence of the “place” in the cultural creative processes. First, Open CSs have weak limits; they are hybrid settings with low creative oversight and multiple purposes. These places are perfect for experimentation because they create unique frames that we call experimental-creative frames. In contrast, Closed CFs have strong limits; they are homogeneous settings with clear creative supervision, which configure professional-creative frames. Finally, CS dissonants are places where there are conflicts between creators on the limits and settings of the place. These places usually have various creative guidelines, but they are potential places in terms of content and forms of cultural production.

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CHAPTER 4

Cultural Creation in Culinary Fields: The Cases of New York and San Francisco Vanina Leschziner

Introduction: Theories of Fields In recent decades, few theories have been as influential in the analysis of the production and consumption of art and culture in sociology as Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1993) field theory. Such has been its influence (Anheier et al., 1995; Bottero & Crossley, 2011; DiMaggio, 1991; Johannes, 2001; Savage & Gayo, 2011; van Rees & Dorleijn, 2001) that various arguments of the theory have been transformed into premises—rarely questioned—in the explanation of the social dynamics of cultural production. According to this theory, every field of cultural production is relatively autonomous and organized around values and logics internal to the field. Fields are structured around two different poles: one oriented toward restricted production and an accompanying artistic reputation (“l’art pour l’art,” or the value internal to the field), and the other oriented toward mass production and commercial success (the economic market, external to the field).

V. Leschziner (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_4

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Naturally, the two poles of artistic reputation and commercial success possess different values within a field and actors acquire positions in it according to the pole they prioritize in orienting their actions. In line with Bourdieu’s theory, studies of cultural fields tend not only to take the internal structure of a field as an a priori but also its external boundaries, a geographical demarcation which is, however, rarely specified.1 Literary fields, frequently studied by Bourdieu and others (Anheier et al., 1995; Bourdieu, [1992] 1996; van Rees & Dorleijn, 2001), are a paradigmatic case in this regard, since writers publish books for audiences and orient their actions toward other writers, neither of which are necessarily local (Chong, 2013).2 Literary fields, just like other cultural areas commonly studied from this perspective, have another unusual characteristic: actors may devote themselves to an activity without the requirement that it be economically profitable. In analytic terms, this means that, at least in principle, some producers in the field can orient their actions toward the pole of artistic reputation and ignore commercial profit. The majority of the studies inspired by this theory tend to investigate the same sort of areas as Bourdieu and thus to emphasize similar characteristics in cultural fields. However, research on fields undertaken from the perspective of organizational studies (Burt, 2004; Morrill, 2001; OwenSmith & Powell, 2004; Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001; Zuckerman, 1999) provides knowledge of other kinds of areas of activity. These concern the corporate world whose activities are necessarily commercial and whose source of legitimacy and prestige is commercial success and not artistic reputation.3 A good part of the creation of cultural products—industrial design, architecture, fashion, food—takes place in fields that combine the characteristics of areas studied from a Bordieusian perspective and those investigated by organizational studies, since artistic reputation is central in the creation of cultural products, on the one hand, and cultural creation happens in the context of wage labor with a necessarily commercial aim, 1  Bourdieu did not theorize the boundaries of a field. In general, his research on cultural fields assumes an equivalence between the extension of the field and the geographical boundaries of the nation (Bourdieu, 1988, [1992] 1996). 2  See Childress (2012) for a general exception, and Casanova (2004) for a partial exception. Childress is one of the few researchers to specify the geographic limits of literary fields; what is more, he notes the existence of distinct fields within a single country. 3  Although studies of fields inspired by organizational theories do not normally discuss Bourdieu’s theory, they are based on premises highly consistent with it (cf. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, 1991).

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on the other. Despite the increasing number of occupations in the socalled “creative economy” (economic activity whose principal source of value is individual creativity) that possess these characteristics, sociological and organizational knowledge of these areas is still limited. To the extent that these areas have characteristics dissimilar from the two most frequently studied social worlds (the artistic and the corporate), they have risks, pressures, and incentives that also differ from those social worlds, and consequently they manifest different patterns of creativity and innovation. For this reason, the study of these fields is necessary in order to acquire an appropriate understanding of the social and organizational dynamics of cultural creation. The aim of this chapter is to present an explanation of the morphology of this type of cultural field and to offer a perspective that facilitates the systematic study of patterns of cultural creation in fields with diverse characteristics. The chapter will focus on a study of culinary fields which, given their differences with respect to the fields commonly studied, have afforded a critical evaluation of the premises that have shaped research on fields, and the development of a new analytic framework. In particular, the chapter will focus on the two most influential premises in the study of cultural creation: (1) the idea that cultural fields are structured around the poles of artistic reputation and commercial success, and (2) the notion that innovation usually issues from higher or lower status positions in a field. The principal contribution of this chapter is to question both premises  and offer an analytic framework that can help explain variation across fields. The results of my research show that culinary fields neither possess the aforementioned structure nor follow such patterns of innovation. Moreover, one of the most significant findings of this research is that innovation normally arises from middle-status positions in culinary fields. The definition of the culinary field that I propose in this chapter differs from other definitions, in particular from that of Ferguson (1998; see also Rao et al., 2003, 2005). Ferguson writes of the gastronomic field, a social space that includes all those actors interested in gastronomy, and not only the world of elite restaurants that constitutes a culinary field, my case study. The limits of the gastronomic field, for Ferguson, extend as far as the national level, while the world of restaurants (an inherently local world) generates fields with much more narrow limits, a key characteristic that I will explain in the chapter. To the extent that the field concept is a heuristic tool, the object of study will determine the boundaries of a field.

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In the following pages, I describe the general characteristics of culinary fields and the particular attributes of the fields in which I carried out the ethnographic research: New York and San Francisco. Such a description will allow me to explain why the fields possess distinct morphologies and, thereby, to evaluate the premises that have governed research in creativity and innovation. In order to provide an analytic framework that explains the variation between fields with distinct features (rather than the similarity between fields, which is what prior studies have tended to do), I will make use of two concepts: “the mode of cultural production” and “self-­ concept.” Whereas the former facilitates explanation of variation in patterns of cultural creation, the latter is an analytic tool required to explain variation in individual action. Together, they create a framework that combines the study of structural and organizational factors with the analysis of the phenomenological experience of the actor.

Culinary Fields High cuisine has characteristics of cultural fields and the corporate world, since elite restaurants promise a creative product (and not simply a meal) and must also be profitable businesses. Even more importantly, chefs— occupying the highest position in a restaurant—are responsible for the creation of the food and the administration of the business,4 a business of high costs and low profit margins.5 In order to make decisions that enhance the competitiveness of their restaurants, chefs keep watch on the actions of other chefs (their dishes, décor, service, and prices) and orient their actions toward them. Of course, they do not lend the same attention to every other chef, since they orient their own actions toward those chefs whose actions may affect their restaurants, namely, other elite chefs in the same geographical locality. Together, these chefs constitute a culinary field.

4  In effect, the French word chef means boss. Chefs are responsible for the administration of the business whether they are owners or employees of the restaurant. In some cases, restaurants hire managers, who are solely responsible for the commercial administration of the restaurant, and are located below the chef in terms of hierarchy. 5  Restaurants have a profit margin between 3%  and 5%. In general, there is an inversely proportional relation between a restaurant’s status and its profit margin. The highest status restaurants also have the highest costs (both in ingredients and labor) and fewer customers (fewer tables and a less rapid turnover, given that meals are of a longer duration), all of which diminish the profit margin relative to restaurants of lower status.

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Chefs must keep informed of the actions of the members of their field because that information is required to create dishes that combine a measure of familiarity for the clientele (i.e., dishes the clientele may consume in other restaurants) and a measure of originality with the aim of distinguishing themselves from the competition. The balance between conformity to traditional styles and originality is important in any organizational field, since it allows a product to appear as a legitimate and recognizable option for the consumer, but at the same time distinct from other products that seek to stand out in the marketplace (Peterson, 1997; Zuckerman, 1999). This balance is especially sensitive in high cuisine, considering that while elite restaurants promise creativity and originality, they cannot depart too much from culinary conventions. Thus, for example, while a visual artist enjoys greater freedom of action to subvert artistic conventions and provoke shock in audiences by means of her work (Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol are paradigmatic examples in this sense), a chef’s creativity is much more limited. The chef must offer relatively familiar products to his clientele, since the appreciation of flavor is intimately linked to familiar tastes and flavors, and a good part of the clientele favors the familiar. In turn, offering highly innovative dishes entails risk, since the cost of ingredients for a not very popular dish can generate economic loss. Further, innovative dishes that do not become popular may ruin the reputation of a chef and even the business if the restaurant no longer attracts customers. These conditions limit the scope of innovation in high cuisine. Orienting their actions toward other elite chefs in the same geographic locality—having access to the same resources and possessing the same clientele—is, of course, a chef’s most effective strategy in a culinary field (Burt, 1987, 1988; White, 1992). This means that culinary fields are local social spaces, whose boundaries are demarcated by the geographic locality in which they are placed (Leschziner, 2015). In this respect, culinary fields differ from the cultural fields commonly studied, such as literary fields, whose limits usually extend far beyond a particular locality. Unlike writers (Casanova, 2004; Thompson, 2010; van Rees & Dorleijn, 2001), chefs are constrained by their locality because they depend upon a local clientele and locally available resources. Thus, it is with local chefs that they compete. While many elite chefs have restaurants in diverse cities and even countries, they must adapt each restaurant to the local conditions and characteristics of the place, including the climate, access to products,

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culinary traditions, and eating and consumption habits and preferences.6 Undoubtedly, chefs seek out information on chefs in other geographic localities (by means of cookbooks, reviews, or the internet), and travel to other localities in search of inspiration. However, it is important to note that while chefs do not need information on the culinary practices in other localities in order to survive in the local market, they do need information on the actions of local chefs in order to emulate ideas popular in their environment and to differentiate themselves from the local competition. Thus, a culinary field not only has local geographic boundaries but is also defined by the characteristics of the locality.

Methodology The ideas proposed in this chapter are based in large part on ethnographic research with chefs at the most prestigious restaurants in New York and San Francisco, whom I interviewed and observed at work. The fieldwork was carried out between 2004 and 2005. The 44 restaurants that constitute the main sample were selected by means of a bipartite sampling strategy, consisting of random and intentional sampling. First, I created a sample with three status categories (medium, medium-high, and high) on the basis of restaurant reviews in the most influential publications—the newspapers The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle and the magazine San Francisco for each city, respectively—making use of the classification of restaurants by stars and prices. Given that it is highly dependent on external reviews, the restaurant world has only limited autonomy. But the morphology of a culinary field is the product of the logic internal to the field, so the opinions of its members are crucial to ensuring that the sample includes the central figures of that field. Therefore, I enlarged the stratified sample with field sampling once the research was under way, utilizing the comments of my informants about other chefs in order to identify the social position of the relevant actors, and to include the central figures of each field in the research. The main interviews were with chefs and not cooks because they play the most important role in culinary creation (cooks, by contrast, are concerned with technical tasks specific to the cooking). This information was supplemented by interviews with culinary 6  The model of elite restaurants is quite different from that of fast food franchises, since the latter offer a certain global standardization in their products and make use of fewer local or seasonal ingredients (though they also adapt their offerings to local tastes).

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professionals of ranks lower than chef, as well as with restaurant owners, managers, service staff, culinary journalists, and professionals in the restaurant industry such as suppliers, architects, and lawyers. While the restaurants that form part of this study range from informal bistros to the most exclusive establishments, all are highly renowned and prestigious. The research was not designed to be a traditional comparative study; rather, San Francisco was used as a control case in order to figure out which characteristics of the culinary field in New  York are idiosyncratic, and which are more general given the attributes that define culinary fields.7

The Culinary Fields of New York and San Francisco New York and San Francisco are considered the top culinary localities in the United States. Larger and more dense than San Francisco, and having higher real estate costs, New York has a far larger and more competitive restaurant industry.8 While New York has long, cold winters that limit the availability of local ingredients, San Francisco has a temperate climate that facilitates access to a variety of high-quality local ingredients throughout the year. This characteristic—that I will call “the means of cultural production”—is important to understanding the morphology of each field. New  York, which offers an especially wide range of ethnic cuisines and products, is recognized for the predominance of innovative culinary styles based upon cutting-edge techniques. By contrast, San Francisco, considered the birthplace of so-called California cuisine, is associated with a more simple culinary style, centered on the use of local, seasonal, high-­ quality ingredients, and influenced by Italian cuisine. While San Francisco’s simple culinary styles highlighting the quality of ingredients have a great tradition and enjoy high prestige, in New York, French cuisine—with its technical complexity—has had and continues to have a great influence, 7  New York and San Francisco constitute ideal cases for an analysis of culinary fields given their high level of prestige (nationally and internationally) and because they possess both similarities and significant differences. This has been developed in more detail in Leschziner (2015). 8  According to 2012 statistics (the most recent at the time of writing this chapter), New York has approximately 8000 restaurants while San Francisco has approximately 1800. The latter figure includes restaurants of Berkeley and Oakland in Alameda County (numbering 600) that were part of this investigation. For more details, see Leschziner (2015; U.S. Census Bureau, 2014a, 2014b).

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although in recent years modernist cuisine, and more recently New Nordic Cuisine, have made inroads.9 Various factors explain the social position held by the culinary styles of New York and San Francisco. First, innovation is a strategic response to the high levels of competition in New York; chefs are constantly seeking new ingredients, techniques, flavor combinations, or presentation styles in order to differentiate themselves and stand out in the market. Second, innovation (in particular, technical innovation) is a response to the limitation on ingredients, a way of compensating for their lesser variety or quality.10 Finally, if innovation occupies a central role in New York, it is because chefs orient their actions vis-à-vis other local actors and emulate those elements that attract attention and prestige in their social space. In this way, they collectively reproduce the social structure of the different culinary styles in that space.11 9  A large proportion of the higher status restaurants in New York are French. Up until the 2000s, French restaurants constituted the majority of this group. However, with the ascension of other cuisines such as Japanese, Modernist, and New Nordic Cuisine, this proportion, while still significant, is no longer a majority. According to data from the first half of 2014, 28.6% of The New York Times’s three and four star restaurants (four stars being the maximum) were classified as French. In order to understand this figure, it is important to keep in mind that this newspaper classifies restaurants under dozens of categories. San Francisco has far fewer high-status French restaurants, a characteristic that has marked the culinary field of the city for quite some time. In addition, New  York has a significant number of culinary professionals of French nationality (including those of lower ranks than chef), while in San Francisco this group is small. 10  This factor is frequently invoked in order to explain the difference between Italian and French cuisines. The former, based upon high-quality fresh products, is considered more simple. The latter is compounded from an elaborate combination of ingredients and a technically complex culinary grammar, first developed in the nineteenth century, and subsequently becoming the basis of modern Western high cuisine (Ferguson, 2004; Leschziner, 2006; Leschziner & Dakin, 2011; Trubek, 2000). While the greater part of Italy has access to a large variety of high-quality products thanks to its climate, France developped a culinary complexity in order to compensate for a more restricted access to natural local products throughout the year. 11  My analysis of the restaurant reviews in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle shows that innovation is perceived positively by critics in New York and less positively in San Francisco. Restaurants perceived as innovative—to the extent that the execution of the dishes is deemed correct and the innovation is not deemed detrimental to the taste—usually received more positive reviews than restaurants perceived as more traditional. Critics identify four forms of innovation—the combination of ingredients, technique, use of new ingredients, and presentation—and more positively value the first of these forms, followed by the second, and to a lesser extent the other two forms (see Leschziner, 2015: 49–71, 179–180).

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For a San Francisco chef, to orient his actions toward his peers in New York—either by way of emulation or differentiation—would be a bad strategy, given that his New  York colleagues have access to different resources and prepare dishes for different consumers with different expectations and preferences.12 Such a strategy in San Francisco would likely be subject to negative sanctions, either in the form of negative reviews in the media and/or in the form of a decrease in clientele. A chef who had moved to San Francisco (from a location near Chicago) to work in a high-status restaurant explained to me in an interview that he had to change his very elaborate and technically complex culinary style in order to adapt to local tastes.13 And there are so many restaurants and everything in San Francisco, so many restaurants are based on natural cuisine. The glory of tasting the radish, you know. It’s just a radish. Like this person [referring to another chef] is getting so much praise for what they are doing. And it’s so simple. And that’s what people like, and people want. So I have to keep that in mind, too, in my cuisine, you know. And I like it, I like it a lot, I like that. I like just a radish, I like just a perfect tomato, I like the seasonal aspect of… Chefs in San Francisco are all about the ingredients…. whereas chefs in New  York are technique driven.

Conscious of his new context, and after having observed his San Francisco peers close up, this chef oriented his actions toward them, creating dishes and developing a new culinary style in order to maintain the prestige of the restaurant in which he worked and to acquire for himself a good position in a culinary field in which he had not yet obtained renown. His previous culinary style, based on an extensive use of techniques and combinations of flavors in the creation of dishes of great complexity (and to compensate for the limited access to local ingredients in the locality where he previously lived), was not viable in San Francisco. 12  Many elite chefs purchase non-local products, either through local purveyors or by importing them directly. However, the availability, cost, and quality of these products are quite different from those of local products. In addition, the increasing tendency to prepare dishes with local and seasonal ingredients has meant a decline in the acceptance and popularity of such practices. As for customers, while restaurants in cities like New  York and San Francisco do attract non-locals, these rarely form the basis of their clientele (see Leschziner, 2015). 13   The names of the chefs and the restaurants have been kept anonymous and confidential.

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Knowledgeable about what his peers in New York, Paris, and Barcelona do, this chef (like his peers) travels regularly in search of inspiration in order to incorporate innovations and to distinguish himself in the local field. However, to strike a balance between conformity with the styles favored in the local field and originality which would permit him to stand out in the field required close observation of his local peers. These actions are not necessarily deliberate or conscious (Becker, 1976; Coleman, 1990; Hechter & Kanazawa, 1997). On the contrary, after being adopted habitually, the actions become dispositions, which is to say patterns of cognition and action reproduced without deliberation (Bourdieu, 1998; see also Bourdieu, 1990). To the extent that such practices develop in relation to the internal logic of action of the field—and that, thus, through the reproduction of practices, the logic of action becomes more embodied than conscious—such logic regulates the social dynamics of the field. In addition, the social order of the field—with its principles, classifications, and relatively stable forms of action—enables actors to develop their “self-­ concept,” a self-perception with a relatively coherent set of prescriptions and proscriptions (given actors’ social positions) that facilitates the delineation of relatively effective actions (Leschziner, 2015; see also White, 1981, 2008).

The Mode of Production and Innovation in Culinary Fields The literature on creativity and innovation in organizational fields shows not only that individuals delineate effective actions in response to the pressures and incentives they face but also that given that such pressures and incentives vary across status, individuals’ actions collectively produce patterns of innovation with a similar social distribution across fields (Bourdieu, 1976, 1993; Frickel & Gross, 2005; Monin & Durand, 2003; Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001). Although Bourdieu’s field theory and organizational studies make use of different perspectives, their arguments about patterns of innovation and their implications are similar. Both literatures point out that innovation usually arises either from positions of low or high status. According to this argument, low-status actors have little to lose in innovating because their status cannot be much lower, and because they are new in the field and thus are not yet overly invested in it, or feel themselves excluded from it. But these actors have incentives to innovate in that,

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should the strategy be effective, their status would rise and, in the long run, change the rules of the game that determine social positions in the field. For their part, high-status individuals may experiment with innovation because, given their status, should their innovation be unsuccessful, the risk to their social position would be minimal. Middle-status actors run the greatest risk in innovating, according to this logic, because of their significant investment in the field and because they do not have sufficient status to risk their social position should their innovations be unsuccessful.14 While this argument highlights important factors in the explanation of patterns of creativity and innovation, it also presents certain limitations. In particular, while the theories employing this argument have been developed with respect to research in fields with specific characteristics, they have been applied to explain and predict patterns of creation in all kinds of fields. However, not every field has the same social distribution of risks and incentives with respect to innovation. For one thing, culinary fields, combining characteristics of the cultural fields with those of the corporate world, present different patterns of innovation. Specifically, and in contrast to what is highlighted in the aforementioned perspectives, my research shows that in the culinary fields of New York and San Francisco, innovation tends to arise at middle status levels (Leschziner, 2015: 148–156).15 For low-status chefs, innovation has incentives but also great risks. An innovative culinary style that does not become popular not only will affect the reputation of a chef but can also lead to bankruptcy for the restaurant. Low-status chefs run a particularly high risk in innovating because, given their limited prestige, their culinary mastery does not yet enjoy the legitimacy and trust of the clientele, and thus their innovations have a higher probability of being perceived as badly prepared food.16 For their part, high-status chefs also have few incentives to innovate, not only because they already occupy a high social position but also because competition at this status level is lesser. There are fewer high-status restaurants and thus 14  Phillips and Zuckerman (2001) have called this phenomenon “middle status conformity,” an influential term in organizational studies (Burt, 2004; Podolny, 2005; Rao et al., 2005). 15  In my research, I have called middle status “upper-middle” because in the world of elite restaurants, the lowest status is never very low; hence its designation as “middle.” 16  It is not always easy to tell whether the problem with a dish lies in its conception or its preparation.

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less pressure to differentiate from the competition. And in addition, these establishments seldom have a regular or frequent clientele (as is the case with a bistro or neighborhood restaurant), and thus high-status chefs feel less pressure to constantly revamp the menu in order to attract regular customers. Middle-status chefs have the most incentives to innovate, given the high levels of competition at their level; they must differentiate themselves not only from a large number of restaurants at the same level but also from those at the levels above and below. In contrast to lower status chefs, the prestige enjoyed by middle-status chefs means that they can count on their clientele’s trust in their culinary skills, and thus run a lesser risk that a culinary innovation would be perceived as a badly prepared dish. However, these chefs run risks too, for they have enough status to be able to innovate but not so much that their social position is immune from the potential failure of the innovation. Despite these risks, for middle-status chefs innovation is an especially effective strategy for standing out in a particularly competitive niche and for attracting the attention of the media and the public. Patterns of innovation can be explained by the particular characteristics of the area of activity, what I call the “the mode of cultural production.”17 In the culinary world, the mode of cultural production has five key attributes. First, although restaurant cooking is a team effort, the responsibility and the recognition of the work rests with the chef; in organizational terms, this produces an “individuation” of culinary creation and increases the significance of status in the kitchen.18 Second, chefs are not only responsible for the creation of dishes but also for their preparation. Although they themselves rarely do the cooking, the public and critics associate the creation and execution of dishes with chefs, and in evaluating the food consider the two activities together. This is an important difference between high cuisine and other areas of cultural creation wherein 17  “The mode of cultural production” is obviously inspired by Marx’s concept of modes of production ([1867] 1889). Similar to Marx’s concept, the mode of cultural production refers to what individuals produce and how they produce it. For an elaboration of the characteristics of the mode of cultural production, see Leschziner (2015). 18  Up until the advent of nouvelle cuisine, the culinary movement developed in France in the 1960s and 70s, restaurant chefs were not known by name; the name of the restaurant and the classic dishes on its menu constituted the capital that mattered. With nouvelle cuisine, chefs “came out of the kitchen” and an organizational transformation began which has continued up until the present (Ferguson, 2004; Rao et al., 2003, 2005).

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creation and execution are separate tasks carried out by individuals in different occupational roles (Glynn, 2000). While a composer, for example, may earn great reputation with pieces that are difficult or impossible to perform or with compositions highly regarded by only a few, a chef cannot create a highly original dish that is impossible to cook or not popular with the clientele. Third, chefs are also responsible for the administration of the restaurant business. This affects the culinary side of their work since administrative duties take up a great deal of time and limit the amount of attention chefs can dedicate to the creation of new dishes, and may also limit the kinds of dishes chefs design because cost and profit calculations are ever present in their minds. Fourth, culinary creation is necessarily a commercial activity. Given the high costs and low profit margins, chefs cannot be unconcerned about the commercial viability of their restaurants. As a commercial activity, culinary creation is oriented toward the general public and not toward experts. In consequence, it cannot distance itself too far from the familiar tastes of the clientele. An expert public (colleagues but also clients with more sophisticated palates) would be more open and capable of appreciating originality, be it in the ingredients, the combinations of flavors, or in technique.19 However, chefs must satisfy their clientele not only in order to survive in the market but also in order to maintain their reputation, which is dependent upon their ability to run a profitable business as well as upon their culinary skills. Finally, the exchange of knowledge in cuisine is not regulated by laws but by norms. While chefs acquire ideas and inspiration from other chefs, they cannot give public credit where credit is due (menus or dishes do not usually have citations or references to other chefs). Thus, the extent of borrowing from colleagues is limited by the risk of having one’s dishes deemed too derivative.20 These five attributes of the mode of cultural production in cuisine are necessary for explaining the patterns of creation and innovation in this area. While the mode of cultural production refers to the general attributes of an area of activity, cultural creation unfolds in a social space with  Bourdieu (1977) makes reference to this point in his distinction between docta and doxa.  Chefs can make use of various intellectual property laws to protect their ideas, but they rarely do. The only common intellectual property law in cuisine is copyright; however, this law protects cookbooks and not the combinations of ingredients that make up the recipes. The normative regulation of knowledge-exchange in cuisine is an important factor in the diffusion of ideas and patterns of creation in a culinary field (Di Stefano et al., 2014; Fauchart & von Hippel, 2006; Leschziner, 2007, 2015: 73-97). 19 20

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particular characteristics that undoubtedly influence the activity. Thus, analysis of the mode of cultural production must be combined with the characteristics of a culinary field—including its means of production—in order to explain why patterns of creation vary between different fields as well as between different areas of activity. The size of a culinary field, the concentration of restaurants and real estate costs all affect the level of competition in a field. In addition, access to natural resources, as well as local culinary traditions influence the symbolic value given to different norms and culinary principles (such as ingredients or culinary techniques) and the culinary styles that become central in a field. In summary, chefs delineate lines of action according to the mode of cultural production in cuisine, but orient their actions toward those of other field members in order to adapt their culinary styles to the characteristics of the local space, which limit their creativity and affect their reputation.

Logics of Action Although each field has its particular characteristics, every field of an area of activity is organized around the principle of excellence of the activity or what Bourdieu calls the enjeu, the stakes (Bourdieu, 1993).21 In cuisine, the principle of excellence is flavor. Without exactly being what Bourdieu calls an illusio (Bourdieu, [1997] 2000: 11), since it is not an abstraction nor misrecognized, flavor constitutes an ontologically specific logic of action for chefs. In effect, upon identifying the most important element in the quality of a dish, the vast majority of the chefs I interviewed invoked flavor or ingredients (the two being directly associated in chefs’ cognitive schemas, such that the latter shapes the structure of the former). The culinary principles chefs invoke offer significant sociological information, since chefs orient their perceptions and actions vis-à-vis the principles that constitute the central logics of action in their field. At the organizational level, this means that those culinary principles structure the field. The fact that chefs emphasize flavor or ingredients in the representation of their culinary creations is an indicator, not so much of the role of flavor or ingredients in cuisine but of the symbolic value of these elements in a culinary field. While chefs take a range of factors into account when creating their dishes, they focus on flavor in the representation of their creations because of their intersubjective understanding of flavor as the value  Enjeu literally refers to what is at stake in a field.

21

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of excellence in cuisine, and thus the value they deem morally “pure.” This does not mean that chefs are cynics or hypocrites, but rather that in the context of dialogue, where questions give rise to reflections on certain aspects and not on others, they are encouraged to focus on the values that matter to those aspects. In addition, they tend to focus on the information they use in deliberate cognitive processes (such as the principle of excellence in their occupation), rather than knowledge so internalized it has become second nature. The principles of action habitually followed by chefs in the kitchen are the practical logics (Bourdieu, 1990) that, having become second nature, are not easily articulated in the context of dialogue.22 Chefs vary with respect to the principles they invoke to represent their cuisine. However, the variance is not random but consistent with status levels. While chefs with high status in New York tend to highlight flavor as the sole logic guiding the creation of their dishes, those of lesser status invoke other elements besides flavor.23 Chefs of the highest status are under greater pressure to demonstrate excellence in their restaurants— where a meal demands a considerable investment in time and money—and it goes without saying that the flavors and ingredients in each dish must be perfect. However, no chef achieves high status without demonstrating culinary creativity and innovation. Thus, if chefs of the highest status are focused on flavor in the representation of their cuisine, it is because at their level of status they are under greater pressure to demonstrate devotion to the value of excellence in their work. To the extent that high cuisine food must not only taste good but also be an expression of creativity and innovation, originality becomes an important culinary value; further, originality is the most effective response to the pressure for differentiation and, thus, is the other principal logic of action in a culinary field. Indeed, the greater pressures to differentiate in New  York, together with the means of production available in this city, partly explain why originality plays a more central role in New York than in San Francisco. Given that innovation has a positive symbolic value and attracts great media attention in New York, innovative culinary styles are 22  American sociology of culture has given increasing attention to the influence of the context of action in the analysis of cognitive patterns and practices (DiMaggio, 1997; Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003; Swidler, 2003). 23  The New York and San Francisco fields present certain differences in this regard. Here, I only analyze the New York case.

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more visible in this city and therefore a more readily available source of inspiration—both in cognitive and pragmatic terms—than in San Francisco. This facilitates the emulation of innovative culinary styles by other members of the field (Rao et al., 2005). Taken together, these conditions contribute to the centrality of originality as a logic of action around which chefs orient their actions in a field.

How to Navigate a Field Naturally, to the extent that chefs orient their actions vis-à-vis other members of the field, and some actors occupying central positions in the field seek to innovate in their practices, the tendency to innovate will become more profound. In analytic terms, this means that originality is a logic of individual action as well as a structuring principle in the field, the means by which both actors and culinary styles acquire their social positions (Leschziner, 2015). Indeed, the internal logics of a field allow us to explain variation between fields in an area of activity, even within a single country. If actors in an area of activity orient their actions vis-à-vis their local peers and have necessarily local audiences, the field will acquire a local geographic delimitation and a locally specific morphology.24 Field theory and organizational studies have contributed a great deal to the analysis of social action through works that show how individuals orient their actions vis-à-vis other members of the field and make decisions in response to the incentives and pressures they face given their social positions (Bourdieu, 1993, [1992] 1996; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Frickel & Gross, 2005; Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001). However, one of the limitations of these perspectives in the analysis of social action is that they tend to assume instrumental rational action, since the explanation of action is usually thought to lie in the motivation of actors to maintain or improve their status. But, to the extent that not all actors in similar social positions act in the same way (or are motivated by the same goals), structural or organizational factors are not sufficient to explain social action. The findings of my research show that, without a doubt, chefs delineate lines of action in response to the pressures and incentives they face given their status but also in view of their professional trajectory and projections 24  In other words, the delimitation of a field should not be a theoretical task (and even less an automatic reproduction of Bourdieusian analyses), but rather an empirical one, on the basis of the observation of the actions and opinions of field members.

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for the future. The culinary styles and techniques learned during their training, the chefs with whom they have worked, the cognitive schemas developed during their careers and their professional goals all play a significant role in chefs’  actions. All these elements go into making up a chef’s “self-concept” (Mead, [1934] 1967; see also Gross, 2008), which functions as a compass for navigating the field and establishing lines of action. In an organizational field, there is a variety of factors to take into account when making decisions, a great deal of uncertainty, and above all multiple pressures and contradictory incentives. For example, would it be better to satisfy customers with familiar dishes in order to guarantee a full restaurant or to innovate to attract attention and stand out in the market? These factors complicate the decision-making process.25 The self-concept helps direct the attention of individuals, given that it helps them to cognitively and pragmatically prioritize the most important factors (and ignore others less relevant) in light of the pressures they face, and the skills, capacities and interests they posses, and in this way facilitates the reduction of organizational complexity and decision-making.26 The self-concept develops through a dynamic and co-constitutive relationship with an individual’s field position. As individuals advance in their careers and change social positions, the pressures they face, as well as their skills, cognitive schemas and values also change, and with those also the self-­ concept. If the self-concept functions as an effective compass for navigating a field, it is because it is transformed along with changes in social position. In this way, the self-concept (as defined above) constitutes a heuristic tool that allows us to explain variations at the level of individual action that cannot be explained by means of organizational or structural factors alone, on the one hand, and to explain the relation between individual action and the morphology of a field, on the other.

25  Some sociological and organizational perspectives provide particularly useful information on the complexity of organizational fields and above all on how individuals respond to it (see Fligstein, 2001; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Porac et al., 1995). 26  These ideas are inspired by Dewey’s pragmatist theory ([1922] 2002, [1939] 1967) and, in particular, by his explanation of the dynamics of action and the intrinsic relation between means and ends (see Leschziner, 2015; Leschziner & Green, 2013).

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PART II

New Visions on Creative Practices

CHAPTER 5

The Jolie Môme Theatre Company: A Sociology of Artistic Work in Political Theater Marisol Facuse

Introduction: Convergences Between Art and Politics This chapter has its starting point in doctoral research (Facuse, 2008, 2013), the objective of which is to understand the unusual character of contemporary artistic-militant1 practices. Known as committed, social contestation or resistance art, we are interested in those art forms that take  The concept of “militant theater” proposed by Olivier Neveux refers to a specific modality of political theater, characterized by its direct or leading involvement in social struggles. For clarity and precision we will retain the adjective “militant” to characterize this type of performance, taking into account that it is a description raised in the context of notions of political theater, intervention, theater-action, agit-prop theater or theater in struggle, which constitute a conceptual space that in different historical periods designates the same artistic and social phenomena. 1

M. Facuse (*) University of Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_5

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struggles for social transformation as their universe of reference and action. Examples of such practices can be found in the theater of Bertolt Brecht, the republican songbook of the Spanish Civil War and street muralism in Latin America. In order to understand the multiple possibilities of articulation between the artistic and the political, we will analyze a particular case: the French theater company Jolie Môme. This example serves to construct more generally the category of activist or “militant theater” (Neveux, 2003).2 The political nature of this theatrical activity is expressed in several domains: the places where performances take place, the modes of organization of the artistic work, aesthetic choices, their support networks and the target audiences. Based on the theoretical contributions of Howard Becker (2006), we maintain that the “art worlds” permanently interact with other worlds of social life. Using this perspective, we are interested in the boundaries established between theater and politics in our analysis of Jolie Môme. We address the interactions between the artistic and the political, not in terms of coincidence or domination, but rather of cooperation and convergence. We identify the solidarities that can arise between these two types of social practice, both at the level of production of theatrical works and in the symbolic universes that both share. In fact, the usual approach to this problem argues that the relationship between art and politics has often been thought of in terms of the subordination and instrumentalization of the artistic to the political. From this point of view, artistic-militant works are often perceived by the institutional art world as overly pedagogical and schematic, minimizing their aesthetic value as much as their contribution to the creation of new collective dynamics. In contrast, our hypothesis is that artistic-militant practices create a space of action at the intersection of the Art Worlds and politics, giving rise to new forms of cooperation between artists and activists, between artistic experiences and struggles for social transformation. These practices become another way of experiencing the political, distancing it from the doctrinaire and ideological dimension, approaching the domain of the imaginary (Pessin, 1992). 2  We will use the notion of plural publics as proposed by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi (2003, 2007), assuming that it is a heterogeneous social group that can generate multiple links with works of art and other cultural products.

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Our hypothesis deals with contemporary debates in the sociology of art (Heinich, 2004; Péquignot, 2007; Esquenazi, 2007) that propose an understanding of art works as social processes ranging from production to interpretation. This means interpreting works not based on their uniqueness or their objectivity, as has been done from the definitions derived from aesthetic theory, but by analyzing the links created by them to the human communities that give them life (Esquenazi, 2007).3 The company Jolie Môme is a case of great interest which allows us to explore this hypothesis. Becker’s sociological perspective led us to shift attention from the categories of individuals (ethnicity, gender and educational level) to the categories of activities (Pessin, 2004) and thus to consider networks of interactions more than forms of institutionalization of artistic and social practices. The concepts of “activity”, “trajectory” and “process” occupy a central position in the methodological device we have constructed to study Jolie Môme. Understanding this in terms of the “Art world”, we considered different axes of production: its collective history, its inheritances and affiliations, the life histories of its artists, its shows, its mediators and audiences. On the other hand, the notion of “world of work” (Dutheil-Pessin, 2004)4 led us to consider the internal and external domains of the company’s productions (Péquignot, 1993, 2007), taking into account both aesthetic aspects (especially theatrical performance, showmanship and musical repertoires) as political and organizational (in particular, the 3  Esquenazi proposes a sociology of art in opposition to the definitions raised from the history of art or from aesthetic theory. In particular, he discusses the notions of art held by Gombrich, Barthes and Adorno, which propose the idea that art is a social process that goes from production to interpretation. From the perspective of Esquenazi there is no uniqueness to the work of art, but it exists in the many trajectories of meaning that the public give it. The emphasis here is on the interpretive work and the bonds established between human communities and works of art, rather than on the organization of the artistic work that is the focus of the Beckerian approach. 4  The notion of “world of the work” has been proposed by Alain Pessin and Catherine Dutheil-Pessin in their works on the literature of the nineteenth century and the realistic song, respectively. In dialogue with Becker’s concept of the “world of art”, which gives priority to the study of the organization of artistic work, the concept of “world of work” takes into account the imaginative dimension of artistic works, genres and trajectories. For example, in the case of studies by Catherine Dutheil-Pessin (2004) on the realistic song, the biographies of the singers, the types of staging, the public image, the sound dimension and how all these elements account for a particular type of work of the imagination.

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division of labor, modes of operation and distribution of power). In this chapter, we will develop the aspects related to Jolie Môme’s division of labor and collective modes of operation and how these intersect with the political ideals of equality and solidarity espoused by the group.

Methodology: The Ethnography of Theatrical Work Our methodology was based on ethnographic work developed over three years and entailed long stays in the theater of the company, attendance at meetings, rehearsals and accompanying the group during tours. In this context, in-depth interviews were conducted with members of the company and its support networks, and press archives were analyzed in order to reconstruct its history from its founding in 1983 to the present. The field work was carried out between 2004 and 2007 in Paris and other regions where the group puts on shows in France (Marseille, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Aurillac and Avignon, among others). Ten interviews were held with the permanent members recognized as “main core” of the company, plus a series of interviews with gatekeepers who are part of their support networks and their collective history. At the same time, 140 interviews were conducted with audiences within the framework of the four shows presented during the period of field work. To this end, both theater and theater festivals were attended, and during the tours, the company’s tent was regularly attended.

Jolie Môme: A Countercurrent Theater The Jolie Môme theater company was formed in Paris in the early 1980s on the initiative of actor Michel Roger. From the outset he claimed his affiliation with the “theater of agitation and propaganda” (agit-prop), an artistic movement that emerged in the early years of the October Revolution in Russia (Amey et al., 1977). It proliferated internationally through numerous theatrical experiences that emerged simultaneously with social upheavals during the first half of the twentieth century. Decades later this type of theater reemerged in the social struggles of the sixties through emblematic companies such as the Living Theater (New York, 1947) or the “theater intervention” after May 1968 in France (Ebstein & Ivernel, 1983). Like the agit-prop companies, Jolie Môme chooses as stage of its interventions setting and situations unconventional for the theater, such as

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workers’ strikes, occupied factories or political demonstrations. This tendency was inherited directly from the guidelines of the theatrical practices in France after May 1968. As for the ways of organization of theatrical work, these are based on the principles adopted by the “theater of intervention”, which questioned the basis of the model prevailing until then in normal theater companies. In the context of these theatrical experiences, companies such as the Théâtre du Soleil, L’Épée de Bois and L’Aquarium made history, in which artists gave life to unpublished projects characterized by a great political and social commitment (Cramesnil, 2005). In all of them, the existence of a permanent troupe of actors was favored, an equality of salary and the polyvalence or multi-skilling of the artists. This organizational model was sidelined in the 1980s due to successive changes in the mode of art funding by the state. Since then, economic contributions by the state have been directed to theater directors rather than theater companies, which favored the development of individual projects and made operations based on permanent troupes of actors difficult (Abirached, 2005). As for the dramas and the issues addressed by theater companies, the prominence in the 1970s of political theater began to disappear in the following decade, as companies reoriented their interests toward subjects of private life or toward a “theater of author”.5 In this way, Jolie Môme ­represents a form of theater running against the mainstream in both artistic and organizational choices. In fact, its founder Michel Roger was influenced by experiences of the “theater of intervention” of the seventies, having been part of the Theater de l’Epée de Bois for almost a decade,

5  Although there is a large number of classical and contemporary authors whose dramatic works can be classified as political theater (Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Adamov, Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, among others), which characterized the dramatic style of the theater of intervention in France after May 1968, a new method of collective writing emerged, by members of companies based on research on social problems of the time.

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one of the five theaters of Cartoucherie6 directed by Antonio Diaz Florian.7 From its beginnings, Jolie Môme introduces classic plays such as Brecht’s Mother, Adamov’s Barricade on the Paris Commune and La crosse en l’air,8 based on a poem by the French writer Jacques Prévert that deals with the complicity between the Vatican and fascism during the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, the company produced collective creations to address political conflicts such as Je reviendrai et je serais des millions, [Spartacus], which refers to imperialism and the plunder of some countries by others in the new world order, or Cabaret de chansons, a musical spectacle that copes with current political themes. We will briefly discuss Cabaret’s analysis in order to provide the reader with a clearer idea of the militant character of the company’s works. It is the oldest show in its repertoire, created during its early years and performed in the streets of Montmartre in Paris, a neighborhood that since the early twentieth century was the scene of the realist song (Dutheil-­ Pessin, 2004).9 Cabaret is composed of theatrical songs and short scenes. These are recurring forms in political theater because of their great adaptability to any type of setting (the street, the factory, the theater). The repertoire ranges from French political or romantic songs (e.g., those by George Moustaki, Léo Ferré, Serge Reggiani and Serge Utgé-Royo) to Prévert’s own compositions and songs from the international revolutionary repertoire (e.g., Le Temps des cerises and A las barricadas). Short scenes

6  The Cartoucherie, located in the city of Vincennes (France), became an emblematic place for intervention theater in the seventies, when the actors of companies such as The Theater du Soleil, L’Épée de Bois and L’Aquarium built their theaters and consolidated their artistic projects. At present, it remains one of the most recognized theaters in France. 7  Antonio Díaz Florian, an actor and director of Peruvian origin, in 1969 founded the Workshop of L’Épée de Bois (The wooden sword) in Paris, an experimental theater group that later became the Theater L’Épée de Bois. In addition, he had been an actor in works directed by the influential Ariane Mnouchkine, founder of Théâtre du Soleil, and has directed a score of works, among which are some of his own, such as La Soufrière (2001) and El mata “Che” (2008), and others by classic authors such as García Lorca and Molière. 8  The title of the poem by Prévert La crosse en l’air could be translated into English as The Rifle Butt in the Air, a pacifist expression that alludes to the soldier who in the heat of battle renounces killing his enemy. 9  Dutheil-Pessin (2004) refers to the popular songs interpreted mainly by women in the streets of Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. Their main exponents were Fréhel, Damia and Édith Piaf.

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refer to national and international political conflicts (e.g., undocumented immigrants, employment insecurity, war, racism and colonialism). The format of Cabaret evokes different artistic traditions that break with the dichotomies between theater and song, street and room, art and politics, and retake Brechtian forms that re-edit popular aesthetic traditions. At the same time, Cabaret regains nineteenth-century forms of performance in France (such as the songbook, social melodrama or gogueta)10 that develop social criticism through the use of parody and improvisation. As far as its political commitment is concerned, Jolie Môme supports social struggles in a direct way thanks to its mobility and the minimum scenographic resources it requires. With Cabaret, Jolie Môme has supported striking workers and political actions led by associations of immigrants, precarious workers and the homeless. In general, Jolie Môme highlights in all its shows the aesthetics of popular theater, such as the comedy of art, circus, clown and street theater, giving prominence to music and song. The relationship of the scene with the spectators is direct. The actors aims to communicate with the public by directing their gaze and voice to the audience, trying to break with the principle of the “fourth wall”11 of classical theater typical of the Italian scene (Duvignaud, 1973, 1999). Finally, the company’s cooperation networks and publics since its earliest years have been heavily nurtured by actors from the political, social and trade union worlds; a dimension that has involved the inventive deployment of new forms of collaboration between artists and activists.

10  The gogueta (goguette) is a nineteenth-century French tradition that brought together a group of fans who composed lyrics based on popular melodies expressing social criticism in a satirical tone. This festive practice has now been resumed in some parts of Paris. An example of this is the Goguette des Z’énervés created by the musician Christian Paccoud and performed weekly until today at Café Le Limonaire. See http://limonaire.free.fr 11  The “fourth wall” alludes to an imaginary barrier that separates the actors and the public in the classical theater. This means that the actors do not direct their eyes to the audience present in the room, nor dialogue with them, as if the theatrical scene happened in a closed space. On breaking with the “fourth wall”, the characters interact directly with the audience, questioning them directly by voice, eye contact and movement in the scene.

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Modes of Collective Operation: The Organization and Division of Labor The Multiple Capabilities of Actors and Equal Wages In the experiences of agit-prop theater of the early twentieth century, as well as in the political theater companies of the 1970s, political commitment was translated into modes of organization of artistic work in accordance with the ideal society that it sought to build. In the same way, Jolie Môme has practiced a collective mode of operation throughout its history, based on the two organizational principles that prevail in French political theater: “polyvalence” of artists and equal pay for all its members, regardless of their seniority and the type of function performed. After the introduction of the Statute of Intermittent Employment12—a salary compensation system created in France for film and theater workers—the company is sustained by an organizational arrangement that allows actors and technicians to devote themselves full time to theatrical activity. Jolie Môme has a stable team of professionals comprising eleven members who receive a permanent salary. Of these, nine are actors, one is in charge of public relations and another is a light and sound technician. The principle of “polyvalence” of the actors implies that each actor develops skills or extra activities of a technical nature or related to the internal organization of the company (see Table 5.1). These are tasks that may have a greater or lesser degree of specialization. If we use the Beckerian notion of Art worlds, we can affirm that in the company the same artists must develop core activities—related to aspects of art in the production of its works—and support activities—tasks of another nature indispensable for the final artistic product (Becker, 2006). The division of labor and tasks in the company Jolie Môme can be summarized as follows: The distribution of tasks and the internal organization of the work of the company have gradually been shaped according to the needs of the company and the competencies of its members. Examples of this are the tasks related to the technical area carried out by different members, including some actors:

12  In a specific section, we will discuss in more detail the aspects related to the financing of the company and to the system of intermittency that applies to theater workers in France.

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Table 5.1  Division of Jolie Môme company work Artist/ technician

Core artistic activities

Serge Balu

Actor, musician, singer and songwriter Mathieu Actor, musician, singer Barbances and songwriter Loïc Canitrot Production Assistant Cyril Chellal Actor, singer and musician Lorène Actor and singer Dubreuil Stéphanie Actor and singer Giner Eric Jeunesse [Sound and light technician] Sylvie Lartaut Actor Cécile Actor, singer and acrobat Michau Michel Roger Director, actor, musician, singer and songwriter Pascale Actor and singer Zanelli

Support activities Responsible for the company’s website Writer and editor of Le Môme, the group’s newspaper Responsible for public relations Responsible for the amateur singers’ workshop Secretary of public relations, network mailing and product sales (Posters, CDs, T-shirts) Responsible for the group’s photographic archive. Runs the public bar during performances. Responsible for the management of the La Belle Étoile theater Logistics in tour periods and group activities: food for actors and guests In charge of the press archive. Internal organization of the troupe (meetings) and head of the amateur theater workshop Finance and administration: entertainment sales contracts, internal administration

I take care of the sound. I have the material, a microphone, an editing table. As a musician I also help with the [musical] arrangements also with putting up the tent and the scenery. I am a bit of reference for everything that is technical and material. (M. Barbances)

The development of support activities allows for a degree of professionalism parallel to artistic work, as well as a more equitable distribution of working time among team members. The principle of equal pay presupposes equal dedication of time and energy to collective activities. Unequal involvement of the actors in the tasks is therefore likely to create tensions that end up affecting daily relations among troupe members. These differences become more evident when it comes to taking on the small tasks that Everett Hughes (1997) defines as “dirty work”, that is, those socially less valued activities. This is accentuated during the most demanding periods, such as during tours.

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For the director of the company, the different degrees of involvement of the actors have to do with their careers, their personalities and their favorite areas of work. Equality for him can only be expressed where it is objectifiable, where there is a relation with the social rights of the actors, that is, in their salary: Equality does not exist on a natural level. Unfortunately some [actors] are beautiful and others are ugly. Some are fat and some are thin. Some have talent for improvisation and some do not. Some have the talent to visualize things globally and others do not. It is a whole set of things. But where equality is important, it is in rights and in wages. (M. Roger)

Most of the internal difficulties of the troupe derive from problems specific to the emotional life of the group (Pagès, 1977). According to the director, this may be related to the high degree of involvement required of the actors in collective activities: There are other problems, even psychological ones. We are not easy. We are complicated. The problem is that we have complications in our emotional life … it is difficult. Everything personal is difficult to cope with in the troupe. Above all, it’s the level of demand on personal life, to be always available to the service of the troupe, that wears people down. (M. Roger)

Faced with these difficulties, it is necessary to deploy certain strategies to handle conflicts and best deal with the internal relations of the group. In this way, throughout its history and in parallel to the distribution of functions, the company has been profiling less visible roles related to its internal cohesion, as one of the actors explains: I have the function of being the “positive gentleman” … I have the impression that I am a more optimistic person, who naturally sees the positive side of things, because there are people in the team who are stressed out even before anything happens, and say that “it won’t work” and all that. I have this function. It is not a material function, but rather of maintaining morale. (M. Barbances).

On the other hand, the novelty component contributed by external actors to the core group, who participate in certain shows, can also contribute to overcoming the internal difficulties of the group and enrich its creative processes:

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Sometimes we need fresh blood … new actors, because after a while it is not good for us to always be “locked in”, because it is complicated. That is why we try to have one or two other people who are always external. (M. Roger)

Finally, the polyvalence or multi-skilling of the actors, in addition to implying a double function of every member of the troupe, spread between core and support activities, is related to the dual artistic and activist membership of the group. Thus, when incorporating a new member, the group takes into consideration the newcomer’s political beliefs and his or her career as an activist. This adaptability is a central process in the artistic production of Jolie Môme. The greater or lesser involvement of the actors in the communal life of the troupe also creates internal hierarchies in which those who devote a greater amount of time can obtain greater recognition and appreciation by the director and the group. Likewise, differences are generated by the nature of the support activities carried out by each person according to their greater or lesser artistic, creative and specialized aspects of the work groups. Social values extrinsic to the world of theater also play an important role in the recognition of actors by their peers and the director. Tasks requiring technical know-how (such as sound, graphic design and computer skills) are more valued than those requiring less specialization (such as cleaning the theater, driving the van or buying food), either because they do not need specific training or because they are less visible at the time of producing the final work of the group. Aware of the unequal appreciation of extra-artistic activities, theater companies emphasized the importance of the polyvalence or multi-skilled capability of actors. This probably explains the fact that in the division of labor there is not a single actor or actress in charge of this type of task and that the whole team is asked to share responsibilities and functions in a fair way within the troupe.

The Material Life of the Troupe Sources of Income The shows put on in theaters and on the street in different regions of France are the main source of income for the company. The most significant contribution comes from the Song Cabaret that is programmed most frequently and which brings the company about sixty percent of total

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tickets sold each year. Since its inception, the Cabaret is on Sundays in the Montmartre district of Paris, and is also programmed in theater halls, festivals and in support of various political activities. Also, the sale of discs after the shows represents a considerable contribution to the annual incomes of the group. Sales take place mainly at the end of functions but also through activist libraries and at political activities such as forums, debates or parties. The rest of the earning come from the three shows that are presented at the company’s theater in the commune of Saint-Denis, and tours in various French regions. As for the distribution of income within the company, most of the incomes are used to pay the salaries of the actors and technicians, the remainder for operating expenses. As we have seen, the priority given to wages has a direct relationship with the conception of a permanent troupe theater that seeks to give its actors security and job stability. This aspect is considered fundamental to the way the company operates: We prefer the less usual practice of keeping our actors as a group. That way, instead of being dismissed at the end of a normal contract, people leave only when they want to. We offer them the opportunity to remain permanent members of the troupe. We try to give everyone not only a job but a role in the group. Maybe I have gone too far by incorporating too many people. We are eighteen in Je reviendrai et je serais des millions [Spartacus]. Eighteen taking into account those who come from outside. For this I have been reproached because this made things difficult. But I like it when there are lots of members. It’s important to me that the team that is the nucleus of the company—eleven people—have a job, a place to live and the opportunity to practice their profession. It is true that this is going against the current trend, in which actors are discarded at the end of their contracts. People are hired, then fired, then hired again and fired again. But we appreciate the aspect of family security and we will keep it until we can do so no longer. (M. Roger)

The decision to dedicate the majority of the incomes to salaries, as well as to opt for an equal distribution, is the fruit of reflection that at the same time covers artistic and political aspects of its work. This is a feature that distinguishes the performance of Jolie Môme from other theater companies, as one of the actresses says: There are companies with the same budget as ours. We spend sixty percent on wages. There are companies in which only ten percent goes to wages

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because they prefer to buy an expensive wardrobe. In the operation [of a company] one observes where the expenses go. (P. Zanelli)13

The Intermittent Employment System Despite the importance given to wages and job security, the company’s incomes are not enough to cover the entire salary of its members. Like many such companies in France, Jolie Môme is part of the intermittent employment regime (Menger, 2005); a social security system that covers the periods of rehearsal and creation of shows in which no remuneration is received. This compensation system, created in the 1980s in the field of film production, was conceived of to offer a stable salary to artists and technicians working on temporary contracts. From obtaining a number of stamps or cachets from contracts signed with public or private employers, the system ensures workers a permanent income during the year. At present, this allows the state to subsidize the artistic work of a significant number of companies,14 including those whose operation is based on the model of a permanent theater troupe: In the 1980s many new intermittent workers appeared. Many new companies were formed in France and there was tolerance. At that time Jack Lang was the Minister of Culture. Everyone knew that no one was looking for a job, and even in big companies like Mnouchkine they worked for six months, they gathered together their cachets, then people were counted as unemployed during that time [the rest of the year], they got compensations and meanwhile rehearsed their shows. It was a way of working that suited everyone, considering that there are not so many performers in France. (P. Zanelli)

13  Abirached (2005) notes the significant increase in costs of stage props and wardrobe to French theater companies in the 1980s. 14  Historically, in France, to be paid in vouchers or cachets consisted of stamping a card in which the number of times the temporary workers had developed an activity was counted that must be paid as if they were employed. Subsequently, the expression was used in the theater business to refer to the remuneration of artists and technicians. Currently, it is necessary to accumulate a minimum of 507 hours for a period of between 304 and 319 days to receive payments in cachets. According to official employment statistics in France, in 2014, a total of 256,000 intermittent theater employees were registered. This figure has increased by 4.8 percent since 2010. For more details, see http://www.pole-emploi.fr/accueil/

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The actors of Jolie Môme are aware of the importance of the intermittent regime for the survival of the company, without which they could not maintain their current model of organization: If we said, ‘Okay, we’ll become wage earners for the company,’ we’d be only two or maybe three in number. We could only hire say, three people. But that means between the three of us we’d have to maintain the theater, deal with administration, theatrical direction, lighting. [If we take care of all that work,] we’d end up doing monologues. (P. Zanelli)

For some years, this system of financing show workers had been limited to a smaller number of artists in order to reduce costs, adding more and more demands on artists to access and maintain their intermittent worker status. The members of the company Jolie Môme have been actively involved in the defense of this statute by participating in actions organized in defense of theater workers, in strikes and street demonstrations. Existing Without Subsidies: Between Autonomy and Insecurity Without considering the public contribution through the intermittent employment system, Jolie Môme does not receive direct subsidies from the Ministry of Culture or regional or local governments. For this reason, some of its members use the concept of “Self-funded” to characterize its way of functioning, as opposed to the companies that receive state subsidies. The absence of subsidies is often claimed by the company as a sign of autonomy that gives them independence in their political positions. This allows them to be consistent with the principle they call “theater without compromise”, strongly supported by the public. Following the terminology of Becker (2006), we could recognize the members of the company as belonging to the category of “mavericks”, that is, artists who, knowing the conventions of the art world, decide to develop their productions on the margins and, to some extent, in opposition to the “integrated professionals” in the system. According to the artists themselves, their difficulties in obtaining public support are related to their limited connections with the world of institutional theater. Similarly, the pronounced political nature of their theatrical productions could lead to negative pre-judgment by culture officials deciding the distribution of public subsidies, which would affect the evaluation of their artistic quality. As we have pointed out at the beginning of

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this chapter, political theater seems to face a permanent tension between their political efficacy and their artistic efficiency (Ebstein & Ivernel, 1983). However, this political factor allows the company to create support networks outside the institutions of the theater world. These networks are oriented to political, civil association and union actors with whom they establish relations of solidarity and mutual support. On the one hand, the company intervenes artistically in diverse political actions and, conversely, the actors of the militant world make possible its theatrical project can go ahead by offering contracts and considerable promotional support and access to new audiences. It is a network of mediation that allows the consolidation of the company’s theater work, exemplified in the venues where it has performed over the years. Its current location, La Belle Étoile (see Photo 5.1), was made available to the communist municipality of Saint-­ Denis in order to contribute to the creation of artistic spaces in La Plaine, a neighborhood in full transformation that has been leaving behind its industrial character to become a mainly residential area. If we use Becker’s approach (2006), the support network deployed by militant activists can be understood as a fundamental link in the production chain of these plays: They [the militants] fill our rooms. When we have a function it is always full. We have a network that fills the rooms … Also among the public there are people who do not participate in any organization and who come by word of mouth. But sixty percent of the audience in the room are militants or friends of militants … The militants reward us well for our commitment, our militancy. Whenever they can, they hire our shows. There is indeed mutual solidarity. (P. Zanelli)

The articulation between the artistic and militant worlds thus becomes an essential component in the material life of the company. However, it is a cooperative relationship that is not without difficulties. The convergence of interests between artists and militants has certain contradictions related to the conception and valorization of their artistic work, and consequently with the means devoted to artistic production. Artists and militants must often find the balance between political commitment and the need to make their livelihood. On the other hand, militant activity is practiced most of the time outside working hours and theatrical activity, which is the reason why dialogue is necessary to successfully conjoin these two operational rationales.

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Photo 5.1  La Belle Étoile Theater, Saint Juste Street No. 14, La Plaine area, commune of Saint-Denis, Paris (April 2005). Source: author

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The process of negotiation between the company and the actors in the militant world accounts for these contradictions: It is necessary to find a balance, taking into account that we need to earn a living. It takes time and energy for people to understand that this is our job, that if we always sing for free we are devaluing it. In addition, there are militants who say ‘don’t worry, we can invite Jolie Môme’ and they do not realize that this is our job, that there are rehearsal hours behind our performances and that we need to live on what we do. (P. Zanelli)

It is important to keep in mind that the relative economic balance that the company has managed to create is built on a precarious base. The members of the troupe are forced to schedule a large number of functions to meet the requirements of the intermittent employment system and thus maintain recognition of their professional status. This limits the time devoted to creative work and collective reflection necessary for the continuity of any theatrical project. The precariousness of working conditions means some members of the troupe a sense of uncertainty about the future, both individually and collectively. In spite of this, the actors value their autonomy from the system of institutional financing. Independence from subsidies has political repercussions, which renders into a freedom of expression that allows the company to adhere to causes that often go against the background of social and political consensus, as in the case of prisoners of the Direct Action group in France.15 This allows them, at the same time, to establish a certain homeostasis in the material life of the company, based on the strong commitment of its actors to the collective project, as well as the support received by the militants in mediation tasks and promotion of performances. A historical look at the evolution of the material life of Jolie Môme allows us to verify that, although it has always had limited financial means, the income generated by the shows have increased progressively throughout its history. This gradual evolution is due, according to the actors, to their ability to maintain and increase their support networks rather than relying on public funding, seen as too fluctuating:

15  An armed anarcho-communist group carried out actions between 1978 and 1987. The French authorities considered it a terrorist group.

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[Our system] is like a house under construction. First, you’re laying down the floor. Then you are fine-tuning the details. I think it’s reassuring because we build on solid foundations. (P. Zanelli)

The Distribution of Power and Collective Decision-Making Protagonists of the theater of intervention post-May 1968, taking on the concerns of the social and intellectual movements of the time, questioned deeply the power relations and the distribution of power in the daily or micro-political spaces (Guattari, 1989). They questioned the logic of theatrical work organization and its hierarchies, for instance, the privileged place of the director in making decisions that affected the whole troupe. As we have seen, from its beginnings, Jolie Môme has striven to put into practice the ideal of equal pay and the equal distribution of work time. This principle is more difficult to establish in the complex terrain of power relations, where the figure of the founder and director of the company, Michel Roger, continues to have a substantial influence. It is, however, a dynamic in transformation that, in the words of the members of the troupe itself, has been gradually oriented toward higher levels of participation in collective decision-making. The theme of the distribution of power in the company’s relations will be dealt with in the last part of this chapter. Elements for a Foucauldian Analysis of Power in Theatrical Work Analyzing power in its micro-physical dimension means considering it in terms of multiple relations of force, understanding it as something that, although not localizable, circulates in the various activities of a society. In his first volume of History of sexuality, The Will to Know (1994), Foucault highlights the immanent nature of power, which, contrary to its more conventional representation, is not unified from above but is exercised from different local points. To have this perspective in mind in the analysis of a theater company means to examine not only the relation of the vertical power emanated from the director but also to see its exercise from diverse points and positions and its distribution among the members of the troupe. Our interviews allow us to argue that in Jolie Môme the exercise of power oscillates between a hierarchical model, centralized in the undisputed authority of the director, and a more horizontal one that demands the opinions of the other members of the troupe.

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Another important aspect of the Foucauldian theory of power we consider is the inseparable relationship between power and knowledge. In the case of Jolie Môme, knowledge acquired through the artistic or political experiences of members of the troupe creates positions of power, and conversely, certain knowledge results from certain functions (especially, technical, artistic and financial), ensuring the exercise of specific powers. Considering this latter aspect, we can identify the knowledge associated with diverse domains: A) Artistic knowledge: the theatrical, musical or technical knowledge of each member that makes possible the “expert” who emerges when making decisions related to the artistic field, such as theatrical and musical repertoires, scenographic and aesthetic options. B) Internal organizational knowledge: domains such as financial or public relations derived from the different functions assigned to the members of the company delimit positions of power that are present at the time of making decisions, such as the number of actors in a show, its cost, the acceptance of proposals of contracts or solidarity with a certain political cause. C) Historical knowledge: this is less visible and is related to the history of the company. The senior members are the repositories of knowledge that determine specific positions of power, whether they are predominant or subordinate. D) Political knowledge: political involvement, present in all domains of artistic production of the company, crystallizes relations of knowledge and power within the troupe. Members who belong to a political organization or are most involved in social struggles carry with them a knowledge that gives them greater value and creates privileged positions of power. These fields of knowledge are distributed differently among the actors, becoming visible according to the type of decision being discussed. Some of these fields of knowledge can be accumulated in the same actor if he or she is, for example, a person with professional training in the theatrical and musical domain and is also committed to a political cause. In the same way, factors such as the age of entry into the company and the modality of integration into the team of actors can influence the place assigned to each person. The actors who entered through casting after completing their professional training take a different position from those who joined when

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they were very young, through their participation in the theater workshops offered by the company. The Two Pillars of the Troupe Throughout the history of the company, specific power positions have been consolidated, such as the positions of director and founder Michel Roger and actress in charge of finance Pascale Zanelli. Both are considered as the two “pillars of the troupe”, since they play decisive roles: theater management and economic management. This favors their influence on the strategic decisions of the company, which limits the principle of collective management as an ideal organizing principle, as witnessed by some of the actors we interviewed. At the same time, the presence of these founders gives a certain continuity to the collective trajectory of the company, as opposed to the great number of changes that have taken place during its three decades; the composition of the troupe, the different spaces where it has settled, the passage from the status of the amateur company to professional and its transition from a socio-educational theater in its early years to decidedly militant. A Variation in the Exercise of Power When the members of the troupe refer to their mode of operation, there is a consensus that the decision-making system centralized in the director has gradually moved toward more participatory dynamics, as shown by the reflection of one of the actresses: It used to be rather a democratic centralism—to use a political term—and now that is less present. Things are decided by the group. (S. Lartaut)

This can be explained by the history of the troupe itself, given a significant number of actors have spent a good part of their career there, contributing to and influencing the collective dynamics. On the other hand, if we assume the inseparable nature of knowledge and power relations, we can conclude that the diversification of the activities we have noticed at the beginning of this chapter has generated a distribution of knowledge within the group (artistic, technical, political and financial) and, consequently, a rebalancing of the distribution of power.

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Finally, the life stages of its members also have an influence on this transformation in the exercise of power. Contrary to what might be thought, the passage of time and the years of experience as director of the company, far from solidifying the centralization of exercise of power, seem to relativize it. This allows the involvement of new actors in decision making, as its director says: The shows have become better and better as I have begun to doubt. Before I was the one running everything […] now I am getting older and I am getting more and more doubts about everything. I’m not sure. That is why I need to have the everyone’s opinion. (M. Roger)

This transition to a less centralized model sometimes creates a perceived power vacuum among members of the troupe, leading to the director being asked to be more involved. Nevertheless, the contribution and influence of a greater number of actors stimulates the creative work and improves the final product of the troupe. This is reflected in the overall project of the company at present. The Director’s Place in the Creative Process In the domain related to the process of creation of shows, the relations of power seem a little less hierarchical than in the domains analyzed so far. The role of the director appears mainly as an articulator of the work done with the actors, as perceived by one of the actresses: Michel has always uses the energy of the actors on stage based on what people and we actors bring with us. He creates the show. We have always felt very free and at the same time very creative. It is really a shared energy. I have always lived like this. (S. Lartaut)

In spite of the contradictions and ambivalences we have seen so far, issues of power and the system of collective decision-making are always a live topic in the reflection of the members of the troupe. An important aspect that seems necessary to mention is the question of authorship, in which the collective dimension of individual recognition prevails. Texts, plays and musical compositions are signed with the name of the company Jolie Môme, which brings us closer to the notion of the collective work of many actors, which we can relate to the concept of “world of art” Becker

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(2006) as the product of collective action. At the same time, these conceptions of art and the artist are the inheritance of the ideals of political and militant theater throughout history. Power Relations Between Men and Women In spite of concerns about power issues and the interest in maintaining an equal number of men and women in the team of actors, the division of labor tends to reproduce the classical patriarchal division of functions. It is the actresses who have reflected more deeply on the gender relations in the company. In their account of the company’s organizational logic, they are largely confined to tasks related to the internal life of the troupe (especially, secretarial, affective relations and material organization) leaving men to the domain of artistic and intellectual creation (especially, artistic direction, writing of plays and musical composition). At the same time, they recognize their difficulties in rethinking these traditional ways of doing things and engaging in the tasks that had hitherto been carried out by men. On the other hand, the actresses express their discontent toward the use of an image of women that, in the shows as well as in mediation, privileges an ideal of beauty and youth, thus reinforcing sexist stereotypes. Gender issues are equally present in the works produced. This is expressed, for example, in the distribution of male and female roles in shows. Often actresses play the role of male characters, a widespread practice in theater because in most of the pieces there are more roles intended for men. Inequality in gender relations is also present in the power of speech in moments of collective decision-making. For actresses, aspects such as lower voice volume of some may influence the attention given by the group to female members’ interventions at meetings. Consequently, some actors are more “audible” than others, which ends up harming the women. Aware of these gender inequalities, actresses have developed counter-­ strategies with a view to democratizing the power of speech and breaking with existing hierarchies of power. Thus, they have established mutual solidarity and support to balance the period of time assigned to each speaker, paying less attention to those who monopolize the floor and valuing the contributions of those who express themselves with greater difficulty.

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Conclusion The analysis of the means of collective functioning of a political theater from a micro-sociological point of view inspired by Becker and Foucault opens new perspectives for the understanding of the relationships between art and politics. Accordingly, the interest in the interactions and the concrete means of organization of artistic works allows for the understanding of other dimensions relating to the phenomenon than those usually observed from the theoretical frameworks of the aesthetics and philosophy of art. In this chapter, we have sought to describe and understand the collective modes of operation of a militant theater company based on the meanings that the artists themselves give to their experiences. We have approached the relationship between art and politics by moving away from an aesthetic approach to focus on the analysis of the collective careers, forms of cooperation between artists and activists, and the organization of artistic work. Analysis of the collective modes of operation of the company Jolie Môme has allowed us to address several aspects to deepen our understanding of the logic that underlies its organization. In terms of professional fairness we find that the company operates through a principle of distributive justice in respect of wages and of time devoted to work—a principle inherited from members’ earlier experiences of political theater. The different degrees of involvement of its members in the tasks of the company, be these direct such as acting and direction, or indirect such as technical support activities, constitute a difficult aspect to objectify and measure, which cause tensions within the group because all receive the same salary. Conflicts in this area are related to the personality of each member, the multiple competencies required by theatrical work and the articulation between individual and collective needs, whether political or artistic. Regarding its support networks, detailed observation of the artistic activity of Jolie Môme allows us to account for the processes necessary for the production of its performances, as well as the roles played by the networks of supporters. These support networks can be composed of people and organizations of diverse character: for example, municipalities, civil associations, political parties, trade unions or alternative media. In some communities, especially those with strong labor or civic traditions, the company has an important network of political activists and artists who participate in the promotion of the shows to the local public. These

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networks also provide support through pre- and post-show production tasks, such as putting up posters, distributing invitations to participate in local media or helping erect and remove the stage and circus tent used during tours. As far as material life is concerned, the analysis of the company’s financial basis shows that it is a project that has largely been built outside the institutional system. The peripheral position of Jolie Môme with respect to institutional art worlds gives an important level of independence that has been translated into a radicalization of its political positions. In this way, the company finds parallel financing channels, making actors in the militant world into fundamental agents for the presentation and production of the shows. Consequently, a relationship of reciprocal support is established that allows Jolie Môme to give continuity to a theatrical project that articulates a vocation both artistic and political. As for the division of labor, in Jolie Môme, there is a sexual division of functions that tends to reproduce a patriarchal cultural model. In general, men tend to be in charge of technical tasks and women perform activities related to the private space and domestic support. Men often take the floor in the public space and devote themselves prominently to tasks of artistic creation. These and other contradictions are matters of discussion among the members of the company and seem to influence its organizational logic over time. As we have seen, the actors and the director report some transformations in the way collective decisions are made and in the internal distribution of power. The militant or activist theater of Jolie Môme is thus a project in permanent construction, based on concerted action between artists, mediators, shows and audiences, all of whom participate in the “world of the work” understood as a permanent experience of collective creation. A final aspect that we are interested in highlighting in the conclusions of this article is related to the limits of an externalist-type analysis that has guided the essence of the findings discussed here. In this perspective, the forms of organization of artistic work, the division of roles and the forms of financing of theatrical production take priority, leaving in the background the internal dimensions of the works related to dramaturgies, theatricality and aesthetic options with which the theater denounces, activates and proposes new representations to its audiences. For future research, we believe it necessary to articulate both dimensions, approaching what Alain Pessin and Catherine Dutheil-Pessin recognized as the “world of work”. In this perspective, two paradigms converge: that of micro-sociology and

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interactionism proposed by H. S. Becker and the authors of the Chicago School, and the French tradition of the studies of the imaginary and the sociology of the work. Such a theoretical device would enrich the contributions of sociology to a deeper understanding of the political theater in the present.

References Abirached, R. (2005). Le théâtre et le prince. Tomo I. L’embellie 1982-1992, Tomo II. Un système fatigué 1993-2004. Actes Sud. Amey, C., Amiard-Chevrel, C., et al. (1977). Le théâtre d’agit-prop de 1917 à 1932. Tomo II. L’URSS - Ecrits théoriques – Pièces. La cité - L’Age d’homme. Becker, H. S. (2006). Les mondes de l’art. Flammarion. Cramesnil, J. (2005). La Cartoucherie: une aventure théâtrale. Les Éditions de l’Amandier. Dutheil-Pessin, C. (2004). La chanson réaliste. Sociologie d’un genre. L’Harmattan. Duvignaud, J. (1999). Sociologie du théâtre. PUF. Duvignaud, J. (1973). Spectacle et société. Denöel/Gouthier. Ebstein, J., & Ivernel, P. (1983). Le Théâtre d’intervention depuis 1968. L’Age d’homme. Esquenazi, J. P. (2007). Sociologie des œuvres: de la production à l’interprétation. Armand Collin. Esquenazi, J. P. (2003). Sociologie des publics. La Découverte. Facuse, M. (2013). Le monde de la Compagnie Jolie Môme. Pour une sociologie du théâtre militant. L’Harmattan. Facuse, M. (2008). Utopie sur scène: Le monde de l’oeuvre de la Compagnie Jolie Môme. Pratique artistique e imaginaire d’une compagnie de théâtre militante. PhD thesis, Université Pierre Mèndes-France. Foucault, M. (1994). Histoire de la sexualité. Gallimard. Guattari, F. (1989). Cartografías del deseo. Francisco Zegers. Heinich, N. (2004). La sociologie de l’art. La Découverte. Hughes, E. (1997). Le regard sociologique, essais choisis. Éditions de l’EHESS. Menger, P.  M. (2005). Les intermittents du spectacle: sociologie d’une exception. Éditions de EHESS. Neveux, O. (2003). Esthétiques et dramaturgies du théâtre militant. L’exemple du théâtre militant en France 1966-1979. Tesis doctoral en Estudios teatrales y artes del espectáculo, Université Paris X, Nanterre. Pagès, M. (1977). La vida afectiva de los grupos. Esbozo d una teoría de la relación humana. Fontanella.

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Péquignot, B. (2007). La question des œuvres en sociologie des arts et de la culture. L’Harmattan. Péquignot, B. (1993). Pour une sociologie esthétique. L’Harmattan. Pessin, A. (2004). Un sociologue en liberté. Lecture de H. S. Becker. Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Pessin, A. (1992). Le mythe du peuple. PUF.

CHAPTER 6

Habitus in Dance: The Social and Artistic Skills of a Rehearsal Dafne Muntanyola-Saura

Introduction: The Rehearsal as an Artistic and Social Practice What do dancers do when they rehearse a duet or a trio? How do choreographers legitimize their artistic decisions during the rehearsal? This chapter seeks to understand from a sociological point of view what it means to dance together. The general aim is to explain how a dance rehearsal functions as an artistic and social practice. The specific aim is to locate the artistic practices of a dance rehearsal in its context of production. Professional practices, and artistic practices in particular, hide behind the rationalizing discourse of decision-making in folk psychology. In his ethnography of television production, Saferstein (1992) talks about how

D. Muntanyola-Saura (*) Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_6

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professionals disguise or obscure the decisions of their daily practice.1 Feyerabend (1987) wrote about the myth of creativity, Bourdieu (1980, 1992) of the processes of social classification of taste and the principles of structuring the field of art, and Becker (1982) of the need to subvert the roots of artistic conventions in the art world. In sociology, there is an established theoretical framework on artistic production, especially in France (Moulin, 1967; Becker, 1982; Heinich, 2014) but also in the US (Zolberg, 1990), Australia (De la Fuente, 2007), and the UK (DeNora, 2014). However, recent publications on these practices (Zembylas, 2014) do not explain empirically how artists actually make decisions during their creative process. Using the case of dance, in this chapter, we go beyond the rationalizing discourse that gives the choreographer and the dancers of a company good reasons for their artistic decisions. We believe that, from the creative decisions made in a dance studio (as in a concert hall, a television or stage production, or a visual arts community), principles of social organization based on intersubjectivity and interaction emerge. This pragmatic perspective regards the Other, the partner or the other members of the duet, trio, or quartet, not as objects but as subjects. The specific objectives are the following: (1) to explain the social organization of a rehearsal in terms of intersubjective interaction based on its communicative contents; (2) to present the particular characteristics of dance as an interaction focused by the centrality of the gaze; and (3) to define musicality, listening, and physicality, which appear in the discourse of the members of the company, as social skills that are part of a shared habitus. In summary, our aim is to try to overcome the individualistic vision of creativity to explain the types of cognitive and social mechanisms that the members of an artistic team activate when they are in the work context of the dance studio. This requires a change in the level of analysis to observe microsociologically the creative decisions of members of a dance company during a rehearsal. This chapter is based on data from a longitudinal and ethnographic audiovisual study initiated in 2009 with the London dance company Wayne McGregor-Random Dance and the ICL laboratory of the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, of which I was a part as a Fulbright Scholar and later as a postdoctoral researcher. The method used is cognitive ethnography, which 1  On the critique of the rational choice model as a formalized fiction, see Muntanyola-­ Saura (2014).

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focuses on the mechanisms of production of knowledge and communication in everyday life and allows us to analyse expert knowledge in situation. This case study is important because it deals with a leading company in the creation of new movements, and because of the interest of the choreographer Wayne McGregor in including the results of the research in his choreographic tasks. From the conversational analysis of the instructions and interviews, we considered musicality, listening, and physicality as indicators of social and creative skills. The microsociological concepts of focused interaction and keying (Goffman, 1961, 1974), on the one hand, and intersubjectivity (Schütz, 1967, 1971), on the other, allow us to show that synchronization, communication, and interaction do not occur in a social vacuum. They are skills of a cognitive nature but are also part of a habitus shared by the members of the company. By insisting on the pragmatics of physicality, the choreographer changes the key of the instruction and complements the listening and musicality skills of the dancers. This is a way to explain the legitimacy of the choreographer as a strategic figure in the studio, while the dancers function as figures that incorporate his or her creative criteria.

Theoretical and Conceptual Perspective The prevailing paradigm in dance theory is based on the phenomenological tradition led by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1945). An example of the use of this paradigm can be seen in the book The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory by Helen Thomas (2003), in which everything revolves around the subjective experience of dancers and their sensory skills. Inertia (Gallese et  al., 2004), body awareness (Thomas, 2003), and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) all form part of the experience of dancers. However, in this chapter, we want to go beyond the phenomenological subjectivity that dominates theoretical work in the field of dance. Our thesis is that the phenomenology of the body and subjective awareness, that is, the experimental analysis of individual action and somatics, are not the only perspectives in the social sciences. On the contrary, there are other branches of philosophy and phenomenological social sciences, close to the work of Herbert Mead and Alfred Schütz, that go beyond the understanding of movement in dance through the body and individual sensations. Speech, gestures, direction of gaze, and body posture are creative tools for both the choreographer and the dancers. Therefore, we will

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use the following theoretical concepts to explain the activity of listening in the context of the dance rehearsal: affordance (Gibson, 1977; Dreyfus, 2010; DeNora, 2014: Noë, 2015), intersubjectivity (Schütz, 1971; D’Andrade, 1995), keying and focused interaction (Goffman, 1961, 1974), and finally habitus (Mauss, 1936; Bourdieu, 1980; Wacquant, 2015). The Communicative Dimension of the Artistic Decision Gibson’s (1977) concept of affordance has been adopted by various traditions in psychology to analyse perception as a form of action (and we would add that it is a form of social action). Affordance consists of material characteristics of the environment that offer the participants possibilities of action.2 Dreyfus (2010), following Merleau-Ponty, uses the concept of solicitation to refer to the possibilities of action provided by perceptual environments. Solicitations are gestalt (i.e. holistic and perceptual) attractions of objects and persons. There is therefore a reflective relationship between the choreographer’s gaze and the performance of the dancers: what deNora (2014: 72) calls “a mutually determining relationship”, out of which “the reality of aesthetic judgements can emerge”. This gaze is not only a phenomenon of perception but a social activity in itself. In his book on aesthetics and neuroscience, Noë (2015) rejects the possibility of reducing artistic experience to a psychological phenomenon such as perception or attention. Art as a social activity is beyond the causal explanations of other processes such as photosynthesis or the perception of colours. Dancers, together with the choreographer, seek an optimal grip on the world around them. The participants in the rehearsal form a field of possible actions by interacting with an environment that is constructed not only linguistically but also kinesthetically. Our analysis will make special reference to the behaviour of the gaze in the rehearsal and its role in the interaction process. The gaze not only refers to a type of individual action but also includes the physical and social environment. We agree with the proponents of conversational analysis when they state that communicative resources are ordered sequentially in time. The study of communicative action can be found in the pragmatic and interactive traditions of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and symbolic interaction (Goffman, 1974), in cognitive sociology (Cicourel, 2  See Menin and Schiavio (2012) for a recent discussion on the possibilities of musical action.

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1974), and in ethnography (Wacquant, 2015). As Bassetti (2014: 109) states in his ethnography of dance, “The body-in-action is also body-in-­ interaction”. More recently, “embodied cognition” and “distributed cognition” define the individual mind and knowledge as an accidental property of the interaction of brains in a social environment. The studies in distributed and embodied cognition allow us to state that the unit of analysis cannot be the individual but must include the interactive system that connects people and things in a physical and social environment (Hollan et al., 2000; Gibbs, 2006; Clark, 2008). This approach is not new in sociology and appears in Cooley, Mead, and Schütz. However, the added value of studies in cognitive science and social psychology is methodological. Studies on musicians (Clarke, 2004; Noya et  al., 2010), dancers (Kirsh et  al., 2009), and television crews (Muntanyola Saura, 2014) have been used to explain empirically how reasons and intentions are constructed in the interaction. In short, in our understanding of the dance rehearsal and the artistic decisions that the members of the company take jointly, we start from a communicative and multimodal activity that is socially located. Artistic Decision as Focused Interaction All face-to-face interaction requires the co-presence of the participants; that is, we need to make sure that the others are close enough for us to record the perceptual and conceptual characteristics of what they are doing. Giacomo Rizzolatti, the discoverer of mirror neurons, along with Vittorio Gallese, approached his research in fairly sociological terms. He asked himself, how do we recognize an action?3 And more specifically, how do we recognize the actions of others? The dancers answered this in their everyday life in the dance studio. Rizzolatti (a neurologist) stressed the need to explain the process of interaction and communication, which begins with seeing the Other. This process is based on shared motor representations, which are visualized in a specific region of the brain called the insula, and could constitute the neuronal base of our intersubjective actions. Therefore, intersubjectivity (D’Andrade, 1995) in situations of interaction precedes all motor action. In short, we are neurally programmed to be social. 3  A question asked to the attendees of EAP CogSci 2015, 4th European Conference on Cognitive Science (Turin, 2015).

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Alfred Schütz defines musical relations on the basis of this precommunicative social interaction. In his classic article “Making Music Together”, Schütz (1971) takes the intersubjective nature of musical practice as a precommunicative social interaction. Working in pairs is a step-by-step process and takes place in an internal (shared) time (Schütz, 1971: 172). The same expression, step by step, is taken up by one of the dancers in the interviews to explain the process of solving a choreographic problem: so I make a decision, so just I think it is going literally step by step” (A, female dancer, 32). Time is the basis of face-to-face interaction, so moving together becomes a mutual tuning-in relationship (Schütz, 1971: 161). Since each dancer has different and varied dimensions of internal and external time, dancing together requires a reciprocal sharing of the flow of experiences of the Other. The dancers live a shared present in an experience of Togetherness as a We. Indeed, for there to be a real interaction between subjects, there must be an expectation of reciprocity. If we do not have the slightest expectation that our dance partner will respond at one time or another, or at least that they will be aware of our presence and our actions, we cannot enter the social game (Schütz, 1967: 158). This intersubjective sense is crystallized in art through archetypes (Husserl, 1931). In dance, the audience follows the gaze of the dancers to project romantic relationships between them, always based on the classical figure of the duet. This projection occurs both in the great classical ballets and in the Wayne McGregor-Random Dance company, independently of the sex of the dancer. In this context, the gaze builds intimacy. The crossing of gaze, even without an explicit communicative intention, is for the public an indicator of social relation. However, only the audience sitting in the front rows actually sees the direction of the gaze, the angle of head tilt, the shoulder and body posture, and the cultural baggage of the audience does the rest. As Schütz (1971) states, this is an indicator “about what the Other is going to do”. The romantic attribution comes from the relative positions of the dancers and the role that each one has in the duo, which functions as a small-scale social institution (Muntanyola, 2009). The existence of the romantic duet archetype and the consequent communicative patterns are a good reason to consider group dance figures (duets, trios, or quartets) as examples of focused interactions (Goffman, 1961). These occur when the participants share the same point of attention. The rehearsal in dance is composed of a multitude of focused interactions. The dancers “extend one another a special communication license and sustain a special type of mutual activity” (Goffman, 1974: 83). Each

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working situation in duets, trios, or quartets, or partnering, is a focused interaction, as in the case we analyse in section “The Social Location of Choreographic Instructions”. Within the framework of interaction, Goffman (1974) introduces the term “keying”, which involves the intersubjective definition of the limits of action. He considers that the hermeneutic key to action is necessarily social. In our analysis, we will look at the conceptual content of the instructions as instances of keying in Goffmanian terms. The Habitus of a Dance Company To explain the conditions of production and legitimacy of the instructions of a rehearsal, it is necessary to locate the communicative dynamics of the gaze and the intersubjective verbal interaction within a broader framework. We cannot analyse episodes of rehearsal as isolated interactions between two, three, or four dancers. Practices of artistic interaction such as the duet form part of a socially regulated continuum. The communicative interaction that occurs when a dance phrase is created implies a re-­ conceptualization of the previous social interaction. In the dance studio, the intersubjective agreement among the members of the company is directed by the choreographer, who focuses the attention of the other participants on the aspects of his choice as an expert artist. All the members of the company share the pride of following the model of instruction that we call impregnation, characterized by the speed and intensity of work (Muntanyola, 2009). The keying depends on a participant (or group of participants) with authority. Legitimate authority in a given field begins with the ability to define the beginning and end of a relevant interaction, whether it be a scene from a film, a medical intervention, or a dance phrase (Muntanyola, 2011, 2014; Muntanyola Saura, 2014). In the artistic habitus of dance, the definition of the beginning and end of a moment of instruction is a social skill of the choreographer, which Wacquant (2015) defines as acquiring “capacities to act and the dexterity to do things competently”. Thus, the expert knowledge of the dancers as professionals is based on social skills that cannot be detached from their social locus. Insofar as it is social, choreographic keying is arbitrary and precarious. As is well explained by the referential framework of the sociology of art (Moulin, 1967; Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1992; Heinich, 2014), artistic decision-making depends on the social agreements of the context of

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production. In the case of neoclassical dance, this context is crossed by the social principles of distinction and social status (Muntanyola, 2011). We use the well-known sociological term habitus4 to refer to the set of social skills internalized by the members of the dance company, the way in which the choreographer and the dancers work with their bodies during the rehearsal. We are not the first to do so: Wainwright et al. (2006) define three types of habitus in the field of ballet. Taking Atkinson’s ethnography of an opera company as a model, these authors distinguish between the individual habitus (of the soloist Carlos Acosta), the institutional habitus (of London’s Royal Ballet), and the choreographic habitus (of the role choreographed by Acosta). However, this distinction between an individual habitus, a collective habitus, and a fictional habitus is a distortion of the original term. The proposal that we make of habitus in dance recovers the formulation of Mauss (1936), who speaks of the “prestigious imitation” as a process of individual and collective socialization that forms a corporeal habitus, a way of moving. Bourdieu (1980) incorporates individual dispositions as part of a biography articulated in terms of class and cultural capital. Whereas Wainwright et al. (2006) disaggregate the habitus into three levels, Bourdieu and Mauss construct a habitus that is individual and collective at the same time, an approach to which I return here to define a single habitus shared by the choreographer and the dancers. Other recent examples of a definition of habitus that reinforces this continuity are those of Delamont and Stephens (2008) on the habitus of learning in capoeira, and of Sánchez-García and Spencer (2013) on the corporeal habitus in martial arts. These studies bring together not only the individual and the collective but also the mental and the corporal, in the line of Mead and embodied and distributed knowledge. Sánchez-García and Spencer state that habitus is both a mental state and a corporeal way of being. In summary, we believe that the habitus of artistic environments, and by extension that of a dance company, as proposed in this chapter, is transmitted through action, as in the focused interaction and keying of choreographic instructions.

4  The concept of “habitus” was introduced by Mauss (1936) in his text on corporeal techniques, and Panofsky (1967) developed and applied it in his book on Gothic art and scholasticism. Bourdieu (1979), in his postface to Panofsky’s work, gives his first definition of habitus.

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Methodology We present a cognitive ethnography of the rehearsals of a professional neoclassical dance company within a project of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), directed by David Kirsh and in collaboration with Wayne McGregor-Random Dance (Kirsh et al., 2009). We followed a process of intensive observation by filming two months of rehearsals with five fixed cameras plus one hand-held camera. During this time, an interdisciplinary team of researchers took field notes and interviewed the members of the company. They were asked to describe their daily experience and to show us the movements and steps they had learned or created. A similar data collection process was carried out in the four subsequent stagings in London. Here we present data from the last two dance pieces: Atomos (2013–2014) and Tree of Codes (2014–2015). During our observations, more than one female dancer complained that “something went wrong because someone was not listening”. These female dancers not only framed their experience with the Other as an act of coordination between bodies but also as part of a communicative act. Our interviews followed this initial interpretation and we explored the term “listening” by taking it as an important skill in the field of dance. We asked about the dynamics of improvisation and dialogue, and about the attributes of someone who knew how to listen, and whether the interviewees considered themselves good interlocutors. We also performed an audiovisual analysis of rehearsal of a phrase of “making”, in which the company follows the steps created by the choreographer for some dancers who serve as reference to the others. This is one of the three methods of instruction used by the choreographer in the rehearsal (Kirsh et al., 2009). Detailed observation with cameras and the expert eyes of the ethnographers provide a gradual explanation of the qualitative differences between the participants, focusing on what is said and also what is done—in particular, the gestures, the direction of gaze, and the body posture (Collins, 2015). Triangulation through (1) the complementary use of visual perception, (2) the observation of digital video, and (3) the interviews allowed us to describe the communicative and interactive patterns of work at a micro level. Our ethnography includes interviews with the participants, the choreographer, his assistant, and the dancers. In total, 15 interviews were conducted in October 2013 and December 2014 in London. In the interviews, we dealt with the topic of listening as part of a large data corpus, which we

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analysed with the ATLAS.ti text analysis program. For the video, we used ELAN, a program developed by the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and designed to classify movements and facilitate the transcription of the content of interactions. We present an example of conversational analysis (Sacks et  al., 1978; Keevallik, 2010) to illustrate the communicative properties of dancing together. Conversational analysis gives us the most micro-framework for exploring the distributed nature of knowledge between the choreographer and the dancers.

The Social Location of Choreographic Instructions Instructions in dance may include vocalizations by the choreographer to communicate the form or “quality” of a movement (Muntanyola et al., 2009), a type of gestural action that we call “marking” (Muntanyola & Kirsh, 2010), comments and looks (Muntanyola, 2014), and occasional adjustments of a “grip”. This multiplicity of communicative sources calls for a multimodal analysis of the dance rehearsal such as the one we present here. In this chapter, we work with micro-episodes of communication and synchronization for the creation of a trio. Specifically, we analyse a moment of lack of synchronization and communicative conflict. We begin our analysis with the transcription of an episode of the rehearsal of the dance piece Atomos. This episode, which lasted 3 minutes and 20 seconds, consists of the correction of a jump that went wrong in a trio. It is a “making on”, one of the three methods of instruction used by the choreographer in the rehearsal, the others being “showing” and “tasking”. In a “making on”, the choreographer focuses on a dancer, a duo, a trio, or a quartet to shape the dynamics of the steps. Meanwhile, the rest of the members of the company trace the movements produced by this interaction, turning it into an episode that is highly generative of new movements. The correction begins with Wayne McGregor, the choreographer, who is present, sharing the physical space with the dancers in the same visual, auditory, and motion-producing field. While observing them with the attitude of a spectator, the choreographer produces sonifications, which are sounds that communicate qualities of the movements choreographed with the dancers. Sonification is a type of instructional modality. As shown in Fig. 6.1, Image 1, the choreographer freezes the action to see a particular step of a trio, when dancer A throws dancer D into the arms of dancer J. The reproachful look of dancer D towards dancer A (Fig. 6.1, Image 2) indicates that “something is wrong”. With the interruption by the

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choreographer of the flow of action, through the use of the verb form “let’s see”, the focus of creative attention narrows. This is a typical example of keying in the framework of a focused interaction. The action is slowed down and requires the revision and repetition of a particular step. The following sentence, “you are not quite catching it”, is a type of aesthetic judgment that demonstrates the authority of the choreographer. This particular step is more than a utilitarian movement: it is not only a physical action but also a legitimate artistic judgment. And the movements of the dancers are part of the rehearsal to the extent that the choreographer sees them. He evaluates and selects the movements that he likes, according to his aesthetic criteria. Wayne asks dancer A why she is angry, which is visible from her facial expression (Fig.  6.1, Image 2). The proposal of verbalization indicates that the body movements of the dancers are considered by the choreographer as a sign of inner experiences, emotions, and feelings in real time. Wayne marks with the left hand the throw in question (Fig. 6.1, Image 3), which, as we state in the theoretical framework, is another common and

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Time: 0’-30’’. Wayne: Weeing-ya-bum (sonification). Let’s see this one [step]. Yes, you are not quite catching it. Wayne to D: What did you feel about this one [step]? (Marks with his left hand). D: I feel we don´t go together at all with the communication of time. I don’t know where to go. Wayne: ¿With J? D: Already before. Wayne: Okay. Let’s fix this, then. Let’s see where we finish then.

Fig. 6.1  Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author

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cognitively effective modality in dance and other performing disciplines. Despite starting with the words “I feel”, the dancer does not formulate her response in terms of sensation but in terms of rhythm, shared time, and communication. Then, Wayne asks what member of the trio the problem occurs with. She avoids giving the name and instead verbalizes the position of the dancer in the order of the phrase. This way of structuring her response in communicative terms and the repeated complaints in the study that “they don’t listen to me” led us to ask about this possible social skill. To follow the Other “without thinking”, there must be an intersubjective process of internalization of the time of the Other, of seeing oneself in the Other to form a We (Schütz, 1971). In fact, the same dancer uses the plural as a subject of action in the dance phrase that we are analysing, although in fact she is referring to individual movements performed in coordination. Moving together is a question of “tuning in” (Schütz, 1971: 161). One of the dancers uses the expression “growing together”, which Schütz (1971) also used to refer to making music in groups. In dance formations of this type, the dancers discover a new world together (Mead, 1934: 210); new ideas can emerge and so emergent movements are really born from and can be products of distributed cognition. Dancers inhabit a state of common consciousness, which involves focusing on “doing”, on movement, not on one’s own body. As in Gallese et al. (2004), they see the Other as a subject rather than an object. To maintain the flow of movement, coordination, and creativity in dance, the participants experience a present by transcending their individuality (Schütz, 1967). Dancing with others is therefore an example of the power of the pure relation of the We (Schütz, 1971), in which the unit is much more than the parts. Listening is a social skill in movement and is the first component of the habitus of dance. It involves the reciprocal, intersubjective participation of dancers in the time and space of the Other. This “getting lost in the Other” can go so far as to dilute the dancer’s identity and sense of agency. In the following quote, a dancer complains of his inability to maintain control of the duet: I had problems in the past where I partnered certain people and it got to the point where they were taking too much control over the duet. I ended up just kind of being a statue and this is them and I was so worried about putting them (my dance partner) in the right place, because they weren’t really

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listening to me. they were just doing their thing. But then I just lost my identity in the duet. (J, male dancer, 24 years old)

This first fragment of analysis is also a clear example of musicality; a social skill of the dancers based on the focused interaction of the romantic topos. As Schütz (1971) proposes, time is the basis of face-to-face interaction, of which the trio is a clear example. In work in pairs or groups, dancers share different dimensions of outer and inner time, so a relationship is established through the reciprocal exchange of the flow of experiences of the Other. The choreographer closes this communicative phase by declaring another time limit (“Let’s see where we finish then”). Again, he applies a system of references that is outside the vocabulary of time and points to an aesthetic meaning (“Let’s fix this”). The verb “fix” is a technical term in dance that means to consolidate, to stabilize the steps of a phrase for all the members of the company. The use of specific terms and the insistence on the emotional motivations of the dancers constructs the vocabulary of the choreographic instructions. It is a manifestation of the keying carried out by the choreographer, of which we will speak next. In Fig. 6.2, dancer D and dancer A, who throws her, return to the correct starting position. But instead of starting to move, D talks and reflects on the specific steps that lead to the throw. This is another example of keying, this time from the point of view of dancer D, who reduces the tempo of her interaction and focuses her attention on the smaller units of the action, the tempo of the steps (Fig.  6.2, Image 4). This operation makes the choreographer impatient and he responds to his indecision by asking her to reformulate what she is saying with greater numerical precision (“How many [steps] do you have?”). This leads again to a verbalization by the dancer in terms of time (“we are late”) and (in)communication. The choreographer dismisses this answer as insufficient, since it does not address the dynamics of the movements. He does not want the dancers to focus on the when of the action but mainly on the how. Instead of seeking reasons for the error in musicality, the choreographer studies the form of the steps, that is, the physicality of the movement. After his request (“We should get the how right”), the dancers repeat the phrase and mark the steps while the choreographer sonifies, highlighting the dynamic qualities of the movement. If the dancer performs a keying based on musicality as a creative skill, the choreographer responds with another key based on physicality.

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4

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Time: 30’’ - 1’30’’ D: OK. I think there are two of them (steps). One, two... (D marking the steps with her arms). (Image 4). W: Yes, basically... D: And then we go... I have the feeling that if we would go round, the next one [step] is the pause, then [we would have] one [step] to change and then…anyway. W: Say it again. So how many [steps] have you got? D: One, two..., and then we... I was actually late for him, so we did two [steps], so the communication is not right at all. W: Yes. That’s a when thing. That’s the when with the music. I also think the how is not right, so even if the when is wrong, we should get the how right and then we will go back. D: So the first one [step], the second one is... (A and D mark it. J is watching.) W: Whoow Weey (sonification). W: Now from here, from here this is a moment where we have to register that you see J... (Image 5). and we all get started like that. So whatever is happening musically, we understand now that this is gonna happen, because sometimes your head goes down like that (Image 6) and you, dig and get too close, actually. This is what happens. So let’s just see how it is so we can really register that J is there and will be there.

Fig. 6.2  Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author

The choreographer once more exercises his artistic authority by stopping the action and gives more specific instructions to dancer A, who has to perform the throw. That is, there is a change of interlocutor, since until that moment the dialogue was between dancer D and the choreographer. The choreographer again formulates a correction in aesthetic terms (“This is a moment where we have to register that you see J” (Fig. 6.2, Image 5), distancing himself from the vocabulary of the musicality of the dancers. In suggesting this course of action, the choreographer is establishing a connection between A and J that is part of the romantic topos, an

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intersubjective key that frames the focused interaction of the duet and is ubiquitous in dance pieces. From the modality of the gaze, the audience attributes meaning to the danced representation. When changing the direction of gaze and body posture, dancer A will indicate to the audience and the other dancers that there is a reciprocal relationship with the other dancer, J, who has to receive dancer D. The choreographer uses here phenomenological terms when considering the gaze as a precommunicative tool that helps us become aware of the presence of the Other. The public and the dancers project their expectations to build something that is about to happen: a throw. By following the eyes of the dancers, as an audience, we can identify an archetype: the romantic duo. In addition, A’s gaze towards J guides the coordination of the action in the trio. As the choreographer also states, dancer A must correct his posture and his relative position in space (Fig. 6.2, Image 6). In this type of focused interaction, the participants are both witnesses and participants in the context of the Other (Schütz, 1967). Or, as stated by the choreographer, in this relationship of fiction, we need to know that dancer J “is there and will be there” (the choreographer in Fig. 6.3). In the context of the romantic duo, the gaze as a form of action creates a relationship of intimacy, a social relationship that is formed between those whose glances cross. As Schütz says (1971: 176), “Even if performed without communicative intent, these activities are interpreted by him as indications of what the Other is going to do and therefore as suggestions or even commands for his own behavior”. The dancers share the same community of practices, a here and now, as part of the interpretative keys to the situation of the rehearsal that build the company’s habitus. In Fig.  6.3, the trio repeat the steps with the complete movements, unmarked. The result is evaluated favourably by the choreographer, who nevertheless introduces another correction. He tells dancer A to let go of dancer D earlier to increase the inertia. In addition, he again uses terms related to the tradition of classical ballet and the romantic archetype (“in the air”), with acrobatic connotations, and also introduces ways of giving instructions imported from social relations in the real world (“you should let her go a little”), which makes the other dancers laugh. At this point MJ, another dancer, intervenes and proposes an alternative course of action: if the throw were pyramidal it would be easier for J to catch the dancer (Fig. 6.3, Image 9). W states that the shape proposed by MJ does not interest him and recalls the direction of the throw, which

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7

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Time: 1’ 30’’-2’ 30 A, D and J dance the steps. (Image 7). W: I think that’s good. I just think you manage her too much. I think she could be IN the air. I think if you take her, I think when you go beyond your reach, it actually inhibits her. I think you should let go of her a little (W marks with his hands the hold of A, Image 8). A: OK. Good. (Laughs from the dancers). MJ: Could we have... (to W). Sorry (says MJ to dancers A and D for the interruption). W: It’s OK. They didn’t go yet. MJ: Because it looks as if it’s that way it goes up, it is so easy to catch her (gesture of MJ. Image 9). W: Yes. but I was just about to say to you I don’t want that (W gesticulated). I don´t want how you caught her into the arms in that way. What I want is not this, but Swiif (sonification and gesture in the Image 10). MJ: OK. W: So I do actually appreciate you getting more height. but I think what I want is more height and more long [a movement]. MJ: OK, cool. W: So maybe it’s a good combination of those [two] things. So maybe a little more height might help. (J, A and D do it full out again).

Fig. 6.3  Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author

is parallel to the ground. Even so, he incorporates a dynamic dimension of what MJ suggests: increasing the height of the throw as a way to simplify the step. This is an example of distributed cognition, in which a peripheral third party (Lave & Wenger, 1991), in this case another dancer from the company outside the centre of the action, introduces relevant information that the actor with greatest artistic authority (the choreographer) transforms and adapts expertly to the concrete scenario of the action. We see how during the interaction a series of sequential phrases is formed. The shared goal, performing a dance step correctly as the

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Time: 2’ 30’’- 3’ 45’’ W: Yes. Now it tilts that way. (O takes the place of A and marks the step of A, Image 11). You push her like this. (W takes the place of A, Image 12). I am a little upset about it because you can do this so it looks really good. (The trio does it full out. Image 13). W: That’s it. That was so much better. You know why it was better? Because you figured to do it. You went HA, you didn’t go PUFF (sonification and gesture). You went more elastic, ELASTIC (gesture) like with the breath. And she had more like a HAA (sonification). That [repetition] was good. Let’s do it again. That’s good. It will look sharp. (The trio repeat the steps again). W: Weey (sonification while watching). There we go! This was a little low, but much better. D: Yes! W: Yes, there is a much better feeling, isn’t there? A: Yes. W: Thank you guys.

Fig. 6.4  Instruction of a trio (London, 2012). Source: Author

choreographer envisages it, is achieved cumulatively. There is also an emotional escalation: the choreographer corrects the way in which dancer A throws dancer D into the air (Fig. 6.4, Image 12), but he gets annoyed because he feels they are not improving at the same rate as his instructions. Then, to convey what he really means, the choreographer takes the place of the dancer. This is a corporal modality used occasionally with difficult movements. As a communicative reinforcement, his assistant O also embodies the movement for the other dancers to see (Fig. 6.4, Image 11).

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The extra motivation that the choreographer gives to the dancers is to say that he thinks they are able to create a very good final product, so the aesthetic judgment of the choreographer is the standard of reference that sets the conditions for improvement. The sequence is repeated again and the dancers obtain the approval of the choreographer. Wayne verbalizes the change in movement again from the how, moving away from musicality, and he justifies it in terms of dynamics and breathing, with a vocabulary that belongs to contemporary dance and its body awareness. This keying is the third element of the company’s habitus, which consists in legitimizing the correction not through musicality, which as we saw above is also part of the dynamics of instruction, but through the pure physicality of the body in movement. As we see in the following quote, the choreographer and the dancers share the skill of being fast—it is the house style: I think it’s because there is something about speed and also about time. You do not have time to think […]. You have to do it right away. It is more naturally linked to my way of working. (F, Dancer, 25 years old)

All the dancers state that the choreographer is very fast in creating movements, specifically in the practice of instruction that we have analysed here, the “making on”. This component of habitus coheres the creative process. Dancers memorize and learn quickly, although the movements are not standardized as in classical ballet. They feel that they have to make corrections on the fly, but see it as a positive feature of the rehearsal; they take it as an indicator of their social ability to work fast and well.

Conclusion The dance studio is one of the building sites of the company’s artistic habitus. This chapter was written using data from a longitudinal cognitive ethnography and audiovisual support from the London dance company Wayne MacGregor-Random Dance. The conversational analysis of the instructions and the interviews allowed us to find empirical indicators of three key concepts for understanding artistic production processes: intersubjectivity (Schütz, 1971), focused interaction, and keying (Goffman,

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1961, 1974). It was thus considered that physicality, listening, and musicality are social skills shared by the dancers and the choreographer. First, the choreographer formulates his corrections based on the form of the steps, that is, from the physicality of the movement. He is the strategic figure in the studio, while the dancers function as figures that incorporate the company’s habitus. Through the keying, the choreographer configures his communicative and interactive participation, and points out the mistakes and imperfections of the dancers, as well as guiding the construction of choreographic phrases to achieve the correct execution of the dance steps. All the members of the company share the pride of following the model of instruction that we call impregnation, characterized by the speed and intensity of the work. The second component of habitus in dance is listening, which is a social skill based on movement, motor intentionality, and shared action. The means to achieve this precondition for communication is the reciprocal participation of the dancers in the time and space of the Other. Therefore, listening becomes an empirically relevant indicator of the intersubjectivity of any creative process. The pleasure the dancers obtain from moving together comes precisely from inhabiting the time of the Other and sharing a wealth of perceptual information that contributes to the sense of reciprocal agency. Like Mead (1934), Clark (2008), and Hollan et  al. (2000), we understand that listening is a social skill of the present moment. The third component of the company’s habitus is musicality: a social skill of the dancers based on the focused interaction of the romantic topos. The interaction in duets or trios is accompanied by the re-­conceptualization of the immediately previous social interaction. The members of the company must share a common narrative to complete the action of the Other. This specific sequence of interactions leads to moments of distributed cognition, as in the intervention of dancer MJ during the interaction between the choreographer and the trio. Musicality is a corporal ability but also an activity that is distributed among the participants of the dance rehearsal. The results of our analysis reaffirm the need to speak of a single habitus, contradicting the tripartite proposal of Wainwright et  al. (2006) and recovering the original proposal of Mauss, Panofsky, and Bourdieu. Dancing together is the intersubjective product of a concrete, face-to-face interaction in an environment defined by the company’s habitus. The three social skills analysed legitimize the choreographic decisions of the members of the dance company. Choreographic keying is social and therefore arbitrary and precarious, but it is taken for granted and structures the

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daily rehearsals. The normative dimension of the creative activity—what is good and what is bad—cannot be disconnected from the conditions of production of this interactive and situated process. The choreographic authority to start and finish a sentence in the studio is part of this creative process. Indeed, the decisions of dancers and other professionals are based on social skills that cannot be detached from their social roots.

References Bassetti, C. (2014). The Knowing Body in Action in Performing Arts: Embodiment, Experiential Transformation and Intersubjectivity. In T.  Zembylas (Ed.), Artistic Practices. Social Interactions and Cultural Dynamics. Routledge. Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1979). La distinction. Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le Sens pratique. Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1992). Les règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Seuil. Cicourel, A. (1974). Cognitive Sociology. The Free Press. Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind. Oxford University Press. Clarke, E. (2004). Empirical Methods in the Study of Performance. In E. Clarke (Ed.), Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects. Oxford University Press. Collins, R. (2015). Visual Micro-Sociology and the Sociology of Flesh and Blood: Comment on Wacquant. Qualitative Sociology, 38, 13–17. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper/Collins. D’Andrade, R. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press. Delafuente, E. (2007). The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts. Cultural Sociology, 1(3), 409–425. Delamont, S., & Stephens, N. (2008). Up on the Roof: The Embodied Habitus of Diasporic Capoeira. Cultural Sociology, 1(2), 57–74. DeNora, T. (2014). Making Sense of Reality. Sage. Dreyfus, H. (2010, April 6). Lecture notes. UC Berkeley. Feyerabend, P. (1987). Creativity: A Dangerous Myth. Critical Inquiry, 4(13), 700–711. Gallese, V., Keysers, C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2004). A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8, 396–403. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall. Gibbs, R. (2006). Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press. Gibson, J.  J. (1977). The Theory of Affordances. In R.  Shaw & J.  Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Bobbs-Merrill. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harvard University Press. Heinich, N. (2014). Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain. Structures d’une révolution artistique. Gallimard. Hollan, J., Hutchins, E., & Kirsh, D. (2000). Distributed Cognition: Towards a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2(7), 174–196. Husserl, E. (1931). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Routledge Classics. Keevallik, L. (2010). Bodily Quoting in Dance Correction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 4(43), 401–426. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Cambridge University Press. Mauss, M. (1936). Les techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie, XXXII(3–4), 337–343. Mead, G.  H. (1934). Mind Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Vol. 1). University of Chicago. Menin, D., & Schiavio, A. (2012). Rethinking Musical Affordances. Avant, 2(3), 202–215. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge & Kegan. Moulin, R. (1967). Le marché de la peinture en France. Éditions de Minuit. Muntanyola Saura, D. (2009). Choreographing Duets: Gender Differences in Dance Rehearsals. E-pisteme, 2(3). http://research.ncl.ac.uk/e-­pisteme/ Muntanyola, D. (2011). Los músicos y el coreógrafo: opiniones cruzadas en danza. Scherzo, 268, 102–105. Muntanyola-Saura, D. (2014). A Cognitive Account of Expertise: Why Rational Choice Theory is (Often) a Fiction. Theory & Psychology, 24, 19–39. Muntanyola Saura, D. (2014). Palabra de Artista: los recursos discursivos de la autoridad artística. Aposta. Revista de ciencias sociales, 62, 1–24. http://www. apostadigital.com Muntanyola Saura, D. (2014). How Multimodality Shapes Creative Choice in Dance. Revista Internacional de Sociología, 3(72), 563–582. Muntanyola-Saura, D., & Kirsh, D. (2010). Marking as Physical Thinking: A Cognitive Ethnography of Dance. In Proceedings of the IWCogSc-10 ILCLI International Workshop on Cognitive Science (pp. 339–355). Muntanyola, K. D. D., Lew, A., Jao, J., & Sugihara, M. (2009). Choreographic Methods for Creating Novel, High Quality Dance. In Proceedings, DESFORM 5th International Workshop on Design & Semantics & Form (pp. 188–195). Noya, J., Pérez, M., & del Val, F. (Eds.). (2010). MUSYCA. Música, sociedad y creación artística. Biblioteca Nueva. Noë, A. (2015). Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Panofsky, E. (1967). Architecture gothique et pensée scholastique. Minuit. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1978). A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. Academic Press. Saferstein, B. (1992). Collective Cognition and Collaborative Work: The Effects of Cognitive and Communicative Processes on the Organization of Television Production. Discourse & Society, 3(1), 61–86. Sánchez-García, R., & Spencer, D. (2013). Fighting Scholars. Anthem Press. Schütz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press. Schütz, A. (1971). Making Music Together  – A Study in Social Relationship. Martinus Nijhoff. Thomas, H. (2003). The Body, Dance & Cultural Theory. Palgrave Macmillan. Wacquant, L. (2015). For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood. Qualitative Sociology, 38, 1–11. Wainwright, S., Williams, C., & Turner, B. (2006). Varieties of Habitus and the Embodiment of Ballet. Qualitative Research, 4(6), 381–397. Zembylas, T. (Ed.) (2014). Artistic Practices. Routledge. Zolberg, V. (1990). Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Representations of the Uncertain: Art, Astronomy, and Dark Matter Paola Castaño

Introduction: The Uncertain Object An astrophysicist, a historian, and an artist walk into a bar to talk about an uncertain object. The bar is located in Kreuzberg (Berlin). The year is 2011. The astrophysicist is Jaime Forero, Colombian, at the time a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam in the field of computational simulations of the formation and evolution of galaxies. The historian is Lucía Ayala, Spanish, back then a PhD student in art history at the Humboldt University in the field of astronomic representations of the structure of the universe between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The artist is Yunchul Kim, Korean, established in Berlin in an artistic residency, musician, and author of experiments in the creation of “metamaterials” and award-winning installations with fluids. And the uncertain object is dark matter. These are the origins of the interdisciplinary collaboration Fluid Skies and the work Carved Air whose goal is, according to its authors, to study the material fluidity of the universe.

P. Castaño (*) Egenis Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_7

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Through the analysis of this collaboration, this chapter examines the encounter between artistic practices and scientific questions around an unsolved problem: dark matter. The collaboration Fluid Skies is, above all, a research group; and the work Carved Air is not only a group of pieces that were exhibited at the Ernst Schering Foundation Gallery in Berlin in late 2012, but it is also the process of exploration and exchange between the three members of the team. This process also resulted in a series of talks, a concert, the publication of a book, a symposium, and, according to the authors, in the lasting effects of the collective exercise in their respective professional careers. Along these lines, the chapter makes a case for art as a particular mode of knowledge production. Encounters between art and astronomy have been mainly documented in the realms of the observational and artistic visualization. The history of astronomy is inextricably linked with that of the visual representation of celestial objects from the beginnings of the study of the universe (Reeves, 1997; Hentschel, 2000; Edgerton, 2009; Nasim, 2014; Benson, 2014), to the emblematic images of the Hubble Space Telescope and the improved resolution promised by its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (DeVorkin, 2008; McCray & Smith, 2009; Zimmerman, 2010). In fact, one of the main appeals of astronomy as a field of knowledge for the general public lies in this visualization potentials.1 However, unlike those encounters, in the case of Fluid Skies, the dialogue between art and astronomy revolves around precisely that which the latter cannot see: dark matter. In other words, Fluid Skies is not an exercise in visualization or representation of scientific topics in an artistic product, but it is the configuration of an experimental space to reflect on a problem that leads various disciplines to serious uncertainties. According to the Standard Cosmological Model, dark matter corresponds to the vast majority of the existing matter in the universe and is, by definition, invisible by virtue of not emitting electromagnetic radiation. The existence of dark matter was deducted through the gravitational effects it causes in visible matter, particularly in the behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters. In a strict sense, dark matter is only matter hypothetically given that its

1  Precisely, acknowledging this feature, several current initiatives aim to bring astronomy closer to people with visual impairment. NASA, the International Astronomical Union, and organizations like Astronomers without Borders and Universe Awareness have developed instruments and publications aimed at this purpose. See, for example, Grice et al. (2010).

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ontological status has been inferred by astronomy and particle physics, but has not been confirmed directly. This chapter offers an approach to art from a sociology of science perspective. Something crucial that studies of science in the social sciences have accomplished during the last decades is the translation of the traditional concerns of epistemology into topics for empirical research. The nature of reality, the problem of objectivity, the symbolization and representation of objects, and the universality of science are no longer unsolvable philosophical puzzles, but can be treated as empirical research problems following scientists in their past and present practices (Latour, 1987, 1999; Pickering, 1992; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Daston and Galison, 2007). In addition, in its approach to scientific practices, these studies have accomplished an understanding of science not as spelled in capital letters, in singular, and as a finished product, but in lowercase letters, plural, and as a process. Along those lines, in this chapter I do not examine art in capital letters, singular, nor as a finished work, but, above all, as process. On the basis of these premises, the next pages follow the protagonists of Fluid Skies as they approached questions about the materiality of the universe during the creation and presentation of their work. Starting in Kreuzberg (Berlin), this chapter follows  the protagonists to the Astrophysics Institute in Potsdam, Yunchul Kim’s workshop/laboratory in Berlin, the gallery of the Ernst Schering Foundation in that city, and the Einstein room at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The chapter concludes describing the subsequent trajectory of the collaborators in a communitarian hall and a classroom in downtown Bogota (Colombia), the headquarters of a political movement in Almeria (Spain), and an artistic residence at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, in Geneva (Switzerland). This chapter does not address the question about the moment of public reception of the work (Silberman et  al., 1968), but focuses on reconstructing its creation and presentation on the basis of documents produced by the collaboration and analyzing the voices of its authors—in the case of Forero the astrophysicist, and Ayala the historian, through my encounters and interviews with them, and in the case of Kim the artist, through other interviews and references to his work.

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The Artwork as a Dialogue Drinking a beer in Kreuzberg, we said yes to plunging into doing something together. We agreed on the fact that the three of us wanted to start the adventure of creating a common space. We did not know very well what was going to come out of that. We knew that it was going to be a creative and productive space in which we would combine our experiences as professionals in different fields without hierarchies. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

The starting point of the collaboration Fluid Skies was that encounter in Berlin, anecdotally traced back to the bar, where three people with different professional backgrounds, countries of origin, and methods of work formed an agreement. In the midst of that heterogeneity, in the book that bears the same title as the artwork, the three authors highlight the two elements that brought them together. The first was “a critical approach to our respective disciplines, a desire to go beyond their concrete and daily practices, and a need to take them to a deeper level of meaning” (Kim et al., 2012: 17). This “deeper level of meaning” was, for them, the very understanding and experience of the physical world on different scales. In fact, that is the second element that brought the three together and that Ayala, thanks to the vocabulary and concepts of her field, helped to put in terms of “the fluid materiality of the universe.” In their words: This involves considering the meaning of matter in diverse theoretical and practical contexts and also paying attention to the ways human beings deal with it—through creativity, science, tin the past and in the present. (Kim et al., 2012: 17)

This dialogue is not simply a backdrop, but it is a protagonist in the type of encounter that took place between the collaborators. As the astrophysicist explains it: Berlin is a place where there is a great flux of art. Not only in the institutional sense, but you also find artists trying to do things. There is a whole machinery of people who write about art, people who study art; and I landed there, and all of this started to draw my attention. It was somehow inevitable. Everybody was involved in that world. (Interview with Forero, 2015)

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The Institute for Space Experiments directed by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson exemplifies Berlin’s institutional infrastructure and the various sources of support to develop these encounters. This Institute, that aims to produce experiments of “uncertain certainty” (Institut für Raumexperimente, 2015) and neighbors Eliasson’s own institute, was affiliated with the University of the Arts in Berlin and received support from the Department of Education of the German Senate, educational programs from the local administration, and scholarships from the Einstein Foundation. In that context, Forero started participating in conversations, met artists, and even gave a talk about simulations of the large-scale structure of the universe. As for Fluid Skies, the axis of the link between Forero the astrophysicist and Kim the artist was Ayala the historian. While getting her PhD in art history, Ayala met Forero and Kim separately. Given the topic of her research, she was active in academic circles related to astronomy, attending talks and conferences, and also, given her personal interests, she participated in artistic circles in Berlin. In addition, the encounter took place during a particularly reflexive period in their careers. In Kim’s case, his move to Berlin entailed an expansion of his artistic field, going from musical composition (which he studied in South Korea) to experimenting with other arts. According to him, “the immateriality of the work as a musician made me feel futile” (interviewed by Heeyoung, 2015). His collaborators also witnessed the effects of this transition in their encounter: “Yunchul started his musical training in a very digital way and ended in a very material one” (interview with Ayala, 2015). In Forero’s words, after finishing his PhD in France and starting a new professional stage as a postdoctoral researcher, “one starts to think and to ask questions: What are the bases of my work? Why do I spend ten hours sitting here all day? And this is where explorations begin” (interview with Forero, 2015). For Ayala, her closeness to the artistic circles in Berlin also led her to reflections about the strict academic style of her field in which very few historians of art interact with actual living and working artists. However, at the same time, Fluid Skies became a space for her to reaffirm and resignify her professional identity: I am a researcher. That is how I define myself. I have done research the orthodox way, in the format of a doctoral thesis and as an academic at a university. But there were also other topics that I wanted to investigate and I saw that, to make the most of them, it was better to explore a non-­academic

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and non-orthodox path. But I consider Fluid Skies as a line of research, on the same level of importance of what I did for my doctoral thesis. The only difference is that I allow myself certain licenses and certain freedom when it comes to tackling the topics. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

The group spent several months in long days of dialogue and exchange of materials and ideas: Jaime would tell us things about astrophysics, dark matter, the structure of the universe. Yunchul would also explain to us the materials that he used, his artistic references, also issues related to ancient Korean culture, and music. I would share with them issues related to the history of astronomy and the history of images in astronomy. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

In this process, the historian played the key mediating role as a translator. As someone who participated in the communities of the two other members of the team, she became familiar with the artistic and astrophysical codes which, as she highlights, have very little room for dialogue between them. Regarding this issue, Forero states: I remember my first encounters with Yunchul when he would bring out texts on esotericism, philosophy, music, and I said: “what for?” Little by little, I began to soften up and the why started becoming clearer. But this was possible because Lucía was there and she recontextualized what Yunchul said in familiar words for me. She would tell me these things in terms of a history of ideas, and that is where everything started making all the sense in the world. And, of course, she had a historical perspective and would say: “Well, that is just how we think things are now.” She was a lot more realistic about knowledge. (Interview with Forero, 2015)

The historian manifested that during the early phase of exchanges she was particularly alert to the use of terms that could be taken for granted and was aware of moments in which the other two members of the team were not understanding each other: During one of the long days we spent at Yunchul’s talking and cooking, Jaime said something about velocity. And I knew that what Jaime meant when he talked about velocity was not what Yunchul and I understood. That concept took us an entire afternoon of discussion. The question that occupied us was how galaxies can or cannot have velocity if they are moving due

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to the expansion of the universe. For me it was important to detect these things and to know that the three of us were talking about the same things. I move a lot between these two worlds, and this was my role. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

In a 2014 interview, Kim described the process of exchange in this collaboration as an ongoing practice: Through the experience of being part of Fluid Skies I have learned a lot. I meet regularly with Lucía and Jaime and we discuss and share a lot of ideas about how we are working with matter, and what it implies. In art history, the concept of materiality is related to the artwork and it is different to the meaning that “matter” has in physics. This generates interesting discussions: for instance, I search for the truth of the matter that I am working with, there is a certain metaphysical aspect to it, while in physics they think about particles, the smallest elements they can find, and then build on that. This exchange of ideas between different people and different disciplines helps me understand my experiments. Furthermore, Fluid Skies is not only about producing artworks, but also about producing knowledge: we publish our own books, write papers, organize workshops and so on. It is a platform in which we share our ideas and extend our knowledge in different ways. (Interviewed by Waelder, 2014)

The step toward the formalization of the dialogue took place with their participation in a call issued by the Ernst Schering Foundation aimed at funding projects that enabled a dialogue between art and science. This call required having a deadline, setting goals, narrowing terms, writing down concepts, and establishing a group identity (that of Fluid Skies). The group won the grant, and Forero explains what they considered as the most solid aspects of their project: The strength of our proposal was that it was not about an artist illustrating the scientist, nor borrowing motifs from science with the scientist there to provide the explanation about the correct way of doing things, but that this was a genuine exploration of the three of us in the unknown space between history of art and science. This was our real card. To show that this was a very strong collaboration, deep in that conceptual sense of the word. And well, that each one of us had their trajectory. I already had my PhD, Yunchul had had awarded shows in Germany, Lucía was the student of a well-known German art historian that studied the natural sciences. And, lastly, we

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showed that we were going to produce something to exhibit at the Foundation’s gallery. (Interview with Forero, 2015)

A year passed between the allocation of the grant money by the Schering Foundation and the exhibit. During this year, the group continued with the meetings and added new sources of support. Kim and Ayala visited the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, not to take notes about the latest scientific certainties but to learn about the research in progress conducted by members of the Institute and to meet with researchers. The central theme during that phase of the exchange was dark matter.

The Artwork as a Window into Scientific Uncertainties: Dark Matter This was the most exciting thing. We were not doing a work about the phases of the Moon. You can find those, of course. Those are the cases in which a scientist and an artist get together to work on what is known. Here, we were heading to the core of knowledge production both in science and in art. We were in the deepest questions of our own disciplines, of what explains the universe and what is inexplicable. We were in the core of what contemporary astrophysics is about, a field that is full of epistemological lacunae and even endemic impossibilities. And it was precisely because we located our dialogue in that terrain our work became more fruitful. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

Jaime Forero describes his scientific work as that of a “normal scientist” reflexively  in the sense used by historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. That is, a scientist that works within an established paradigm and produces knowledge that can be identified as incremental because it operates within the framework of an established theory. That paradigm is known as the Standard Cosmological Model, also known as Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), which astronomer Edward Kolb describes in the following words: The standard model is a relativistic cosmology (based on Einstein’s theory of gravity) of a big-bang expansion from an initially hot and dense state. The remarkable feature of this model is that, in principle at least, it seems capable of explaining all cosmological observations: the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the evolution of and the present large-­ scale structure of the Universe, the abundances of the light elements, and

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the expansion history of the Universe. Much has been written about the successes of the standard model of cosmology, but celebrations of its successes should be tempered by the fact that it is based upon unknown physics. In particular, in the standard cosmological model 95% of the mass-energy density of the present Universe is dark; about 25% in the form of dark matter and about 70% in the form of dark energy. (Kolb, 2007: 1.590)

During their visits to the Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, the members of Fluid Skies focused on the problems stemming from that 95% of the universe, in particular, about the dark matter that forces a restatement of the fundamental nature of matter (bringing together the smallest scale of particles and the largest and most distant structures of the universe), and to a reconsideration of the (seldom questioned) universality of the laws of physics. The history of the discovery of dark matter offers an entry point to understand the nature of these problems. This discovery, more than a precise event, was a process in which the observations of some astronomers2 were progressively contextualized, explained, and acquired relevance in terms of the existing theoretical frameworks, mainly, about gravitation. These first observations reported an anomaly (that could only be so in terms of an expectation derived from those Newtonian laws): the regions external to the center of the galaxy rotated at the same velocity than the internal regions. The expectation was that the rotational velocity should diminish in the transition from the inner to the outer regions of the galaxy.3 This finding could be interpreted in two possible senses: (1) there was an enormous amount of invisible matter in the universe producing gravitational effects, which ended up being known under the name of “dark matter,” or (2) there was something wrong with the Newtonian laws of gravity. To date, the first option continues to be the most popular among physicists. This popularity is expressed in the theoretical success of the ΛCDM model, the most accepted one to understand the formation of

2  Most references to the discovery of dark matter refer to Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky and his observations of the Coma galaxy cluster during the thirties, and US astronomer Vera Rubin, forty years later, and her observational study of the rotational features of spiral galaxies, particularly Andromeda (Sanders, 2010). 3  From this logic, the gravity of visible matter is not strong enough to keep stars in orbit without expelling them from the galaxy. See Rubin (1996).

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structures in the universe,4 and in the increasing closeness between astronomy and particle physics in the effort to detect dark matter.5 According to this model, only 5% of the universe is made up of visible matter. The second option has a more limited academic credibility and involves a series of theoretical propositions, stating that the problem of dark matter will not be resolved by means of finding a new object, but by redefining the tools of the search.6 In one of its most succinct and blunt assertions about the problem, Vera Rubin stated that most astronomers “prefer to accept a universe filled with dark matter rather than to alter Newtonian gravitational theory” (1996: 125). For Kolb, there is a possibility that future cosmologists will see dark matter and dark energy as “cosmic epicycles7 of early twenty-first-­ century cosmology.” However, most astronomers see them as real phenomena. And, “if they are real, then there is an opportunity in the very near future to discover the nature of the basic mass-energy content of the Universe” (Kolb 2007: 1590). The conversations about these topics during the research conducted by Fluid Skies led Forero to reflections like the following: 4  According to the collaboration led by astrophysicists Volker Springel and Simon White, “together with the theory of cosmic inflation, this model [LCDM] makes a clear prediction for the initial conditions for structure formation and predicts that structures grow hierarchically through gravitational instability” (2005: 629). This collaboration produced the Millennium simulation, which linked the initial conditions of the universe and its current complex state through a computational exercise that compared observational data with theoretical models. 5  Following the premise that, by virtue of being matter, dark matter has to be or has to be made out of particles, the search in the field of particle physics has focused on this level. The main candidate particles are WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). To this date, the results of detection efforts, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) located on the International Space Station, have not been conclusive. 6  The most known proposal in this field is called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and, in general lines, it states that gravitational force operates differently in the furthest galaxies and proportionately becomes weaker with distance without the need for a “mysterious dark matter” element. For a characterization of the philosophical debate, see Jacquart (2021) and Martens et al. (2022). 7  Ptolemy used the concept of epicycle (a circle whose center rotates on the circumference of another circle) to preserve the geocentric model of the universe, characterized by uniform circular motion of the planets, while facing the observational evidence that put this model into question. Kolb associates the concept with an ad hoc argument that generates a substitution parameter for something that cannot be explained by a given model in order to keep its premises (Kolb, 1997; Sewell 1999).

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In science you do not know that things work because there is a historical and institutional shell above you that makes you credible. While in the case of art, those things are under constant renegotiation. When I understood this difference I felt very exposed about what I was really doing, and this led me to question what was sustaining my work and my credibility in institutional and discursive terms. I cannot imagine how someone can see this in the sciences if it is not in an encounter with art. (Interview with Forero, 2015)

For decades, social scientists have been stating that the universality of scientific knowledge is not its intrinsic property, but an achievement of the institutionalization of conceptual frameworks, the standardization of procedures, the generalization of results, and the sedimentation of ways of seeing the world in scientific communities. However, these statements, that an astrophysicist probably would not have read in the work of a sociologist, become an experience in the encounter enabled by the artistic project and while facing the uncertain object of dark matter. Along the same lines, the artist finds unanticipated convergences between his work and the experimentation of academics. The members of the group describe the surprise in Kim’s encounter with group at the Institute for Astrophysics focused on magnetohydrodynamics (the study of fluids and their properties in electrical conductivity) because the scientists’ experiments on fluid dynamics were the same that the artist was conducting in his workshop through a combination of self-taught practices of trial and error. During the process of creation of the artwork and during the later reflection in our interviews, the astrophysicist and the historian describe their trust in Kim’s work, not only in terms of its awards and its prestige as an established artist in Berlin, but also because of the scientific character of his creative process. As Forero puts it, “his workshop is a laboratory, just like the workshops of electronics and chemistry at the University, but brought together, a little big messier. There, he is also testing things. And he does it rigorously” (interview with Forero, 2015). To this point, and after learning more about Forero’s computational work on galaxy formation, Kim says: Nowadays, scientists don’t experiment so much, they create simulations and therefore are usually surprised when they visit my studio and find an experimental laboratory. They expect a more “artsy” environment but instead they find a chemistry lab. (Interviewed by Walder, 2014)

After the months of exchange at the Institute and Kim’s workshop, in February of 2012, the themes for the artwork were clear: fluids, magnetic fields, and the large-scale structure of the universe. The only thing missing

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were the pieces by the artist. While Ayala and Forero were making progress on their side of the project, Kim was conducting tests of the pieces he would craft for the exhibit in Berlin. During a preview in Holland with one of the six panels that would make the piece Effulge and just like in an experiment that does not work in the laboratory, one of the panels was not properly sealed, the piece broke and the material spilled. Forero remembers that, despite these problems, “Yunchul was able to run his tests and to be ready for the exhibit in Berlin in the fall” (interview with Forero, 2015).

The Artwork as Pieces for Exhibit A fluid, amorphous landscape emerges in the piece Effulge. Fluids that flow, air that blows, and machines working that trigger a turbulent movement. Simultaneously, a sound of submersion emerges in the exhibition room. (Kim et al. 2012)

Carved Air was exhibited at the Foundation Ernst Schering gallery in Berlin between September 7 and December 1, 2012. The main feature of the pieces, manufactured by Kim and named by him as “fluid-kinetic,” is movement, both physical and of sound.

Photo by Katja Hommel reproduced with permission from the author

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The main pieces are Effulge and Triaxal Pillars, and, as an ensemble, they are the vehicle for the main concept of the collaboration: the material fluidity of the universe. These are moving pieces made with assemblies of glass, aluminum, photonic crystals, coper particles, ferrofluids (liquids with magnetic elements), paramagnetic particles, magnets, cables, microcontrollers, computers, motors that rotate and emit sounds, and fluxes of air creating an irregular dynamic of shapes and sounds. Effulge consists of six flat panels on a wall that, autonomously and in a concatenated manner, form a changing structure of thin filaments, bright and dark areas. In Ayala’s words: “the formation of patterns and structures is at times interrupted by a sudden massive flow produced by an injection of air coming from several pumps.” At this point, she continues, “the structure vanishes and is replaced by exuberant flows and ebbs, vortices and a myriad of different patterns that reveal many phenomena taking place in fluid dynamics” (Kim et al. 2012: 25). Triaxal Pillars consists of three cylinders suspended from the ceiling. Inside each cylinder, there is another cylinder and motors that allow for the content to flow in dynamic manners within a particular color scheme. This piece simultaneously evokes three test tubes in a laboratory and the macro cosmos of “The Pillars of Creation,” an emblematic image of the gas clouds in the Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The two pieces are connected to a detector of high energy particles (known as cosmic rays) built by Kim himself. Inside the detector, next to the visible particles, there are invisible ones that he calls “agents” and trigger the movement. As an ensemble, the two pieces generate a dynamic process of constant metamorphosis in which the material changes its appearance from solid to liquid, from depressions to bulges, and vice versa, and where “matter becomes active, changing, fluctuating” (interview with Ayala, 2015). The dynamics and the sound of the artwork with the dense, bright, colorful, noisy, and irregularly moving fluids is produced from the smallest scale. The concept of “metamaterial” precisely points to the procedure of going beyond the natural properties of materials producing new ones— not as a result of combinations but of a redesign of their molecular structure. Kim’s pieces result from the creation of materials that are moldable and tunable8 as a result of these interventions. Therefore, photonic 8  The term “tunable” here refers both to the activity of molding an object and of tuning a musical instrument.

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crystals—periodical nanostructures designed to allow the passage of specific wave lengths (Joannopoulos et al., 2008)—“make it possible for these works to be mutable, while magnetohydrodynamics provides the tools for their constant and complex motion” (Kim et al., 2012: 25). The sound in the exhibit room resembles the natural flow of water, but also the typical noises of a laboratory, with beakers and test tubes in movement, boiling liquids, and machines. Just like the pieces themselves, these sounds avoid rhythmic patterns. With these unpatterned sounds, Kim aims for the representation of fluids as a sphere of potentiality, as “an imaginary and unstable matter,” something that exists just before it can be detected by a shape or captured by a word. In a broader reflection about his practice, the artist states: For me this polarity between control and chaos is important because it creates an interesting paradox, and it forces me to look for a solution. The work is therefore not driven by aesthetic or decorative reasons, but rather by the need to find a solution that allows me to handle this unstable equilibrium. I must find some physical solution, a mechanical device or a program that helps me control this instability. This usually translates into problems in the exhibition context, because sometimes the work is not stable enough. That leads me to think about different forms of building the pieces, different devices and systems. In providing new solutions to newly generated problems, the artwork keeps developing. So, every time I install my work it becomes a challenge. We were talking about scales: this is a recurring problem because I usually start working on a piece in my studio and there the scale is smaller. When I develop the initial idea into the final piece, usually I work at a bigger scale, and then nature is not always 1:1, so if I make something twice as big as the first model, then maybe I need to create a structure that is four times more stable. So in the end it becomes an engineering problem. (Interviewed by Waelder, 2014)

The idea of carving air points to the aesthetic manipulation of that which, in itself, is conceived as fundamentally elusive and fluid. In Kim’s workshop-laboratory, an experimental space to which Ayala and Forero rarely have access in their own research worlds, “investigating the cosmic properties of nanoparticles” (Kim et al., 2012: 113) becomes possible. In addition, by virtue of intervening in the objects, this experimentation closes a gap that epistemology renders unsurmountable: the gap between objects and their symbolizations.

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The Artwork as an Epistemic Proposition Fluid Skies is not about artistically visualizing scientific data, forcing discourses by liking scientific theories to artistic causes or vice versa. Our desire is rather to travel the interstices between us (as experts in different fields and as particular human beings) in order to perform joint research in the form of an ‘experiment in growing instabilities’, an idea that we understand in diverse senses: literal and metaphorical, historical and physical, personal and social. (Kim et al., 2012: 17–19)

Alongside the grant by the Schering Foundation, the project also had support from the Korean Arts Council, the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Korean Cultural Center in Berlin. When Forero moved to the University of California Berkeley, he added the support of the Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) from that university. Next to the exhibit, the Fluid Skies collective organized a series of events that were part of the artwork. The authors gave public talks, offered guided visits to the exhibit, and Yunchul Kim, alongside sound artists Jacob Kirkegaard and Jörg Lindenmaier, performed a concert with his “electroacustic” works. A central event was the symposium Fluid Cosmologies that took place on November 2, 2012, in the Einstein Hall at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities where: Experts from different scientific disciplines will reflect on the central aspects of the exhibit: dark matter simulations, experiments on fluid instabilities and interdisciplinary approaches at the interface of science, media and art. This joint reflection from sciences and humanities examines the significance and potential of the concept of the “fluid skies” in contemporary cosmology, astrophysics and media theory. (Schering Foundation, 2012)

After the presentation by Heike Catherina Mertens, director of the art and culture section of the Schering Foundation, the three main guests at the event, each one a highly recognized figure in their field, made their appearances. The first was Volker Springel, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Heidelberg University and the Institute of Theoretical Studies in Astrophysics. Springel is known for the previously mentioned Millennium simulation and for the creation of the computational language

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GADGET.9 The title of his presentation was “Seeing the Invisible: Supercomputer Simulations of the Dark Side of the Universe.” His presentation was followed by Rainer Arlt, professor at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, titled “Beyond Gravitation: The Subtle Magnetic Universe.” And, lastly, Professor Siegfried Zielinski, director and founder of Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, talked about “Programme and Imagination.” This symposium offered a space for encounters between communities that, again, seldom get together to discuss the foundations of their research and was also a moment of institutional and intellectual validation of the work done by the Fluid Skies collective. The event concluded with the release of the book Carved Air, which also includes institutional voices as a platform of support: an editorial by Sonja Kießling and Heike Martens, members of the directive council at the Ernst Schering Foundation, and a preface by Matthias Steinmetz, scientific director of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam. Next to a collective essay titled “Cosmologies,” each one of the three members of the collective contributed a text to the book. Lucía Ayala’s, titled “Celestial Matter,” offers a historical perspective about the notion of the fluid character of the celestial medium and its continuity in Western thought, starting in Ancient Greece and following milestones in the history of astronomy. The author holds that the idea of dark matter resembles previous ones like ether and the liquidity of the skies to the extent that it relies on theories of the celestial matter “and, at the same time, it remains mostly unexplored” (Kim et al., 2012: 65). The concept of fluid skies is part of a progressive (and not entirely accepted) vision of the world in which, little by little, the idea of Ptolemy’s fixed spheres was put into question. This idea that the materiality of the universe had to be fluid to explain observed astronomical phenomena: Was a big shock in the predominantly Christian thought for which the universe was immutable. The fixed spheres involved a perfect work, the finished and perfect work of God. While the fluid materiality revealed a mutable, changing and structurally flexible universe, one without a perfect geometry. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

The text “Fluid Instabilities” by Jaime Forero restates the premise of the whole project emphasizing that its goal is not to explain the 9

 The acronym stands for “Galaxies with Dark Matter and Gas Interact.”

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astrophysical concepts behind the exhibit. However, says the author, several aspects of the artwork could be traced to the discussions about galaxies and cosmology in which the group engaged, and questions like “what is dark matter exactly?” and “how do we know it exists?”. In his words: Discussing this was our point of entry into the scientific struggle of making visible the invisible, since the most paradoxical aspect of the dark matter hypothesis is the fact that astrophysicists make visible something that they do not yet recognize, which does not correspond to anything we have measured in an experiment (yet). (Kim et al., 2012: 77)

The astrophysicist shows how the concepts of dark energy and dark matter were introduced in the Standard Cosmological Model to explain observable facts that could not be explained by other means. The author describes the perplexities of his discipline and the way in which these two concepts have expanded what he calls the “astronomic phenomenology” and have generated new dialogues between astronomers and particle physicists. However, he also states that these concepts shake epistemological foundations rarely put into question: Is General Relativity the best description of gravity on a large physical scale? Is there an extension to General Relativity to describe the evolution of the structure formation of the Universe? Is there an extension of the standard model of particle physics that could account for the dark matter? The bottom line in all this can be summarized by the following question: Do we understand gravity? (Kim et al., 2012: 83)

Yunchul Kim’s text, titled “Imaginary Matter,” offers an overview on the concept of the fluid using philosopher Gaston Bachelard as a framework of reference. Kim reflects on the convergence between the artistic and the scientific practice in terms of the role of imagination and the manipulation of the material world. According to him, a fluid can be described as “a body that, without leaving any trace, is separated into numerous entities similar to itself, becoming thus a single flowing body again” (Kim et al. 2012: 103). The idea of the fluid, as characterized by fluctuating equilibriums and diffuse boundaries, is also taken to the realm of perception: if the fluid has an imperceptible state, the only way to come close to its understanding is through the fluidity of the senses themselves and direct experience. On the level of experience, fluids render the natural

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forces perceptible to the senses: “we can see time through flowing water and see gravity through falling water” (ibid: 103). For Kim, dark matter, to the extent that it is “missing matter,” can only be inferred indirectly via its effects on visible matter, thus making us think about the unthinkable and, in that sense, generating “a new metaphysics” that involves different simultaneous scales. According to the artist: Imaginary matter demands another kind of sensibility, different from the flow of dream-like or fanciful images often associated with the word “imagination”. For instance, to grasp the nature of the processes taking place in a fluid requires a certain kind of imagination to be able to operate on the level of particles and waves; moreover, one must also take into account its viscosity, gravitation, relationships with force, and even its microscopic and macroscopic dimensions (which result from the gap between observers and the world). (Kim et al., 2012: 109)

Regarding the relationship between art and science, despite the fact that each one looks at the world and learns about it differently, for Kim they converge in a common mental activity: imagination. In his perspective, imagination emerges in the gap that separates the world and the senses, substances and illusions, but keeping a foot on matter and, therefore, being able to materialize itself in objects. His work precisely aims at that materialization. In their descriptions of the collaboration, the authors converge in their statement about something that brought them together: a resistance against one of the most common features of encounters between art and science, namely, the subordinate role of art in the visualization of scientific data. In Forero’s words, that is, “the power relation that is imposed when there is a side that feels entitled to explain something, and another that has to sit down to take notes and listen” (interview with Forero, 2015). Similarly, Ayala situates Fluid Skies as a form of research that gives her greater freedom than the academic one. Even though her text offers a historical overview in which the accuracy of her sources is crucial, the most important aspect for he was the possibility to produce a story that facilitates what the artwork does: creating an experience for the senses. Therefore, the protagonists are not Forero’s scientific references, Ayala’s historiographic ones, nor the most technical aspects of Kim’s work. Addressing the cosmic ray detector among the sculptures:

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Yunchul did not want to make it too visible. He wanted to use it in a very subtle manner. He wanted it to be without being. Physically, it was very high on a wall, as a kind of shelf, and that is why many visitors might not have seen it. Also, the detector altered the algorithm of the motors, but in a non-­ linear way. The noise and the artifacts rendered the signals ever impure. (Interview with Ayala, 2015)

About the creative process, Kim is reluctant to reveal much in terms of the technical manufacture of his materials which involves a specialized knowledge about their physical reactions, but that remains subordinated to an artistic intentionality. For him, staying on this level is “as if the work of a painter would be limited to the manufactures of colors” (Kim et al., 2012: 113). In another interview, he adds: Once I had a solo show in which I tried to show my laboratory, so that the visitors might approach the process of my work. It was interesting to do it, but then I wonder if this is a good idea, because I don’t want to give clues to people, to have them focus on the making or the technology behind it. I’d like the visitors of an exhibition to simply experience my work, just as when you watch a film: you experience it, you don’t need to be constantly reminded of how it was made. (Interviewed by Waelder, 2014)

The process of dissolving, weighing, combining, and filtering materials is not only an experience with the objects for Kim, but it is also an experience with his own body which “forms a continuum with the reacting fluid.” He sees these subjective and intuitive experiments that bring together mind and body with materials as “perhaps a vestige of the past, when art and science were not divided” (Kim et al., 2012: 117). In sum, different from academic research aiming to stabilize and to make explicit its own procedures, as well as the techniques and references that sustain it, artistic research is comfortable stating that it is based on impressions, fragments of the phenomenon that, in themselves, have something imperceptible about them and that go beyond the limitations of language. For Ayala, “the most essential moments in the collaboration were those in which we faced those limitations of language because that is where you lose your certainties” (interview with Ayala, 2015). Forero’s words summarize the place of art in those moments in which the dimensions of the themes that they were tackling seemed to overwhelm them: “And, since none of us was a mystic, we just remained in the artistic” (interview with Forero, 2015).

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Conclusion Art is a terrain in which you can experiment with things. Art is about creating models. We use this word a lot in science, but it does not have the same depth than it has in art because in art it is about creating different worlds and seeing that those worlds work. (Interview with Forero, 2015)

“Fluid materiality of the universe,” “fluid-kinetic sculptures,” “experiments in growing instability,” “metamaterials,” and “carved air” are some of the terms that, at first sight, seem detached from the current scientific searches about what could possibly be the main component of matter in the universe. However, this look at Fluid Skies allows for an understanding of those terms (and the process by which they become an artwork) as part of the same uncertainties and the process of their elucidation. This examination of the artwork Carved Air can help us put into question how we, as sociologists, comfortably compartmentalize social practices like art and science, adjudicating features to different fields to later put them in relation to one another in our interpretive exercises. In the case of the collaboration Fluid Skies, art is not the playful escape of academics, but a type of research that faces them with the limitations and possibilities of their own forms of knowledge. The astrophysicist is not there to define the questions, provide the data, and share the certainties; the historian is not there to provide the context as background, nor the artist to embellish what they have learned. Experimental rigor is not the monopoly of science, nor intuitive imagination is that of art. It is precisely those uncertainties—shared, explained, and represented in the artwork (as a space for dialogue, research, text, artistic materialization, and epistemic proposition—that enable the encounter between art and science on equal grounds. My encounter with Fluid Skies took place initially thanks to Forero and in the framework of my own uncertainties when I participated in talks and seminars taking my first steps in a new field of study: science on the International Space Station and, in that context, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), an experiment that, among other goals, aims to detect dark matter on the ISS. I met this astrophysicist for the first time at the Bogota Planetarium and then I joined him into his classroom, to public presentations about Fluid Skies and to one of his activities of scientific communication as part of the project Peripheral Astronomies in a communitarian hall located in the Belén neighborhood in Bogota. This project,

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which for him is “a son of Fluid Skies,” aims to bring astronomy through art and everyday objects to underprivileged people. By the time of writing of this chapter, Forero is an associate professor at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá where, alongside his computational astronomy and physics courses, he offers courses about the cultural aspects of astronomy to which he invites artists, sociologists, philosophers, and historians looking “to open spaces for the students to learn while exploring” (interview with Forero, 2015). Lucía Ayala’s career moved outside academia. In 2013, she joined the political party Podemos in Spain, participating in the State Citizen Council in the area of scientific policy, and was a representative of her party and the Almería province in the Andalucía Parliament. In this context, Ayala defended the creation of institutional spaces that fund and enable dialogues between the natural and the social sciences and, among other themes, the valuation of activities different from publications in academic promotions. As for Kim, he continues to exhibit in Europe, directed the project “Liquid Things” at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the research group Mattereality at the Korean Institute of Advanced Studies. Recently, he was one of the eight “laboratory creators” at the Centre of Arts and Creative Technology ACT, located in Gwangju, South Korea (ACT Studio, 2015), and in June 2016 was the winner of the Collide International Award and an artistic residency at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Fluid Skies remains as a collective, and, possibly, in the future and with renewed starting points, the group will reunite to resume the research. This volume, in its effort to showcase a great variety of sociological questions about art, helps us to see it not so much as a specialized field, but as a social practice that constantly renegotiates its features and boundaries in different institutions, transforming the work of individuals from their professional trajectories and positions, combining discourses, justifying itself, and creating platforms for its circulation. Projects like Fluid Skies demand a perspective, as processual as the artwork itself, toward the possibilities that emerge when social practices dialogue from and about their uncertainties. Meaningful encounters between domains that rarely engage with each other can happen when all sides do not feel constrained by the rules of their standpoints, open up to their own fragilities, and from there craft a common space. More broadly, by looking at artwork not only as finished pieces in public view, but as a dialogue, a window into scientific uncertainties, and an

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epistem proposition, this chapter examined art as a mode of knowledge production. The particularity of this mode of knowledge production is that it embraces nuance and dwells on complexity instead of aiming to cut through it. Looking ahead, this conceptualization can direct the sociological gaze toward specific instances of experimentation and epistemological reflection in artwork, and also toward instances in which scientific puzzles find new paths in their encounters with art. The apparently unsolvable epistemological problems of the representation and explanation of nature are being solved every day—in ingenious and always provisional ways, and on different scales—in field sites, laboratories, observatories, art studios, conferences, space stations, and also in bars that enable encounters like the one between Forero, Ayala and Kim.

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Kolb, R. (2007). A Thousand Invisible Cords Binding Astronomy and High-­ Energy Physics. Reports on Progress in Physics, 70(7), 1583–1596. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press. Martens, N.  C. M., Carretero Sahuquillo, M. Á., Scholz, E., et  al. (2022). Integrating Dark Matter, Modified Gravity, and the Humanities. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 91, A1–A5. McCray, P., & Smith, R. (2009). Beyond the Hubble Space Telescope: Early Development of the Next Generation Space Telescope. In H.  Thronson, M.  Stiavely, & A.  Tielens (Eds.), Astrophysics in the Next Decade: The James Webb Space Telescope and Concurrent Facilities. Springer. Nasim, O. (2014). Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. (1992). Science as Practice and Culture. University of Chicago Press. Reeves, E. (1997). Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo. Princeton University Press. Rubin, V. (1996). Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters. Springer. Sanders, R. (2010). The Dark Matter Problem. A Historical Perspective. Cambridge University Press. Schering Foundation. (2012). Symposium Fluid Cosmologies. http://www.scheringstiftung.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2664%3Asy mposium-­fluid-­cosmologies-­i&catid=65%3Arueckschau&Itemid=151&lan g=en Sewell, K. (1999). The Cosmic Sphere. A Scientific Reformation. Nova Science. Silberman, A., Bourdieu, P., Brown, R.  L., Clausse, R., Karbusicky, V., Luthe, H. O., & Watson, B. (1968). Sociología del Arte. Nueva Visión. Springel, V., White, S., Jenkins, A., Frenk, C., Yoshida, N., Gao, L., Navarro, L., Thacker, D., Helly, J., Peacock, J., Cole, S., Thomas, P., Couchman, H., Evrard, A., Colberg, J., & Pearce, F. (2005). Simulations of the Formation, Evolution and Clustering of Galaxies and Quasars. Nature, 435(2), 629–636. Waelder, P. (2014). Interview Yunchul Kim. http://vida.fundaciontelefonica. com/en/2014/06/24/fluid-­matter-­an-­interview-­with-­yunchul-­kim/ Zimmerman, R. (2010). The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries who Built it. Princeton University Press.

PART III

The Artwork: Expanding the Analysis of Its Materiality and Meaning(s)

CHAPTER 8

With the Beatles: Generating the Recorded Rock Album Formula Cristián Martín Pérez-Colman

Each work in itself, by virtue of its differences (however small or insignificant) from all other works, thus teaches its audiences something new: a new symbol, a new form, a new mode of presentation. More important, the entire body of work by a single artist or group gradually, as innovations develop (perhaps through an artist’s entire career), teaches the new material to so many people that we can speak of the training of an audience (Becker, 2008: 66).

The Beatles, Rock Music and Its Material: The Vinyl Record Considered the most famous pop-rock record in history,1 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was—as London Times newspaper critic Kenneth Tynan wrote back then—‘a turning point in the history of Western civilization’ (quoted in Egan, 2009: 140). How is it possible that 1  Number one in most lists of ‘The 100 greatest albums of all time’ type (Appen & Dohering, 2006).

C. M. Pérez-Colman (*) Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_8

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a popular music record, specifically aimed at youth, received such a consideration from the cultural critic of a conservative medium like The Times? Fifty years later, such statement on the Beatles would seem a normal reflection, given the dual process that has canonized the entire Beatles record catalog and, as Becker put it, trained us all as their audience. But where did these records come from? Stylistically, the Beatles’ vinyl records were preceded by rock and roll records, which in turn were preceded by rhythm and blues records; these in turn were replacing the old blues shellac records. And finally, these discs replaced the wax cylinders with which Thomas Edison captured the sound for the first time in 1877.2 In less than a century, we went from recording the sound at the end of nineteenth century to Beatlemania 50  years ago, or, what is the same, from recording the existing music to building musical genres based on recorded sound. As the pentagram opened up the possibilities of a new type of musical creation—the composition—the recorded sound allowed another type of creation: the recorded disc. This chapter studies the development of a new generative formula in record production, which, in the case of the Beatles, emerged between their first LP, Please, Please Me (1963), and the seventh, Revolver (1966). This formula was applied to their later three LPs that can be considered as proper albums, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (aka ‘White Album’) (1968) and Abbey Road (1969). With proper albums we mean discographic projects per se, and not singles or soundtracks of films or audiovisual projects, as was the case with Yellow Submarine (1969) or Let It Be (1970), or even the Capitol Records releases in the American soil, like Magical Mystery Tour LP (1967). We can advance this generative formula first as the alteration of the relations of record production, especially among musicians, record producers and sound engineers. Secondly, this alteration had repercussions on the way of making records: on the one hand, establishing a new series of practices and conventions related to the material production of sound contents and, on the other hand, allowing the artistic valorization of discs, which were treated as ‘artworks’, that is, albums instead of mere LPs. 2  A few years after Edison invention, ‘the Columbia Phonograph Co.[...] found that the phonograph was [...] successful as a coin-operated “entertainment” machine, a novelty attraction (like the early cinema) at fairs and medicine shows and on the vaudeville circuit. And for this purpose “entertaining” cylinders were needed. Columbia took the lead in providing a choice of “Sentimental,” “Topical,” “Comic,” “Irish”, “Negro” songs’ (Frith, 1987: 52, emphasis added).

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In the first place I will present the concept of the generative formula; secondly, I will introduce a sociological perspective that can meet the demands of the study of the generative formula in the analysis of the music recording case; thirdly, I will introduce and analyze, in three different and quite brief steps, the recording case of the Beatles; and in the conclusion, I will summarize the highlights of this formula. The reason that explains the choice of the Beatles is as simple as it is fundamental. Not only because of the aforementioned social hearing training and canonization process that occurred in the last fifty years, but because when their recording career began in the early sixties, the medium through which the industry was articulated was the single (the 45  rpm disc), with all its social, aesthetic and musical implications, while at the end of the decade the LP (33 1/3 rpm) surpassed in sales the single format (Chapple & Garofalo, 1977: 76), allowing new ways and lengths of musical expression. But also, unlike other musicians of the sixties who helped in the emergence of recorded rock music and its establishment as a field of cultural production—such as Bob Dylan’s lyricism (Marshall, 2009), the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson’s recording studio work (Butler, 2010), or Jimi Hendrix’s exploration of the electric guitar (Waksman, 1999)—the Beatles, who were neither the best nor the first, not only excelled in these important planes of musical creation but became the most visible, and then influential act of rock music.3

The Generative Formula In The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu (1996) mentions Gustave Flaubert’s double rejection of realism (social art) and idealism (bourgeois art). In this double rejection lies the formula that generates Flaubert’s writing—art for art’s sake—and Bourdieu’s cultural sociology—a ‘struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favourable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (…) and the autonomous principle’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 40). Bourdieu states that ‘this generative formula, which is the transformed form of the contradictory properties of the position, allows us to reach a truly genetic understanding 3  And, of course, the Beatles dominate almost every survey on music popularity. For example, using various music magazines lists of ‘The 100 greatest albums of all time’ type, Appen and Dohering (2006) featured a meta-list of historical rock album rankings in which the Beatles have four albums in the top ten.

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of a number of the particularities inherent in the position-takings of the occupants of this position’ (1996: 79); that is, a formula that functions as a positioning in a discursive and symbolic social space, and a formula that enables us to grasp and understand the logic of practice within certain expressive field. In the case of rock music, the change of format from the single to the LP is an indicator that helps to understand a possible generative formula of rock as a rejection of pop, and can serve to understand some nuances of the record production—especially those related to the artistic justification. But the record production of the sixties was based on technological developments that afforded the sound manipulation (e.g., editing, sound collages, tape loops, alteration of speeds and superimposed layers of the same sound—an effect known as double tracking that was generally applied to the voice). This influence of the materiality itself over rock music production—being a genre of musical creation from 1966 onward that was possible thanks to innovations in sound capture technology— allows us to expand the Bourdieusian concept of generative formula beyond mere disposition or calculation. The theoretical and analytical aim of this chapter is to incorporate the technological dimensions present in artistic production. This allows us to point out as hypothesis that creativity in recorded music field, at least in the 60s, should be regarded as an effect of collaboration and interaction between human (artistic wills) and nonhuman elements (technological ones). In the field of sociological analysis of artistic production, Becker et  al. (2006) have already incorporated actor-network theory as an analytical perspective,4 pointing out that in the analysis of artistic production we must try to understand ‘the artwork [as] one of the actors involved in the drama of its own making’ (Becker et al., 2006: 3).5

4  This theory does not consist of ‘the empty claim that objects do things “instead” of human actors: it simply says that no science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored, even though it might mean letting elements in which, for lack of a better term, we would call non-humans’ (Latour, 2005: 72, emphasis in original). 5  ‘In the language of Bruno Latour, the artwork […] is an actant […] Like any other participant in the process of making art, it imposes constraints on what others, including the artist or artists who are constructing it, can do’ (Becker et al., 2006: 4, emphasis in original).

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We can also (and probably must) analyze the record production from the production-of-culture perspective.6 Richard Peterson studied artistic justification (e.g., the authenticity) in the field of popular recorded music, incorporating the technological dimension as one of the elements that alters and defines the contents of cultural production.7 In principle, Peterson’s model would seem far removed from Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production. However, in both cases, with different tools, we can understand the constitution of a cultural activity as the establishment of a space of production. According to Bourdieu, the constitutive belief, in a space such as the literary field, is the opposition between a pure art and a commercial art (Flaubert’s generating formula would have been the incarnation of this opposition in his rejection of utilitarian forms of art). Both forms, pure and commercial, are necessary for the constitution of a field.8 Peterson (1997), using the case of country music, describes sound interaction dynamics that also fulfill functions close to the generative formula. From the distinction between soft-shell and hard-core country, he accounts for ways of making music that, in their interaction, have kept alive this genre.9 From our point of view, what makes the perspectives of Bourdieu and Peterson similar is that, considering the conformation of a musical space—as an effect of the interaction of the various environments or milieus in which cultural activity is produced or altered—we have as a counterpart the conformation of dispositions, as ‘schemas of perception and appreciation which organize all perception in the space of producers 6  The production-of-culture perspective ‘focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved’ (Peterson & Anand, 2004: 311), and it operates over ‘a field of symbolic production composed of six facets. These include technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational career, and market’ (ibid.: 313) 7  For example, the role that radio played, as a technology facet, in the emergence of country music in the United States (Peterson, 1997). 8  ‘The two modes of cultural production, “pure” art and “commercial” art, are linked by their very opposition, which acts both objectively, in the form of a space of antagonistic positions, and within minds, in the form of schemas of perception and appreciation which organize all perception in the space of producers and products’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 166). 9  According to Peterson, the soft-shell style is the commercial, sophisticated version of country music, friendly with the common ear. On the contrary, with its hardest sound, the hard-core style is the authentic, rustic but honest version of country music (for example, the music of Roy Acuff), and it had been ‘the dialectical interplay [both aesthetically and commercially] between hard-core and soft-shell tendencies which has served to continually revitalize country music’ (Peterson, 1997: 155).

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and products’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 166) toward those worlds or fields of activity. Although Peterson addressed in his studies a variety of popular music genres, such as the 1950s rock and roll (1990) or country (1997), he did not address the British pop-rock from the 1960s. To link the British case with the classical parameters of modern art, we can follow the work of Israeli sociologist Motti Regev, who points out the existence of a genuine or authentic aesthetic in the field of rock music (1994: 95–97). This is based on four elements that we are going to find in the Beatles music: (1) the electric or electrified sound, which would indicate the importance of ‘the volume, the noise, the “dirty” and distorted sound’ above the melody or the harmony; (2) work in the recording studio, conceived ‘as a kind of laboratory for inventing sound and as a workplace’; (3) the lyrics of the songs and the body of the voice in its execution; and (4) a certain aesthetic eclecticism—which we observe, or hear, for example, in the sonorous orientalism of the second half of the sixties, present in songs (all of 1965) such as ‘See My Friends’ by the Kinks, ‘Heart Full of Soul’ by the Yardbirds, or ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ by the Beatles themselves.10

The Recording Case Thanks to the studies of urban popular music, a perspective that emphasizes the material and technological aspects of musical production has been developed. In their analysis, authors like Paul Théberge (2001), Edward Kealy (1990) or Simon Frith (1987, 1996) have highlighted the contribution of technological developments and the consequences they have had in music production. For Théberge, technologies allow and constrain the production of popular music, whether electromagnetic technologies, recording studio or electric instruments. On the other hand, Edward Kealy has focused his analysis on the historical role that sound engineers have played in establishing different modes of collaboration in record production. He points out three forms or historical modes of collaboration (within the recording studio) in the production of a record: the 10  ‘For some the first group to reach raga rock, even before the Beatles, were the Yardbirds, who recorded ‘Heart Full of Soul’ in February of 1965 […] In the summer of 1965 the Kinks recorded ‘See My Friends’. It is a composition with unmistakable resonances to a Hindu raga [and] after George Harrison’s extensive use of sitar for the Beatles, sitar music spread throughout pop and rock music’ (Noya, 2011, 492–494).

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‘craft-union mode’ (after World War II), ‘entrepreneurial mode’ (in the fifties) and the ‘art mode’ (with the advent of rock). We will find this last one in the generative formula of the Beatles records. For his part, Frith points out that, using a technological perspective, the history of music could be divided into a ‘folk’ stage, in which musical storage would lie in the human body and instruments; ‘art’ stage, in which the musical storage is also given by the written music notation; and finally a ‘pop’ stage, in which storage is also given on discs, tapes or digital files (1996: 226–227). The interesting thing is that Frith places the technological processes applied to musical creation as part of this musical creation. According to Frith, ‘the industrialization of music can’t be understood as something that happens to music but describes a process in which music itself is constructed—a process, that is, that fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical arguments’ (Frith, 1987: 50, emphasis in the original).11 More recently, authors such as François Ribac (2007) or Motti Regev (2013) have tried to bring the sociology of science closer to the analysis of this technological nature of the cultural production of urban popular music. For Ribac, the recording technology becomes another aspect of the history of science. Laboratories, broadcast studios or recording studios are spaces where humans and machines collaborate. Regev, in a similar way, and evoking the Latourian proposal of Becker et al. (2006), takes the very materiality of the sounds of rock music as ‘actants, as ‘things’ in the world whose presence have a certain transformative effect on reality […] that mediated new ways of experiencing the body, new styles of consciousness and modes of embodiment, new designs of the musical public sphere’ (Regev, 2013: 177). This materiality inevitably affects the relations within the record production. As Richard Peterson has pointed out when analyzing country music production, at the beginning of the music industry in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, the first generation of Artists and Repertoire (A & R) men did not try to impose their aesthetic criteria when recording or selecting the material from popular music that could be published, because publishing was estimated as the big business in music, and 11  For example, the mellotron (an instrument with a keyboard that reproduced prerecorded sounds on tape assigned to each key) would not only, in what now is called Abbey Road Studios, be a technological device that was applied to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (the flutes that sound at the beginning of the song), but would be part of the process itself that led to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

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therefore the generation of artists and musicians who began recording in the 1920s enjoyed what we can consider a great artistic freedom (Peterson, 1997: 46–47). However, in the 1940s and 1950s, with the use of magnetic tape and with the institutionalization of the forms of the music industry, the record producers or A & R men took absolute control of everything that was going on inside the recording studio, from the selection of songs or the session musicians12 to the dates of recording and mixing. And this was what the Beatles found when they began their record career in the second half of 1962.

Beat Boom Recording Artists The Beatles began their recording career with George Martin, the A & R man from Parlophone13 with whom they worked throughout their career. Together,14 in what now is known as Abbey Road Studios, they recorded ‘Love Me Do’ to a twin-track EMI BTR3 primary tracking machine15 (Hammack, 2018: 27) in September of 1962. Published in October as single, it reached a meritorious place number 17 in the charts.16 ‘Please, 12  Using session musicians instead of group musicians, with the aim of obtaining a certain sound, was and still is a standard practice in the recording industry. George Martin, for example, employed Andy White as drummer for the Beatles’ recording session of September 11, 1962. 13  Parlophone was a subsidiary company of EMI (the great British record label). It had previously been part of the old German label Lindstrom. Parlophone was a minor label that was dedicated to record comic numbers, including Peter Sellers and the Goons. Moreover, when Martin commented on a board of directors that he was about to record a number called The Beatles, managers believed that it was a new comedy group (Martin, 1979). 14  With together I refer to the Beatles, producers George Martin and Ron Richards, sound engineer Norman Smith and session drummer Andy White. Throughout their career, in fact, they worked mainly with Martin as producer but with several other engineers: Stuart Eltham, Geoff Emerick, Ken Scott, Barry Sheel, Ken Townsend, Phil McDonald, Glyn Johns, Peter Brown and Jeff Jarrat (Lewisohn, 1988). 15  The Beatles recorded with this two-track machines until October 1963, when EMI allowed them to record ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ with the four-track telefunken M10 (Hammack, 2018: 109). They continued recording with four-track machines until halfway through the sessions for The Beatles (aka ‘White Album’) (1968), when they first got to know an eight-track machine at Trident Studios, recording ‘Hey Jude’ (Lewisohn, 1988: 145). Abbey Road Studios finally switched to an eight-track 3M machine in September 1968 (ibid.: 153). 16  Position number 17 according to Record Mirror and Record Retailer. The list made by the BBC at the time only computed the top 20 and ‘Love Me Do’ failed to rank. Number 21 for Melody Maker; 24 for Disc; and 27 for New Musical Express (Lewisohn, 2010: 351).

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Please Me’, their second single, came to light in early January 1963. When it reached the top of the charts,17 they proceeded almost immediately to record an LP with the name of the single. The main goal of the LP, Please, Please Me, was, as was the case, to capitalize on the success of the singles.18 Despite the usual practices, such as recording the album in a single day or using session musicians, and despite the fact that the Beatles were not but the last step within the musical machinery ladder, the recording contained some elements that varied the usual way of making a pop music record. First, as had already happened with their two singles, they included original songs of the group. Up to then, in the UK, very few recording artists from popular music, with the exception perhaps of Billy Fury, composed or signed the numbers they recorded. For this there was a whole structure of the creation and implementation of musical creations, managed by composers and editors.19 Secondly, the covers (or versions of other artists’ songs) that were included were not depending on any publishing house, because these numbers were Martin’s suggestion, who based his choice on what he saw the Beatles perform at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. Thirdly, it has some studio tricks. In the recording session on September 4 for ‘Love Me De’, Martin did some editing (Lewisohn, 1988: 18), and in ‘A taste Of Honey’ McCartney voice was double-tracked (ibid.: 20). With the Beatles (November, 1963) was their second LP, preceded by the arrival of Beatlemania or beat boom,20 thanks to the success achieved with the singles ‘From Me to You’ (April, 1963) and especially with ‘She Loves You’ (August, 1963). With the Beatles repeated some aspects of the first LP— fourteen songs, eight of which were signed by the group—and they continued to work with some recording studio tricks—like the aforementioned tape editing or the vocal double tracking—and also they began to record onto four-track machines. The album did not include old singles or their B sides. This was an aesthetic move supported by the Beatles themselves: ‘by then the Beatles had adopted the view that singles and albums should be  Record Retailer was the only one of the British charts that placed ‘Please, Please Me’ in the second place. The rest of the lists placed it on first. 18  ‘Albums afforded a greater profit margin, were less breakable (than the old shellac discs), and cost only slightly more to handle. By 1969, 80 percent of the sales dollar was in LPs’ (Chapple & Garofalo, 1977: 76). 19  The world of composers and editors in London was known by the name of Denmark Street, this was the street where the publishing houses were. 20  A good description of early Beatlemania is the book by Michael Braun (1964), an American journalist who accompanied the Beatles when they were still on the circuit of package tours (the usual British circuit of theaters where several artists shared bill in performances of less than 20 minutes for each group or artist). 17

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treated as separate projects’ (Kozinn, 2010: 68).21 It included a cover work much more successful than the previous one. This cover made by photographer Robert Freeman, which was based on the photographic works that Astrid Kirchherr22 had done with the Beatles two years earlier in Hamburg, helped create a sense of internal coherence; that is to say, a sort of consonance between the visual path of the cover and the sound path of the disc. It is a resource that is clearly seen in Rubber Soul and Revolver. But it was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that, while consolidating the notion of record-work, enshrined the importance of the cover work. After the singles ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ (November 1963), ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ (March 1964) and the following success in the United States (February 1964), the Beatles recorded their third LP. It was also the soundtrack of their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night. It included the homonymous single and the mentioned ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. This album was also composed exclusively of songs signed by Lennon and McCartney and also included several studio tricks, such as editing tape, double tracking or the slow recording and the subsequent acceleration of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ guitar and piano solo.

The Recording Art at the Height of Beatlemania In 1964, the Beatles began to spend less time on live performances (see Chart 8.123). The recording studio was an alternative to the concerts, which—in almost all the places they visited—were transformed, with 21  As Alan Kozinn continues, ‘there would be exceptions later in their career’ (ibid.), and these will be, as we’ll see, their audiovisual projects: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), Magical Mystery Tour (1967), Yellow Submarine (1969) and Let it Be (1970). 22  Kirchherr was a German photographer who was close to the Beatles and took several pictures of them during their stays in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. 23  Each concert is represented, even when there are two or more functions on a single day, provided that it is not two functions in the same theater—a characteristic aspect of the package tours of 1963. Lunch and night sessions on the same day at the Cavern counts as two concerts. That’s why in 1962, there were more concerts than days of the year. The hours of studio work are difficult to compute, so I have indicated days in which studio work was done, regardless of the hours required. Although in the early years they used the studio only to record, in the final years the Beatles ended up doing composition, recording and even mixing work. I have counted both recording sessions and mixing sessions as a working day in the studio, despite what Lewisohn says: that it is difficult to verify the participation or not of the Beatles in all the mixing sessions. However, there are two clear things: first, that their presence in the mixing sessions was increasing from 1965; and second, that these sessions were rising in number, which shows the growing importance of the production of the recording.

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Number of concerts and days in the studio recording

400 350 300 250 200

Number of concerts

150

Number of days in the recording studio

100 50 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970

0 Years Chart 8.1  Concerts and days in the studio recording of the Beatles 1960–1970. Source: Lewisohn (2010). Own elaboration

Beatlemania, into an out-of-control celebration that placed musical activity in the background (see, e.g., Braun, 1964 or Kane, 2004). Thus, the emergence of some introspection in the work of the Beatles became inevitable, reflecting that position in which they were located with respect to the noise that happened to them around. A position John Lennon called being ‘the eye of the hurricane’ (Spitz, 2007: 502). At the end of 1964, after the single ‘I Feel Fine’ (November 1964),24 came the fourth album, Beatles for Sale. It did not contain previous singles and it incorporated personal themes—for example, ‘I’m a Looser’—or foreign sounds—like the Flamenco air in ‘No Reply’. However, and as the ironic name of the album attests, it was still a product aimed at the Christmas market. The year 1965 was the year of change in the record production of the Beatles. They lost interest in playing concerts, and their number diminished. According to Lewisohn (2010: 181), they did not even rehearse before going on tour. They spent nearly the same time on tour as on the 24  The structure of this song is relatively simple (I–V–IV, and I–iii–IV–V in the bridge), but it stands out because it incorporates the sound of guitar feedback. Although Pete Townshend, Dave Davies or Jeff Beck were using the sound of electro-acoustic feedback at their concerts in 1964, the Beatles moved ahead of time to record it.

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recording studio, and they also reduced the number of radio appearances, one of the key points of their success in the United Kingdom. Instead, they opened the sonic range of their record production. Both in Help! (August, 1965)—soundtrack of his second feature film—as in Rubber Soul (December, 1965), new sonorities were introduced. From recording music ‘as it happens’ to building musical genres based on recorded sound, the Beatles moved from a field of recorded musical activity—which sought to capture the musical sound in its execution or achieve an aesthetic effect that simulates the performance of live music—to a field of musical activity that attempted to generate a recorded sound that did not depend on a subsequent staging, such as, for example, a concert. Thomas Turino (2008) calls the first stage or recording field ‘high fidelity music’ and calls the second ‘studio audio art’. The first stage is meant to produce a recorded sound that sounds like a live performance. We can say that this is a type of recording that reproduces or imitates the dynamics that happens in the immediacy of the musical action described by Alfred Schütz (1951).25 Turino talks about his ethnomusicological work in Peru and Zimbabwe, but he also includes the first stage of The Beatles’ recording career in his distinction. That is to say, we are facing a type of recording whose manifest objective is to form a relation of mutual tuning, using the Schützian terminology, that is established in the act of musical execution. Thus, in speaking of the dynamics of sound interaction, we can distinguish first the ethnomusicological components—the incitement to participation that music produces, incitement that can be due, for example, to the frictions peculiar to the sounds that Charles Keil calls ‘participatory discrepancies’ (2005)—and, secondly, based on Randall Collins, we can distinguish the (micro) sociological elements present in the musical act as an interaction ritual—a mutual, shared focus of attention placed on the same object, to make and hear the song, and the emotional entrainment or rhythmic coordination that is generated in the ritual or staging of that musical action, a social consonance that rushes ‘through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation/arousal of participants’ nervous systems’ (Collins, 2004: 42). 25  From a phenomenological approach, Schütz proposed to analyze the musical act as an act of mutual attunement from the temporal dimension, understanding sound or musical production as a ‘social relationship [that] is founded upon the partaking in common of different dimensions of time simultaneously lived through by the participants’ (Schütz, 1951: 96).

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The second stage mentioned by Turino, the ‘studio audio art’, includes the addition of more instruments, any kind of orchestration, sound effects such as the double tracking or even cutting and pasting pieces of different takes into one (these things were already present almost from their beginning). The differential aspect here lies in the lack of need to replicate live later on the music produced in the recording. This sound manipulation removes the ability to record in a natural way the possible invitation-to-­ participate effect generated by live music or the dynamics of interaction and mutual tuning. However, this sound manipulation generates other possibilities, such as constructing new types of music and new forms of generating participation based on the electronic sonorities achieved with increasing independence from both the creation processes habitual until then and their possible live replication. The changes associated with this new way of recording began to be noticed in Help! While four-track recorders were still used until Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles changed the methodology. In the first sessions of recording, back in 1962 and 1963, they arrived with the material prepared and rehearsed, whereas from 1965, they began to bring incomplete songs to the studio, where they used to finish them (Kozinn, 2010; MacDonald, 2005). With songs like ‘Yesterday’ or ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’, they replaced the usual instrumentation of rock music by acoustic instruments and session musicians. When they kept the electric instruments, they incorporated exploratory sonorities, like the instrumental drone of ‘Ticket to Ride’.26 In these changes suffered by the Beatles’ record production, we hear how they try to polish and highlight the effects of musical production, appealing to new sonorities, rhythms and timbers. Subsequently, this will lead to the psychedelic exploration of the possibilities of the recording studio. With Rubber Soul, whose output date coincided with the double single ‘We Can Work It Out’ / ‘Day Tripper’ (December 1965), we are facing an LP that presents almost all the nuances that will later be identified with the artistic work of rock music.27 Introspection alienated the group from 26  The song begins with an arpeggio in A major that is maintained during the first ten bars with the same riff (or phrase that repeats itself). The use of the drone builds an ostinato or rhythmic pattern very unusual in pop music until then. 27  On the ‘nuances’ and the aesthetic canon of rock, see Motti Regev’s (1994) mentioned text. As for the ‘transition’ character of this album, we can notice it in the fact that although in its form and content it is a successfully achieved album, it is still a product aimed at the Christmas market.

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the usual love theme, as in ‘Nowhere Man’ or ‘In My Life’, and also allowed them to anticipate the 1967 Summer of Love and psychedelic orientalism with songs like ‘The Word’ or ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’. In the early Beatles records we can hear ‘two American styles which had not previously been put together’ (Gillet, 1996: 263), the rock ‘n’ roll from the '50s and the sound of the Detroit label Tamla-Motown and the girl groups from the early 1960s. The Beatles made versions of Little Richard (‘Long Tall Sally’) and the Marvelettes (‘Please Mr. Postman’), and their own compositions were a mixture of powerful instrumentation of rock and roll with the vocal play of the girl groups (‘It Won’T Be Long’). But discs like Help! And Rubber Soul marked the incorporation of the new contemporary influences. In them we hear the sound approach to Bob Dylan and the Byrds, in songs like ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ or ‘If I Needed Someone’. In the summer of 1966, this time without a movie in between, the LP Revolver and two singles were published: ‘Paperback Writer’ and the double single ‘Eleanor Rigby’/‘Yellow Submarine’. Revolver lacked only a color cover and the collective anxiety of fans that preceded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to have had a similar or superior impact. But it was also preceded by the ‘bigger than Jesus controversy’, which diverted the possible attention on the album, as well as it lacked the help of an established rock press that would have evaluated it better28 (Rolling Stone magazine was just about to appear). Significant was the decorative work done with magnetic tape—the treatment that was given and the results achieved, for example, in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. In this song, the first one they recorded for Revolver, they cut and pasted tapes with different recorded sounds and altered reproduction speed (laughter, flutes, pianos), and they recorded backward guitar solos and incorporated all this in the final mix, thus creating new sonorities. Microphones were moved in close to drums and instruments (Emerick & Massey,

28  Returning to the meta-list of historical rankings elaborated by Appen and Dohering (2006), we can appreciate that, from the year 2000 onward, Revolver appears as the favorite album, removing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from the first position to number 2.

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2011: 128) or wired through a Leslie speaker29 and then the ADT30 was applied to the voice (MacDonald, 2005: 190–194). These technical moves were unprecedented. The consolidation of the schizophonic31 dissociation of the first half of the twentieth century was now clearly allowing the emergence of the artistic notions of record production through the sound manipulation. In practical terms, in this album we can hear how the generative formula is altered and a new discographic and aesthetic canon arises. This has to do with the material possibilities of the sound produced in the recording studio from the various trends of popular music of the twentieth century, such as rock and roll, the music hall or the most avantgarde contemporary artists. With the piano (accommodated to the tuning of the tempered scale, marking within its limits—the octave divided into twelve semitones—the possibilities of sound combinations), we can hear the culmination of the musical rationalization process (Weber, 1958). And with the recording studio as a new paradigm of instrumentalization, and under the artistic way or ‘art mode’ of collaboration between musicians, engineers and producers (Kealy, 1990: 214), we now hear how the new sound limits of music are investigated and how their aesthetic values are expanded. If we also think of the pentagram not only as the ideal reflection of a sound, but as a method of composition, we will have to take the recording (since with this new paradigm the songs are finished in the studio) as a new creative method of composition.

29  In the case of the voice, Lennon wanted to ‘sound like the Dalai Lama singing from the top of a mountain,’ according to Geoff Emerick (Emerick & Massey, 2011: 23), the sound engineer for this album. 30  The ADT is the mechanization of double tracking. It was an invention of Ken Townsend, engineer of Abbey Road Studios. If the double tracking was achieved by recording the same track twice, the ADT divides a signal into two and rejoins it with a microsecond separation between the two generated signals. In this way, a similar sound effect is achieved, and time is saved by avoiding having to record two studio takes. 31  Schizophony refers to the separation between an original sound and its reproduction or electroacoustic transmission. It is a term coined by Murray Schafer (1994). Being able to manipulate sounds is one of the fundamental indicators of modernity: for example, telephone, record disc, radio or sound cinema.

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Consolidation of Recorded Rock After the United States tour in August 1966, the Beatles never toured again. Nor did they bring out new material for 1966 Christmas market— although on British soil, Parlophone label hastened to release a compilation of big hits. At the end of the year, they began recording ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’. Both songs, although they did not appear in the album but as a double single, were the germ of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The recording of this album lasted almost half a year.32 The initial idea was to make a disc around the figure of a fictitious group. In the end, the central point of the album was not so much the concept as the infinity of possibilities that it left open somewhat ambiguously and that were based on the conscientious exploratory work done in the recording studio. The main result was the confirmation—for those who had not found it out yet with Revolver—about the alteration of the old formula of the pop record and, therefore, the alteration of the relations of production within the record industry. On the one hand, new influences continued to be incorporated, in particular, the studio work done by Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds (1966). And not just sound work, which, in the case of Brian Wilson, was a step further in building a sound wall in the style of Phil Spector, but also incorporated its artistic justification, that is to say, the very idea of doing an artwork and surpassing Pet Sounds itself, the ‘album of all time’, as Paul McCartney came to call it (quoted in MacDonald, 2005: 215). On the other hand, this meant that sonic exploration and experimentation (hitherto limited to the established functions of sound engineers and record producers, as well as constrained by the technical possibilities of the recording studio [Martin, 1979; Peterson, 1990, Théberge, 2001]) yielded to the creative agency of the group, transforming hierarchical labor relations into a creative alliance between musicians, producers and sound engineers (Emerick & Massey, 2011; Kealy, 1990; Regev, 1994). After this album, the end of the Beatles began (or was accentuated, if we consider that the end was originated with the cessation of the tours). Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles since 1961, died, and the group had its first great failure with the audiovisual experiment Magical Mystery 32  ‘Sgt. Pepper had taken four months and cost £25,000—an unheard-of sum in those days, more than twenty times the cost of the Beatles’ debut album’ (Norman, 2003: 297).

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Tour.33 The components began to distance themselves from each other. Nevertheless, they had time to explore and to exploit the new generative formula in two albums more: the double LP The Beatles (aka ‘White Album’) (1968) and his farewell, Abbey Road (1969). The ‘White Album’ (November, 1968) was a stylistic departure from psychedelia and the Summer of Love ethos. It was carried out in a fragmented and overlapping way. The work with eight-track recorders allowed the components of the group—because, according to George Harrison, of the increasing uncontrolled fight of egos (The Beatles, 2000)—not to have to be always together when recording. That is, they could work their respective part separately. Not that they didn’t play together; in fact, they did play together a lot on this record, but there were also moments when they didn’t need to be in the recording session. In this album, the Beatles gave their particular review to the history of music: from country (‘Rocky Raccoon’) within the field of popular music, to the vanguard close to the musique concrète (‘Revolution 9’). Everything seems to be included.34 This album was also the first they recorded for their own label, Apple, whose first single was ‘Hey Jude’ (August, 1968). At the same time, it coincided with the premiere of the animated film Yellow Submarine (July, 1968), to which they added a soundtrack that was nourished of orchestral compositions of George Martin, some leftovers of the sessions of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band plus some ad hoc recording (January 1969). Before embarking on their last album, the Beatles faced in early 1969 another failed project: the Get Back sessions. The original idea was to prepare a show, rehearse it, film the process and finish it with a concert and recording it. It was about doing a record in the old style, without studio tricks—a ‘high fidelity’ recording. A year later, these sessions saw the light under the title of Let It Be (May, 1970), soundtrack of the film of the same 33  Magical Mystery Tour is now another album within the Beatles catalog. On British soil it was a double EP (or extended play, a vinyl record the size of a single but of longer duration) with six songs, that Capitol released in the United States—along with the rest of the singles of 1967—as an LP eleven days before the UK EP. See the Beatles discography in Lewisohn (2010: 350–351). The failure was not the EP or the American LP version, but the film, which had very negative reviews after it was released on television. One of the problems was that it was broadcasted in black and white, despite having been shot in color. 34  The Beatles (1968) consists of 30 songs and reaches different registers. It sounds like the Beach Boys in ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’, ska or blue beat in ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, music hall in ‘Honey Pie’ and even foreshadows the heaviness of hard rock in ‘Helter Skelter’.

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name. These sessions constitute a bittersweet musical and filmic documentary. In them was registered the post-Sgt Pepper somber atmosphere that permeates the ‘White Album’ that led to the definitive dissolution of the quartet. Abbey Road (September 1969), the swan song of the Beatles, was, according to themselves (at least in The Beatles, 2000), a conscious effort to close the discography of the group. In spite of the deteriorated personal relations and the desperate business issues related to Apple and its management, the album we listen to is still worked under the exploratory logic of the generative formula. Experimentation with synthesizers in ‘I Want You’ or ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is noticed, in addition to the incorporation of contemporary tendencies, like the suite that constitutes almost all the B side, possibly influenced by ‘A Quick One While He Is Away’ by the Who.35

Conclusion Bourdieu (1996) works in the context of this chapter as our sociological starting point. His model is able first to provide us with a frame in which to situate the Beatles position within the field of recorded musical production and secondly to give us an insightful outlook on artistic justification and creativity. As we have tried to show, Bourdieusian model lacks a clear perspective on music production and technological issues. That’s the reason we have brought Richard Peterson and the production of culture perspective, first, and the actor-network theory, later. Because there’s a need to overcome Bourdieu’s lack of interest in technological change. On the one hand, production of culture perspective helps to get us near to the musical fact (industry, composition) as well as to the symbolic impact and justification, which in the case of popular music, and Peterson (1997) seems to be quite aware of this, drifts from ‘art’ toward authenticity. And on the other hand, the actor-network theory, be it from the application given by Becker et al. (2006) or by Regev (2013), serves to introduce the materiality of recording technologies and its incidence in the course of action. As we get deeper into musical and technological change, Bourdieu 35  I base my hypothesis on the fact that in the bootlegs recordings of the Get Back sessions, the Beatles are heard to play—in their own way—this song. Lennon had been a few weeks before in The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus (not released until 1996), where the Who played a version of this song, also known as the ‘mini opera’. Another possibility is that they were ‘inspired’ on the B side of the album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, of the Small Faces (May, 1968).

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seems to move, fade away. However, when we perceive how success and recognition—deriving from the use and implementation of new technologies that alter the very nature of what was considered music until then— alter positions within the record industry, the theory of the fields of cultural production seems to revive, because we see how rock music is consolidated, if not as an artistic form, indeed as a form of cultural production. And in the case of the Beatles, rock music is consolidated through the emergence of the rock album generative formula. We can summarize this emergence of the rock album generative formula in the two opposite modes (as ideal types) with which the Beatles worked—two ways of making records that varied in time dedicated to recording sessions, aesthetic judgments applied to the sound material and the technology involved: first, the generative formula of the rock record during the consolidation of the beat boom (1963–1965); second, a new generative formula of the rock album post-beat boom (from 1966). As we have seen, the new generative formula began to be established in Rubber Soul (1965), was applied to Revolver (1966) and was consciously used in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (aka ‘White Album’) (1968) and Abbey Road (1969). All these albums had in common the intention to explore the sound panorama and to achieve more than a set of songs: a work. The Beatles catalog adds other experiments that resulted in publications with LP format that overflow the mere record format, so they do not necessarily fit in the model of the generative formula: Magical Mystery Tour (1967), Yellow Submarine (1969) and Let it Be (1970) emerged from different audiovisual projects. Another significant transformation, after the change of format from the single to the LP as a privileged mode of creativity expression and the emergence of the notion of ‘work’, was the consolidation of the compositional model (which also happened with the Rolling Stones, The Who or the Kinks). This meant the decline of the composer-publisher market within rock production (not so in pop music, where independent publishers and composers still play a significant role) and helped to consolidate positions and conflicts within the group (composers, if they were not already, they ended up being the leaders of the different groups mentioned, as it happened with the Rolling Stones—Jagger and Richards above Jones—or the Who—Townshend above Daltrey). This new formula altered the relations of production, sometimes reversing the relations of power within the record labels, sometimes combining in a single figure all the work of recording. Until the arrival of the Beatles,

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musicians were the last link in a record production that functioned as an ‘assembly line’, as Simon Frith, echoing Adorno, put it (1978: 100): A & R men, sound engineers, publishers, managers and so on. Since the Beatles, many musicians began to perform not only the aforementioned compositional functions, but also those of arrangers, sound engineers and record producers; they started owning their own songs; and they even had direct participation in the making of album covers. The new formula also altered the mode of sound production. It went from making ‘high-fidelity’ recordings to building works away from any need for live replication. This new mode of production, the ‘studio audio art’ (Turino, 2008), as we mentioned in the case of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, approached in its forms (cut and paste of tape loops, acceleration or slowing speeds and the challenge to the canons of hearing) to musique concrète. That is to say, being the concrete music pioneer in the art of manipulating recorded sounds, it was rock that popularized, as a means of expression, however, these recording techniques as a new art. While these two modes of production are a rough synthesis of two states of the emerging rock music field, both place the Beatles as the hinge between two historical moments of discographical production. In short, the generative formula they embody is not so much a particular model of construction as a new ‘way’ of facing creative work, which is based on a generative matrix of artistic justification (especially the art of composing and recording ‘works’, the art of bringing up the sounds of the world and the avant-garde, the art of the new counter-cultural hedonism) and the technological evolution that precedes and constitutes rock as a field of cultural production.

References Appen, R. V., & Dohering, A. (2006). Nevermind the Beatles, here’s Exile 61 and Nico: ‘The top 100 records of all time’–a canon of pop and rock albums from a sociological and an aesthetic perspective. Popular Music, 25(1), 21–39. Becker, H. (2008). Art worlds. University of California Press. Becker, H., Faulkner, R., & y Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2006). Art from start to finish: Jazz, painting, writing and other improvisations. University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. Essays on art and literature. Columbia University Press.

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Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art. Genesis and structure of the literary field. Stanford University Press. Braun, M. (1964). Love me do. The Beatles’ progress. Penguin Books. Butler, J. (2010). Record production and the construction of authenticity in the Beach Boys and late-sixties American rock. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Chapple, S., & Garofalo, R. (1977). Rock’n’Roll is here to pay. The history and politics of the music industry. Nelson-Hall. Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton University Press. Egan, S. (Ed.). (2009). The mammoth book of the Beatles. Robinson. Emerick, G., & Massey, H. (2011). El sonido de los Beatles. Memorias de su ingeniero de grabación. Indicios. Frith, S. (1978). The sociology of rock. Constable. Frith, S. (1987). In J.  Lull (Ed.), The industrialization of popular music (pp. 49–74). Sage. Frith, S. (1996). Performing rites. On the value of popular music. Harvard University Press. Gillet, C. (1996 [1970]). The sound of the city. The rise of rock and roll. Da Capo. Hammack, J. (2018). The Beatles recording reference manual (Vol. 1). Gearfab. Kane, L. (2004). Ticket to ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 & 1965 tour that changed the world. Penguin Books. Kealy, E. (1990). From craft to art. The case of sound mixers and popular music. In S. Frith & A. Goodwin (Eds.), On record. Rock, pop, and the written word (pp. 207–220). Routledge. Keil, C. (2005). Participatory discrepancies and the power of music. In C. Keil & S. Feld (Eds.), Music grooves. Essays and dialogues (pp. 96–108). Fenestra. Kozinn, A. (2010). The Beatles. From the cavern to the rooftop. Phaidon. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-­theory. Oxford University Press. Lewisohn, M. (1988). The complete Beatles recording sessions. Harmony. Lewisohn, M. (2010). The complete Beatles chronicle. The definitive day–by–day guide to the Beatles’ entire career. Chicago Review Press. MacDonald, I. (2005). Revolution in the head. The Beatles’ records and the sixties. Pimplico. Marshall, L. (2009). Bob Dylan and the academy. In K.  Dettmar (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Bob Dylan (pp. 100–109). Cambridge University Press. Martin, G. (1979). All you need is ears. St. Martins. Norman, P. (2003). Shout! The true story of the Beatles. Pan Books. Noya, J. (2011). Armonía Universal. Música, globalización cultural y política internacional. Biblioteca Nueva. Peterson, R. (1990). Why 1955? Explaining the advent of rock music. Popular Music, 9(1), 97–116.

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Peterson, R. (1994). Producing artistic value: The case of rock music. The Sociological Quarterly, 35(1), 85–102. Peterson, R. (1997). Creating country music. Fabricating authenticity. University of Chicago Press. Peterson, R., & Anand, N. (2004). The production of culture perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 311–334. Regev, M. (1994). Producing artistic value: The case of rock music. The Sociological Quarterly, 35(1), 85–102. Regev, M. (2013). Pop-rock music. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity. Polity Press. Ribac, F. (2007). From the scientific revolution to rock: A sociology of feedback. Journal on the Art of Record Production, 1. revista online, http://arpjournal.com Schafer, R. M. (1994). The soundscape. Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Destiny. Schütz, A. (1951). Making music together. A study in social relationship. Social Research, 18(1), 76–97. Spitz, B. (2007). The Beatles. A biografia. Larousse. The Beatles. (2000). The Beatles. Antología. Ediciones B. Théberge, P. (2001). ‘Plugged in’: Technology and popular music. In S.  Frith et al. (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 3–25). Cambridge University Press. Turino, T. (2008). Music as social life: The politics of participation. University of Chicago Press. Waksman, S. (1999). Instruments of desire. The electric guitar and the shaping of musical experience. Harvard University Press. Weber, M. (1958). The rational and social foundations of music. Southern Illinois University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Concrete Materialities: Architectural Surfaces and the Cultural Sociology of Modernity Eduardo  de la Fuente

In this chapter, I pursue the theme modern social and cultural life, which can profitably be understood through its material surfaces. The argument takes its lead from Amato’s (2013: 1) Surfaces: A History, which claims surfaces are integral to modern life by making it possible, manageable and pleasurable: Friendly to the needs of the individual body and responsive to group life, modern surfaces are strong, flexible, safe, sanitary, smooth, bright, colourful, and even diaphanous… Made in millions of shapes for endless contexts and functions, surfaces grid, cover, laminate, wrap, and enclose the exterior and interior spaces of manufactured things and legislated and administered lives… Everywhere and on everything, edges are rounded off and rough surfaces are levelled, smoothed, and polished. (Amato, 2013: 5)

In short, material surfaces are part of what the environmental psychologist Gibson (1979) famously called the “affordances” of human existence.

E. de la Fuente (*) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_9

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But, anyone with a keen eye for symbolic associations or human capacities for myth making would no doubt appreciate that aiming to make the world feel “strong”, “flexible”, “safe”, “sanitary”, “smooth”, “bright”, “colorful” and “even diaphanous”, through things that “grid”, “cover”, “laminate”, “wrap” and “enclose”, and which involve actions that “round”, “level”, “smooth” and “polish” the world, implicates surfaces in culture as much as in materiality. Thus, Amato (2013: 1) suggests “surfaces evade easy definition” and “raise classic questions of epistemology and aesthetics”; they also constitute how the senses perceive “material existence in the world” and how social actors “transact connections and understanding” through symbols, metaphors and icons. Surfaces also raise issues of control and fate, prompting questions such as the following: who gets to decide whether something or someone is covered up, laminated or wrapped up? It is this mixture of affordance and symbolism, anxieties about control and pleasure at the possibilities of empowerment, that make material surfaces so intriguing. In this essay, I take the ambiguous status of modern architectural surfaces as an invitation to reflect on the explanatory possibilities of a materialist cultural sociology of modern life. My overriding aim in exploring these themes is to show that we can think with, and not just about, modern architectural surfaces. As such, an exploration of modernity’s textures might be considered a foray into theorizing modern life through the surfaces where such a life has been shaped, imagined and encountered. Arguably, we have a great deal to learn from material surfaces and how they are interwoven with the rest of life. To quote from Nietzsche’s (1974: 35) “Preface” to the second edition of The Gay Science, it is at the surface of things, rather than buried in some hidden reality, that we often encounter intimations of a society’s or civilization’s “health, future, growth, power, life”.

Materiality and Cultural Sociology As Rubio (2014: 617) notes, even if “still incipient and somewhat dispersed, it is nonetheless possible to detect the contours of a novel ‘sensibility’ within cultural sociology that calls for the need to incorporate the material into the study of cultural forms, processes and meanings”. One of the aims of such a material sensibility is therefore to underscore the “importance of exploring the relationship between social worlds and physical environments as a key to understanding how social structures,

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categories, and meanings acquire extension and durability” (Rubio, 2014: 618). Note here that a materialist cultural sociology is being charged with the need to throw light upon the very constitution of material objects and environments, as well as the need to map their unfolding in temporal and spatial terms. Thus, Rubio’s (2014) own research looks at what he calls “docile” and “unruly” objects in the privileged institutional context of MOMA in New York. But, arguably, what he says about the materialities of oil paintings and new media installations, held by the “mothership” of modernist and avant-garde/neo-avant-garde art, has applicability to a range of material, spatial and aesthetic processes: “What is needed… is to develop explanations that are able to capture th[e] ‘material unfolding of culture’ as a bottom-up process that emerges through diverse configurations of people, meanings, practices, and materials” (Rubio, 2014: 641). One of the advantages, then, of a materialist approach is an emphasis on process and on the relative stability/instability of things as they unfold through time and space. Approaches that emphasize materiality were also part of “attempts to move away from the idea of separation between different material and cultural domains, and to accommodate the material form of things” (Hicks, 2010: 74). Against the notion of objects, landscapes or cities, as kinds of texts, materiality reflected an “increased interest in the physical properties and effects of materials”, including their “durability”, “destruction”, “rarity”, “enchantment” and “dazzling effects” (Hicks, 2010: 74–75). Rubio (2014: 618) surmises, when it came to a cultural sociology, the material sensibility involves a desire “to restore some heuristic dignity” to materials and to seek to avoid seeing material artifacts as “passive surface[s] upon which social forces act and impart meaning”. The sociology of architecture is arguably one of the more poignant manifestations of these materialist tendencies. A case in point is the socio-­ architectural writings of Yaneva (2009, 2016) who has a background in STS/ANT perspectives and sees architecture as a series of “actions” (or network of human and nonhuman actions) rather than an “object”. Writing with Bruno Latour, she offers the view that “a building is not a static object but a moving project” (Latour & Yaneva, 2008: 80). What this approach aims for is a “method [which] allows us to grasp the capacity of buildings and design projects to elaborate their times and their spaces, and even societies of interested parties, around themselves” (Yaneva, 2016: 5). But, while Yaneva’s (2016) approach has the advantage of emphasizing process and also of drawing attention to the role of

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“controversies” in constituting architectural entities (she has studied, e.g., the controversies surrounding the building of the Utzon’s Sydney Opera House or Hadid’s unrealized design for the same building type in Cardiff), it has been criticized for subscribing to an “approach [that] remains a promise that still has to prove its worth” and which is as “yet to offer an interestingly new view on the iconic structures [it] takes as [its] examples” (Verkaaik, 2016: 141). The mention of iconic structures raises an interesting point: to what extent can we have a materialist cultural sociology of built things if the iconic status of such structures is not included in the explanation? Here, we have entered the controversial territory surrounding the question whether the role of a cultural theory is “to make cultural sociology more materialistic” or “to make the study of material life more cultural” (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012: 1). In their introduction to Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, Bartmanski and Alexander (2012: 1) propose “[o]bjects become icons when they have not only material force but also symbolic power”. The key turn of phrase here is “not only”. Icons are powerful cultural constructions precisely because they engage a viewer, listener, user or believer at an “immediate sensory” surface level, but they are also offer “a kind of reduction or condensation” of cultural associations that provides “believer-friendly epiphanies” and “customer-friendly images” of meaning (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012: 2). In his own analyses of the icons surrounding the collapse of communism, Bartmanski (2012: 61) suggests it was the “iconicity of well-placed events”—such as the physical dismemberment of the infamous Berlin Wall—that provided “[t]emporal, political markers” of the momentous political revolution taking place. The mention of the physical dismemberment of the wall suggests that materiality and symbolism are closely entwined; and further contributions from the Yale Strong Program— which had initially been predicated on the analytic “autonomy of culture” (Alexander & Smith, 2003)—seem to have given way to more materialistculturalist accounts associated with the study of icons. Thus, in Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (Bartmanski & Woodward, 2015), Bartmanski and Woodward (2015, p. 165) focus on an artifact and material surface, which “[b]y all accounts… should have been dead by now, or at best confined to museums and antique stores”, but instead has seen a major resurgence. Rather than seeing vinyl’s recent popularity as simply the return of materiality or the death of the digital, Bartmanski and

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Woodward (2015: 162) propose a multidimensional explanation in which the vinyl record is an aesthetic object and “totem” embedded in “independent, cosmopolitan music scenes’ and associated “urban lifestyles”. They also show vinyl is also an artifact whose “sensual qualities and physical properties [become] stabilized over years of experimentation, testing and routine use at home and in clubs” (Bartmanski & Woodward, 2015: 92). Overall, the recent and more materialist contributions of the Yale School of cultural sociology serve to highlight the role of material icons in social life; and, the concept of “iconicity”, in particular, “allows us to see enchantment as a continuing presence despite tremendous historical change” (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012: 4). Such interventions highlight that cultural sociology can play an important role in reminding us that modernity doesn’t make aesthetic and sensuous appeal (or revulsion and disquiet) disappear altogether. As we shall see below, such entanglements of matter and enchantment/sensuous appeal (as well as their opposite) are important to the multiple social roles played by architecture and the built environment.

Materialist Architectural Sociologies: Ugly Buildings and Architextures Materialist accounts of the built environment are alive and well, as are theorizations of building materialities that parallel Rubio’s notion of “docile” and “unruly” objects. One of the reasons architecture invites materialist thinking, according to Mukerji (1994: 145), is that “[b]ridges, canals, railroad lines, road systems, and even paths in the woods … all contribute to the formation (or not) of social linkages”. In this respect, the “architectural” produces and enables the “social” as much as it “reflects” it. Mukerji (1994: 145) adds the theoretically significant point that the production of “artificial environment[s] for sustaining, organizing and enhancing human life” constitutes an ontological realm where the “distinction between the physical and the symbolic… often breaks down”. What also breaks down is the distinction between architecture and other aspects of the built environment like “infrastructure”—the latter, despite the association with efficient or technological things, having its own “enchantments” (Harvey & Cox, 2012).

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A text which provides something of a bridge between materialist and symbolic perspectives on built things (although, paradoxically, it is about their destruction) is van der Hoorn’s (2009) Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings as offering an alternative anthropology of architecture (Verkaaik, 2016: 141). Indispensable Eyesores asks us to consider “outcast buildings” or the buildings we love to hate. The book explores not only how people engage in architectural “act[s] of destruction” but also how they “build up intimate relations with the buildings they used to detest” (Verkaaik, 2016: 141–142). The explanatory framework includes cultural theorists such as Douglas (1966), who studied “pollutants” or matter out of place, Hubert and Mauss (1964), who studied the function and nature of “sacrifice” and Freedberg (1989), who studied “iconoclasm” or the power wielded by destroyed images. One of van der Hoorn’s (2005: 110) most interesting pieces of ethnographic writing pertains to the demolition of the Kaiserbrau, a structurally complete but never used “nineteen-storey concrete building from the 1970s, initially planned as the largest hotel in West Germany”. The event, which took place at 8:01 am on the 13th of May 2001, and which included 450 kgs of dynamite, was attended by a crowd of 20,000, local, national and European media, and attested to the fact that demolitions can “take on the character of a purification ritual” and that their material documentation through text and image can become “an important element in the collective memory of a place, sometimes still remembered years later as if it was yesterday” (van der Hoorn, 2005: 110). These ritual events become part of vernacular material culture when, for example, attendees acquire a “souvenir” piece of the building. Demolition is here conceptualized as something which brings the “materiality” of a building to the “fore” as the “tons of debris that remain ha[s] to be handled with powerful bulldozers and excavators” (van der Hoorn, 2005: 117). Photographic practices can also play an important role in memorializing demolished buildings and stabilizing some of their symbolic and affective associations. In Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages, the cultural historian Harris (1999) compares the photographing of condemned buildings to the act of capturing images of corpses. It is designed to “retain memories of loved ones whose earthly lives had been brief” (Harris cited in van der Hoorn, 2005: 124). Rituals of architectural destruction emphasize Jones’s (2020: 62) point that “due to its material and symbolic affordances… architecture is one site in which political institutions attempt to make understandings of time

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meaningful to a variety of publics”. As Cairns and Jacobs (2014: 133) note, in the provocatively titled Buildings Must Die, a building’s “demise… [or] obsolescence is not simply a state that appears from nowhere as a categorical fact. It is a value judgment”. Thus, a material “like asbestos” suddenly goes from being a “bit player” in a physical environment’s “structural story to operating as vital in the building’s categorization as ‘unviable’” (Cairns & Jacobs, 2014: 133). We must remember, suggests van der Hoorn (2005: 124), that even in the case of ugly or undesired buildings, “demolition is often a very ambiguous event: it can be seen as a brutal attack by some people, whereas others consider it a necessary act to construct something new”. She wryly adds, there is also the possibility that “through elimination, a building is sometimes granted a form of martyrdom” (van der Hoorn, 2005: 125). Even an ugly building can command complex aesthetic and emotional associations. In terms of the argument we are making here, it is interesting that van der Hoorn (2005: 125n) suggests, while a “building’s outward appearance” or “aesthetic qualities should not be seen as explanatory in themselves” nor should the “choice of materials… be dismissed as entirely insignificant and irrelevant”. Her formulation is that outward appearance and aesthetic materials ensure that “buildings do not all start their biography with absolutely ‘equal’ chances” (van der Hoorn, 2005: 125n). What determines building biography is the intensity of affect that different buildings generate. A building’s significance is therefore often connected with it being “either cherished or rejected”, and not with a building “find[ing] itself in a kind of ‘grey zone’ of routinely unnoticed edifices” (van der Hoorn, 2005: 126n). And, when it comes to intensity of affect, what Bachelard (1983) termed the material imagination of built things plays an important role. As Pallasmaa (2014: 35) proposes, the “images arising from matter project deeper and more profound experiences than the images arising from form”. But what kinds of images or meaning emerge from matter? Especially, spatial or architectonic matter? In Production of Space, Lefebvre (1991; 118) suggests that when we want to think about say an unplanned “path” through a park or a forest, the mapping of such space “has more in common with a spiders’s web than a drawing or a plan”, and adds, that if we were grasping for an analogy, “it would make more sense to speak of texture rather than texts in this connection”. Lefebvre (1991: 118; 222, emphasis in the original) is so enamored of textural metaphors (see de la Fuente, 2019a, 2019b on textural metaphors in social theory and

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sociology), he also proposes “it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘architextures’” due to the fact that they are interwoven with the fabric of their surroundings. Similarly, he suggests people connect to monumental space through a type of meaning which is practical, embodied, temporal, atmospheric, as well as representational and ideological. Lefebvre (1991: 221) gives the example of entering a cathedral’s monumental space where “visitors are bound to become aware of their own footsteps… breathe the incense-laden air, and plunge into a particular world, of sin and redemption”. On occasion, Lefebvre (1991: 223) relies on analogical thought to explain the relationships between space, materiality and experience: “Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on”. On this basis, Production of Space formulates a powerful hypothesis regarding what happens when a city’s “sites, forms and functions are no longer focused and appropriated by monuments”, namely, the “city’s contexture or fabric – its streets, its underground levels, its frontiers – start to unravel”.

Places and Their “Faces”: Material Surfaces and Spatial Habitus The unraveling of cities, regions or neighborhoods is an interesting empirical topic and one that draws attention to the synergistic interplays between the symbolic and the material, the architectonic and its imaginaries. Thus, as Bodnair (2001, p. 182) notes, in Fin de Millénaire Budapest: “The city whose texture unravels is not a city anymore in the sense of being a collective enterprise of its citizens”. Textures are a good lens for analyzing urban fabrics in transition, in that as time accelerates, decelerates or otherwise fluctuates, it becomes hard to avoid the feeling that “[c]ity dwellers are losing their reference points; the city’s secure signposts are disappearing at a speed not experienced before” (Bodnair, 2001, p.  1). Materials and shapes that once looked authoritative, fashionable or comforting start to appear frayed, out-of-synch with the times or ill-fitting. Psyches and bodies no longer seem so at home in buildings, parks and plazas, public transport or—as Lefebvre asserted—a city’s monumental structures. In this respect, monuments are important parts of the texture of the “collective memory” of different urban societies (Young, 1999). And, places, in turn, each have their own particular textural qualities:

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A place’s “texture”… calls direct attention to the paradoxical nature of place. Although we may think of texture as a superficial layer, only “skin deep”, its distinctive qualities may be profound. A surface is, after all, where subject and object merge; the shape, feel, and texture of a place each provides a glimpse into the processes, structures, spaces, and histories that went into its making… people’s sense of place  – attached variously to a movie theatre, a town, a tree, a planet – reveals a great deal about the structure of each of these places in its various contexts. Place… highlights the weaving together of social relations and human-environment interactions. (Adams et al., 2001, pp. xiii-xiv)

In short, capturing a place’s texture entails reproducing the shape, feel or sense of place present there and not elsewhere/nowhere else. In their overview of recent developments in the sociology of the built environment, Martina Löw and Silke Steets (Löw & Steets, 2014: 219–220) note that attempts “to explain the distinct logics of urban conditions” have increasingly started to do so “in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus” and associated terms such as “habitus of place”, “habitus of the city” and “habitus of the urban region”. Although some cultural sociological critics have sometimes felt habitus epitomizes the dangers of sociological reductionism in cultural analysis (see Alexander’s, 1995 critique), Bourdieu’s concept might be salvageable when linked to the material and symbolic textures of spatial entities such as places, cities and regions. Löw and Steets cite as an example of the kind of sociology of places they have in mind, a study of the emotional styles and material imaginaries of two UK cities: The regularity and routine of emotional response arising in cities has been studied in different cities. In 1996, for example, Ian Taylor, Karen Evans, and Penny Fraser published their comparative study of Manchester and Sheffield. They show that in a particular place specific structures of ­experience are developed that differ from those in other places… different ways of effectively coming to grips with the fate of post-industrial collapse are sketched out: Manchester is meeting the challenge through a culture of change… as well as large-scale projects… whereas Sheffield is clinging to the nostalgic feeling of lost industrial greatness. (Löw & Steets, 2014: 220)

They aren’t alone in seeing significant analytic purchase in examining the material textures of the built environment to gauge how cities and regions respond to change. An edited collection, which dates from a decade after the one Löw and Steets cite, titled Thinking Northern:

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Textures of Identity in the North of England, sees the editor make the following observations in the “Introduction”: After decades of economic decline, after a time when the heavy industries withered away and coalmining, shipbuilding and textile industry lost their significance, a new air of self-confidence is perceptible… Warehouses, and mills are being converted into fashionable apartment buildings, or sleek office blocks. The docks and canals, once the arteries of industrialization, are being integrated into a landscape designed for the leisure-oriented urban classes. Finance and the culture-industries are taking over the grim sweat mills of the North… Anyone coming to Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle will find a region in transition… Changing economic patterns are changing the face of Northern England. (Ehland, 2007: 19)

The question of places, cities and regions having “faces”, and ones that change or evolve, attests to the power of material surfaces to convey things. Materially minded urban and architectural sociologists aren’t the only ones making such connections. Löw and Steets (2014: 220) suggest the sociologist of “city imaginaries” is identifying elements similar to “images of the cities as communicated by professional marketing elites”. But there is significant benefit in seeing a location’s material and emotional imaginaries as “structured like a cumulative texture, with images stacked upon images, architectures upon architectures, and so on, reinforcing and colliding with each other” (Löw & Steets, 2014: 220). Additionally, there is also mileage in “identifying and describing the formative period of a city when the material of which the city imaginary is woven is to be found. Keeping in mind the historical dynamics of continuity, shifts, and breaks in a city’s cumulative texture” (Löw & Steets, 2014: 220). It strikes me that keeping an eye on exclusions and repressions in the material record might also be desirable, as well as having the courage to consider textures and surfaces that might otherwise go unnoticed or be considered impolite to draw to the attention of others. A materialist cultural sociology might therefore want to borrow its ethos from Simmel (1968: 69) who, in “Sociological Aesthetics”, argued “[e]ven the lowest, intrinsically ugly phenomenon can be dissolved into contexts of colour and form, of feeling and experience, which provide it with exciting significance”. To ignore the “ugly” or the “low” is to provide an incomplete picture of material and aesthetic life or to the atmospheres of different

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spatial entities. As Rabaté (2018) notes, in a remarkable little book on Rust, to ignore the corrosion of metal surfaces would be to ignore a key feature of the city and region in which he lives, works and gets to experience the sensory aspects of mobility: The spread of rust on metal surfaces is most prevalent and visible in the Northeast of the United States. I was pleased to be hired by the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s  – this gave me an excellent opportunity to observe rust first hand… A simple bus ride from Center City to North Philly provides countless views of abandoned warehouses, sagging bridges, unused oil cisterns, decaying steel mills, broken down factories… A train ride to New York offers more post-industrial delights. Metal poles twisted, corrugated iron sheets, oxidation seeping under sturdy concrete underpasses, rust everywhere. Only on reaching the glittering facades of Manhattan can one forget it. (Rabaté, 2018: 8–9)

In short, not only does metal corrosion provide Philadelphia and much of the northeast of the United States with a distinctive material and aesthetic feel (one connected with the passage from industrialism to postindustrial forms of economic organization), rust also positions the wider region, and its physical environments, in stark contrast to the “glittering facades” of Manhattan. The latter hinges on the prevalence of the so-­ called glass-curtain-wall skyscrapers. As Koolhaas (1994: 10; 293) proposes in Delirious New York, “Manhattan has consistently inspired in its beholders ecstasy about architecture”, and it is the city’s materialities that have arguably made it a natural habitat for “artificial conception and [the] accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals”.

Architectural Surfaces: Materials as Agents and Topics of Modernity Koolhaas’s comments about the city of glass skyscrapers also being the city for the “accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals” places significant emphasis on the materialities of the modern city. The “glittering facades” of Manhattan were made possible by the advent of so-called plate glass technology and construction methods. Higman (2017: 161) suggests, “[p]late glass was invented in England in the seventeenth century but remained expensive until produced by

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industrial methods, making its debut as a major building material in London, in the Crystal Palace of 1851”. The same author suggests the possibility of designing with “large glass windows” has contributed to the sense that the modern built environment involves “height” and a sense of “vertical flatness”, especially when experienced “from the street” (Higman, 2017: 161). Glass has been attributed other affordances. Fierro’s (2006) The Glass State analyzes architecture of “spectacle” and comes to understand “glass as a building material with significant symbolic associations vis-à-vis the discourses of transparency so common in European political discourse” (Jones, 2016: 475). By contrast, in Liquid Modernity, Bauman (2000: 96) suggests that “[w]hat strikes the visitor to La Défense… is first and foremost the inhospitality of the place”. He adds, “wrapped from top to bottom in reflective glass”, the buildings seem to have neither windows nor entry doors… They are imperious and impervious to the eye” (Bauman, 2000: 96). In recent work on competing understandings of architectural cosmopolitanism, I have also charted what I consider to be a reaction against glass as the primary material of global mobility and an aesthetics of sleekness (de la Fuente, 2018). The fact that glass architecture can play these competing socio-political roles is not altogether surprising when we consider the “physical operations we often associate with glass”—which range from the “reflective” to the “opaque”, the “projective” to the “transparent”—also “function as abstract concepts to describe how we perceive the world and ourselves” (Garrison, 2015: ix). Discussions of architectural surfaces and modernity have also been linked to the scale and effects of such material surfaces proliferating. Concrete, glass and steel “only began to become relatively cheap in the nineteenth century and took on a new life in combination, making them agents of modernity” (Higman, 2017: 161). Their joining forces as “agents” of modernity, in turn, led to charges that the world was becoming representationally homogeneous. As King (2016) proposes in Writing the Global City: Nineteenth- and twentieth century developments in building materials  iron, concrete, steel, glass, plastics - have combined with Modern Movement ideology… to bring a specific form of representational homogeneity to the city all over the world; from Brasilia to Chandigarh, Addis Ababa to Jakarta. (King, 2016: 169)

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The proliferation-cum-representational homogeneity narrative tells us a great deal about how surfaces became “icons” and “indices” within a variety of modern projects and experiences. We will spell out some of the iconic and indexical associations in the remaining sections of this chapter. But, what is worth emphasizing is that what seems to be unsettling about modern material surfaces is that they come to symbolize “ubiquity rendered visible”; they embody the possibility, for example, that “all the world can be plasticized” (Barthes, 1993: 97; 99). In other words, material surfaces become ways of addressing concerns about modernity and perceptions of its transformative powers. This is especially the case with concrete. As Forty (2012) states in his magisterial, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, “[c]oncrete is modern … It is one of the agents through which our experience of modernity is experienced”. In keeping with the themes of this chapter, that we should think with and through material surfaces as much as about and on them, Forty also recommends seeing concrete as a material and medium through which we can meditate on what modernity—in a variety of spatial and temporal contexts—has come to mean to us: It is not just that the lives of people in the twentieth century were transformed by, amongst other things, concrete… but that how they saw those changes was, in part, the outcome of the way they were represented in concrete… Concrete realized the prospect of transforming nature and of transforming ourselves and our relationship with each other… Reactions to concrete are reactions to modernity, and on that account should not be understood as direct effects of concrete, but have to be associated with the whole field of events and processes that constitute modern existence… concrete is but one symptom of our discomfort with modernity. (Forty, 2012: 14)

Forty is writing from the perspective of an Emeritus Professor of Architecture, who has clearly absorbed aspects of modern cultural theory. The irony, however, is that formulations such as “reactions to concrete are reactions to modernity”, paradoxically, run the risk of oversociologizing material histories and practices. However, in the main, a text such as Concrete and Culture pulls back from reifying either concrete or culture to the extent it shows (a) that it was not inevitable that concrete should become synonymous with modernity (i.e., Forty shows there were various “failed” commercial and professional attempts in the late-nineteenth century that didn’t capture people’s imaginations); (b) that concrete’s

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tentative modern victories were aesthetic as much as they were technological (for, e.g., Forty shows that concrete and photography developed important technical and creative synergies throughout the twentieth century); and (c) that concrete entails a complex set of temporalities, both as a material and as a set of sociohistorical practices. With respect to (c), concrete’s supposed modernity, and especially its much-vaunted triumph over nature (for e.g., the way some cantilevered concrete structures seem to defy gravity), this should not disguise the fact that the “material is always at risk of slipping back into its craft and earth bound origins” (Forty, 2012: 15). The end result (i.e., the solid slabs of reinforced concrete) can disguise the fact that “concrete shares characteristics with mud in its wet state” (Higman, 2017: 161), and, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Forty (2012: 13–42) calls the chapter of Concrete and Culture examining the material’s modern associations, “Mud and Modernity”. The latter also suggests that concrete involves both the “immobilization” or freezing of time as “every imperfection in construction is recorded for posterity” and a “failure to age in the same gradual and progressive way as other materials” (Forty, 2012: 256). On the basis of such temporal characteristics, Forty (2012: 256; emphasis in the original) surmises: “Concrete is, we could say, untimely matter; it never speaks in more than one tense, generally the present, sometimes in the future, almost never in the past”. From the perspective of a material cultural analysis, concrete is “not a technical ‘given’ but an architectural ‘construct’” (Legault, 2006: 46). Additionally, the material can be “cast in place” or be “prefabricated”; it has elements that emphasize the “handmade” and others that highlight the “machine made”; and concrete’s surface textures can be encountered as either “smooth” and polished or as “rough” and highly ribbed. In a contribution to the Knowing from the Inside project led by Ingold (2011: 14), who has been influential via his materialist anthropology which posits we exist “in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement”, Winter (2017: 42) writes of concrete that it is “a powerful material to think with … not just because of its ubiquity but also because of its perceived failures and the way it throws a spotlight on questions of social and human responsibility”. It is possible to see in the social production of concrete-as-built form a whole meshwork of skilled practice between architects and planners “work[ing] in close collaboration with engineers and an army of anonymous production workers, who didn’t just think about materials, but handled them, understood

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them” (Winter, 2017: 40). Concrete forces us to look at “the experience of the worksite… sites that were once experiments in shaping public life” (Winter, 2017: 40). Her point seems to be that it is all too easy to miss concrete’s essentially experimental character given the various prejudices that the material has acquired.

Concrete as “Grey” or Drab Modernity However, experimentalism or textural variety is not what was to become dominant in popular or professional discourses about concrete. As popular historian of materials, Miodownik (2013: 82), writes, “[c]oncrete is perceived as fine for the construction of a motorway or a hydro-electric dam”, but it is deemed less suitable for building homes or attractive cityscapes as it is generally “regarded as necessary, cheap, functional, grey, dreary, stained, inhuman, but most of all ugly”. Urbanist Landry’s (2006) positioning of concrete in the Art of City-Making entails many of the negative tropes associated with concrete’s role in modern life. He suggests the concrete-built environment tends to be “[i]nert and lifeless” and that the material “ages disgracefully. It leaches, stains and cracks, not to mention cancerous concrete that breaks up to reveal rusty steel, or graffiti” (Landry, 2006: 28). Landry (2006: 27) discusses concrete in the context of what he terms an “imaginary early morning journey from out of town in summertime to a big city… We could be in Europe, the US, Australia, China”. Concrete here is linked to “Lego-like regularity”, “Box-like buildings”, “information overload” and “air conditioning [which is] on, but the air is stale” (Landry, 2006: 26–27). The trip into Landry’s (2006: 28) allegorical city concludes, thus: “Endless concrete walls, rashly constructed. Cheap housing estates. Cheaper breeze-block accommodation for the even poorer. A grey concrete car park on the horizon greets you with a garish red sign: ‘All Day Parking – Only $5’”. Why is there a dominance of narratives where concrete is seen as cold and alienating? One commentator suggests that it was “[w]here concrete was used… unadorned and rough-cast”, that the built environment acquired an “unfortunate reputation for evoking a bleak dystopian feature” (Clement, 2011: 7). The association between concrete and state socialism is, in many respects, rather striking. Forty (2012: 150) also reports that architecture was the realm in which Nikita Khrushchev first chose to offer public criticism of Stalin’s policies as the latter had “required all buildings to be neoclassical in style, with appropriate decoration”. In

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this context, concrete panel architecture, without decoration, became a symbol of the Soviet regime’s commitment to modernization in a post-­ Stalin era. A famous speech by Khrushchev, in February of 1954, thus called for the modern apartment not “to be a replica of a church or a museum” and for “[e]everything in building which can be replaced by concrete or reinforced concrete should be replaced” (cited in Forty, 2012: 151). But it was the color associations of this version of material and built modernity that, in many respects, was most telling. As Fehérváry (2013) notes in a wonderful analysis of socialist materialities, titled Politics in Colour and Concrete, it was the color gray that became “iconic” for a whole way of life under state socialism: [G]rey had come to stand in for the Eastern European material and political landscape during state socialism and remained an image the country sought to escape… Grey evoke[d] not just a landscape dominated by concrete block housing, but a whole array of impressions and sentiments. During socialist times, Western observers often involved the greyness of Eastern Europe as a shorthand for their perceptions of life behind a dark Iron Curtain, of enforced poverty and the fatigue of daily provisioning, of unsmiling salesclerks, scarce goods, and the lack of colourful advertising and commerce. In these accounts, colour often signified the pleasures and possibilities of capitalist consumption, of the freedom to express one’s style through style. (Fehérváry, 2013: 1)

The crucial part of Fehérváry’s (2013: 3) argument is that “[q]ualities of things—colours like orange and gray, substances like wood and concrete, shapes like right angles and organic curves—c[o]me to provoke affective responses to the socio-political and economic ideologies with which they [a]re aligned”. Qualia don’t always correspond across domains. But, in the case of “failed state socialism”, gray/grayness, concrete and block/right-angle architecture and party ideology did seem to coincide. It is not necessary for state socialism to be aligned with grayness and capitalism with color. These associations were contextual. Although such perceptions of the qualities of material things traded on the fact that concrete has a “tendency to lose its sparkle, often disconcertingly quickly” (Forty, 2012: 53), and, as the Collins English Thesaurus suggests, gray is a synonym for “dull… depressing, grim, discouraging, gloomy, hopeless,

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dismal, dreary, somber, unpromising, disheartening, joyless, cheerless, comfortless” (Batchelor, 2014: 64). Some of the synonyms offered above, for the color gray, have also been routinely applied to the concrete architecture of the British welfare state. In an opinion piece for the Sunday Times, former British Prime Minister David Cameron wrote of postwar social housing apartments: “step outside in the worst estates and you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers” (cited in Taylor-Foster, 2016: np). The terms that stand out, in Cameron’s architecturally reductionist formulation where buildings and physical environment seem to entrench poverty and afford criminality and drug dealing, are “concrete slabs”, “brutal, high-­ rise towers” and “dark alleyways”. The reference to the “brutal”, although rendered in the lower case and in the adjectival, is not accidental. It is a reference to the architectural style of Brutalism which, because of its use of “raw concrete”, owes its name to the French béton brut. Béton brut captured the imagination of postwar architects, planners and critics through the construction of Le Corbusier’s housing project, Unité d’Habitation, in Marseille, in 1952, a building famous for an exterior of exposed “concrete that bears the imprint of the moulding process” (Legault, 2006: 47). In the British context, Brutalism also owed its professional currency to the writings of Banham (1966). With the advent of postmodern ideas, Brutalism came to be associated with the “positivistic, technocratic, and rationalistic… identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning ideal of social orders, and the standardization of knowledge and production” (Harvey, 1989: 9). What made the links between Brutalism and critiques of modernism almost facile was the fact that, in many respects, “Brutalism was … the human face of late modernism, replacing the universalizing steel/glass box with more site specific and materially rich experience” (Watts, 2016: np). However, debates about architectural paradigms are hardly ever about ideas per se.

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Concrete Rehabilitation: Rethinking Gray, Revaluing Brutalist Buildings Nostalgia, retro and revaluation became a hallmark of late-twentieth-­ century modernity. What seemed to characterize these new sensibilities was an inclusive attitude toward materials. In some respects, nostalgia destabilizes categories such as patina and “graceful aging” as sources of modern aesthetic and economic value. As Dekkers (2000) had argued in The Way of All Flesh, decay has been at the center of value-making in modern culture—probably much more than we realize. If “a surface becomes uglier with time, it’s called rust or mildew”, whereas if it “becomes more handsome, it’s called patina” (Dekkers, 2000: 51). Similarly, our modern building materials seem to become—at least, according to some popular and mainstream professional taste—less, rather than more, valuable over time. Dekkers (2000: 51) writes: “brick and slate improve with age, so that stones from antiquity are extremely valuable; aluminium and steel become worse for wear, which is why modern buildings become less valuable with time”. But modern peoples are also bombarded with “[t]elevision programmes and magazines try[ing] to teach them the difference between junk and antiques, art and kitsch” (Dekkers, 2000: 51–52). As a result, the “boundary between” such categories is “continually shifting”, and “every so often, fashion dictates that holey jeans are hip” (Dekkers, 2000: 52). So, it is also with colors. Thus, in the wake of the fall of socialism, Fehérváry (2013) reports that an article in a Hungarian glossy lifestyle magazine caught her eye. It seemed to be attempting to “rehabilitate” gray and grayness. The article challenged the boundary between what might be considered an interesting or exciting color, and a boring or dour one: “We tend to associate grey with what is boring, but there are a thousand kinds of grey, and when combined with colors its varieties are endless,” wrote the author as she described a lush interior of multiple textures and hues of grey created by a decorating firm called Zinc. The accompanying photo featured silver frames and silvery satins, a velvet armchair in gun-­ metal grey, cola coloured pillows strewn on a soft, light grey carpet, and a lamp shade the colour of anthracite. “Just look around,” she enthused, “how these furnishings evoke the dawn fog, the rain-soaked highway, the pebbles on the lakeshore!... But here in our home [Hungary], everything

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grey is bad… dull, depressing, uninteresting. It’s time to rehabilitate grey!”. (Fehérváry, 2013: 1)

The same type of rehabilitation is being extended to concrete. One advocate for raw concrete suggests: “The uniform sobriety of concrete turns out, when you look at it more closely to conceal a subtle gamut of textures and colours, beautiful in themselves and a permanent record of how a building was made” (Calder, 2016: 5). A book, titled Concrete Poetry, is gushing and almost evangelical in its characterization: “Plastic, elastic, strong, elegant organic, graceful, powerful, clear, functional, honest, abstract, austere, rigorous, poetic… but bone-beautiful just about hits the nail on the head… Concrete offers the possibility of unlimited exploration of structure and shape” (Rollo, 2004: 28). Forty’s (2012: 280) explanation for the new interest in concrete is intra-architectural: it reflects a “reaction to post-modernism”, which had “concentrated so heavily on image and symbolism”. But while shifts in tastes and styles are interesting (and the shift to “minimalism” has generated an interesting discourse about the politics and psychology of “clutter”—see Chayka, 2020), concrete rehabilitation discourse is not just about architecture. A book titled Concrete Design (Gaventa, 2001), along with examples of famous concrete buildings, lists everyday objects made from raw concrete such as bath tubs, sinks, kitchen benches, chairs and stools, plant holders, bookshelves, dining tables and record players or turntables (the latter, designed by Ron Arad, even includes a section revealing the rusted steel used to reinforce the concrete). Concrete Design also includes a “Glossary” of concrete terminology that covers everything from “Additives” (what you add to concrete to make it stronger or to provide it with textural effects) to “Shotcrete” (a “rough, sprayed concrete” that from a distance “can resemble suede or a thick pile carpet”) and tips about how to produce certain types of concrete effects in your own domestic environment (Gaventa, 2001: 154–156). This suggests that concrete revivalism is much more than a question of architectural taste. Additionally, the revaluing of raw concrete surfaces and the Brutalist revival phenomenon also have a distinct early-twenty-first-century zeitgeist quality to them and tend to involve the kind of nostalgia for “disappearing” aspects of material culture Eastern Europeans experienced post-1989 (i.e., when their social and urban worlds seemed to be changing rapidly). As cultural sociologists who studied nostalgia in the case of socialist and postsocialist Eastern Europe have emphasized, the material

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artifacts people became nostalgic for acted as “iconic bridges” or “acceptable link[s] to the past life-world that constituted the background of people’s lives, whether they liked [that past] or not” (Bartmanski, 2011: 224). In the case of British postwar architecture and the kinds of narratives that have been generated recently, there seems to be nostalgia for a series of “lost modernities”: for the optimism of postwar reconstruction, for the color and freedom of the 60s and for a time when social housing and mass university education seemed like worthwhile national projects. This is not to suggest that Brutalism revivalism is heavy on politics. In the British context, there are critics of “austerity” and defenders of the welfare state who have started valuing Brutalist architecture and planning (Calder, 2016: 18). On the whole, however, the Brutalist architecture revival seems to entail something like a “structure of feeling” and, when it comes to the printed word, revolves around an interesting mix of memoir and cultural reflection, social history and glossy coffee-table books—for example, Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings Around the World (Beanland, 2016), a book whose simulates exposed concrete in both color and texture; Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (Calder, 2016); and This Brutal World (Chadwick, 2016), a Phaidon glossy publication featuring black and white photographs of “iconic” Brutalist buildings around the world. Many of these texts are narrated in the first person, and the author often tells the reader how they either discovered or fell in love with Brutalism. For example, Chadwick’s (2016: 9) This Brutal World remembers seeing, the now demolished, Trinity Square Car Park in Gateshead (a piece of Brutalist infrastructure made famous by the film Get Carter featuring Michael Caine), for the first time, from a train carriage en route to “Sheffield for a night of unadulterated electronic hedonism” and recounts how the Brutalism-electronic music connection stayed with him as he developed an interest in other electronica. Grindrod (2013, 2018) has written Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Post-war Britain and How to Love Brutalism. If the former could be said to have partly “bought into” the narrative of gray modernity—for example, Grindrod (2013: 14) suggests there concrete towers and postwar town planning belonged to an era of “devaluation and the Austin Maxi”—then the latter is more concerned with charting the rise of the Brutalista (i.e., the twenty-first-century Brutalism afficionado), and is written in a humorous way. How to Love Brutalism features chapter titles such as “The Soul of Brut”, “Brutal Bling”, “Lost Brutes”, “Ruined Brutes”, “Gritty Urban Decay”, “Covetable Concrete” and “Emotional

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Concrete”. Arguably, what the author is achieving through humor is charting the onset of a new sensibility, one afforded by new technologies and new consumer goods. Early on in How to Love Brutalism, Grindrod (2018: 13) ponders: “I sometimes wonder what [my friends and family] must think when a photo of yet another concrete edifice appears on my Facebook page”. Toward the end of the book, in a chapter subtitled “the Unlikely Fetishization of Brutalism”, he reports on the various types of objects, rituals and media that a Brutalista might consume, participate in or engage with in twenty-first-century Britain: Today you can buy [B]rutalist maps, badges, Christmas cards, cushions, fabric, illustrations, tote bags, T-shirts, magazines, postcards, mugs tea towels, plates, and bus-pass wallets… There is black and white photography to emphasize the monumental shapes and rough textures and colour to bring a more nostalgic, observational edge… Meanwhile, the buildings themselves are being gentrified, reclad, neglected or demolished, their fate beyond the control of the individual consumer… A more practical measure might be joining organizations such as the Twentieth Century Society, who campaign to protect them. (Grindrod, 2018: 139)

This, then, is the complex situation surrounding concrete rehabilitation and the Brutalism revival phenomenon. There is definitely retro-nostalgia and hipster consumerism going on, but there also seems to be a concern with protecting gentle, and often misunderstood, architectural giants. Concrete’s new associations are a mixture of consumerism and concern with urban heritage; lines of possible contemporary activism alongside nostalgia for a past, when modernity still seemed fresh and utopian “projects” still seemed possible.

Conclusion As I have suggested in this chapter, architectural textures embody all the ambivalences and tensions present within modernity itself. A worthwhile cultural sociology of modernity should be able to make connections between the various material and the symbolic dimensions of the built and social worlds. As per our exploration of materiality and a cultural sociology interested in meaning, narrative and iconicity, it is worth paying attention to process, time and symbolic significance. For architectural surfaces grow old, and change “face”, as they unfold across time and space, but they also

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became entangled in narratives about modern projects and aspirations. These, in turn, generate anxieties and senses of possibility. To reiterate one of Forty’s (2012: 14) central theses regarding concrete and culture: “concrete is but one symptom of our discomfort with modernity”. The recent concrete revival attests to the fact that genuine elation with modernity is possible alongside, or perhaps “after” the discomfort has subsided. In any case, more important than either despair or elation, is the intensity of affect that material surfaces engender and register. This is why surfaces are important and have so much to tell us. Architectural surfaces are like the skins of modern life: it is where we find symptoms of living as well as of aging—intimations of power and the experience of loss.

References Adams, P. C., Hoelscher, S., & Till, K. E. (2001). Place in context. In P. C. Adams, S. Hoelscher, & K. E. Till (Eds.), Textures of place (pp. xiii–xxxiii). University of Minnesota Press. Alexander, J. C. (1995). Fin de siècle Social Theory: Relativism, reduction, and the problem of reason. Verso Books. Alexander, J. C., & Smith, P. (2003) The strong program in cultural sociology: Elements of a structural hermeneutics. In The meanings of social life: A cultural sociology (pp. 11–26). Oxford University Press. Amato, J. A. (2013). Surfaces: A history. University of California Press. Bachelard, G. (1983). Water and dreams: An essay on the imagination of matter. Pegasus Foundation. Banham, R. (1966). The new brutalism: Ethic or aesthetic. Reinhold Publishing. Barthes, R. (1993). Mythologies. Vintage Books. Bartmanski, D. (2011). Successful icons of failed time: Rethinking post-­communist nostalgia. Acta Sociologica, 54(3), 213–231. Bartmanski, D. (2012). Inconspicuous revolutions of 1989: Culture and contingency in the making of political icons. In J. C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, & B.  Giesen (Eds.), Iconic power: Materiality and meaning in social life (pp. 39–65). Polity. Bartmanski, D., & Alexander, J. C. (2012). Introduction: Materiality and meaning in social life: Toward an iconic turn in cultural sociology. In J. C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, & B. Giesen (Eds.), Iconic power: Materiality and meaning in social life (pp. 1–14). Polity. Bartmanski, D., & Woodward, I. (2015). Vinyl: The analogue in the digital age. Bloomsbury. Batchelor, D. (2014). The luminous and the grey. Reaktion Books. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity.

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Beanland, C. (2016). Concrete concept: Brutalist buildings around the world. Frances Lincoln. Bodnair, J. (2001). Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of urban life. University of Minnesota Press. Cairns, S., & Jacobs, J. M. (2014). Buildings must die: A perverse view of architecture. MIT Press. Calder, B. (2016). Raw concrete: The beauty of brutalism. William Heinemann. Chadwick, P. (2016). This brutal world. Phaidon. Chayka, K. (2020). The longing for less: Living with minimalism. Bloomsbury. Clement, A. (2011). Brutalism: Post-war British architecture. Crowford Press. de la Fuente, E. (2018). Cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan surfaces. In J. Etmonspool & I. Woodward (Eds.), Cosmopolitanism, markets and consumption: A global perspective (pp. 157–181). Palgrave Macmillan. de la Fuente, E. (2019a). After the cultural turn: For a textural sociology. The Sociological Review, 67(3), 552–567. de la Fuente, E. (2019b). TANTO... QUANTO: Sobre a Necessidade de Uma Sociologia Textural Da Arte [BOTH-AND: On the need for a textural sociology of art]. CADERNO CRH, 32(87), 475–488. Dekkers, M. (2000). The way of all flesh: A celebration of decay. Harvill Press. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of the concept of pollution. Praeger. Ehland, C. (2007). Introduction: Northern England and the spaces of identity. In C. Ehland (Ed.), Thinking northern: Textures of identity in the north of England (pp. 15–32). Rodopi. Fehérváry, K. (2013). Politics in colour and concrete. Indiana University Press. Fierro, A. (2006). The glass state: The technology of the spectacle, Paris 1981–1990. MIT Press. Forty, A. (2012). Concrete and culture: A material history. Reaktion Books. Freedberg, D. (1989). The power of images: Studies in the history and theory of response. University of Chicago Press. Garrison, J. (2015). Glass. Bloomsbury Academic. Gaventa, S. (2001). Concrete design. Mitchell Beazley. Gibson, J. J. (1979). Ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin. Grindrod, J. (2013). Concretopia: A journey around the rebuilding of post-war Britain. Old Street. Grindrod, J. (2018). How to love brutalism. Batsford. Harris, N. (1999). Building lives: Constructing rites and passages. Yale University Press. Harvey, D. (1989). Condition of postmodernity. Blackwell. Harvey, P., & Cox, H. (2012). The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities, 7(4), 521–536.

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Hicks, D. (2010). The material-cultural turn: Event and effect. In D.  Hicks & M.  C. Beaudry (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of material culture studies (pp. 25–98). Oxford University Press. Higman, B. W. (2017). Flatness. Reaktion Books. Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1964). Sacrifice: Its nature and function. University of Chicago Press. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge. Jones, P. (2016). (Cultural) sociologies of architecture. In D. Inglis & A.-M. Almila (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of cultural sociology (pp. 465–480). Sage. Jones, P. (2020). Architecture, time, and cultural politics. Cultural Sociology, 14(1), 61–79. King, A. (2016). Writing the global city. Routledge. Koolhaas, R. (1994). Delirious New York: A retroactive manifesto. Monacelli Press. Landry, C. (2006). The art of city-making. Earthscan. Latour, B., & Yaneva, A. (2008). Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move: An ant’s view of architecture. In G. Reto (Ed.), Explorations in architecture (pp. 80–89). Birkhauser. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford University Press. Legault, R. (2006). The semantics of exposed concrete. In J.  L. Cohen & G. M. Moeller (Eds.), Liquid stone: New architecture in concrete (pp. 46–56). Princeton University Press. Löw, M., & Steets, S. (2014). The spatial turn and the sociology of the built environment. In S. Koniardos & A. Kyrtsis (Eds.), Routledge handbook of european sociology (pp. 211–224). Routledge. Miodownik, M. (2013). Stuff matters: The strange stories of the marvellous materials that shape our man-made world. Penguin Books. Mukerji, C. (1994). Toward a sociology of material culture: Science studies, cultural studies and the meaning of things. In D.  Crane (Ed.), The sociology of culture (pp. 143–162). Blackwell. Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science. Basic Books. Pallasmaa, J. (2014). Space, place, and atmosphere: Peripheral perception in existential experience. In C. Borch (Ed.), Architectural atmospheres: On the experience and politics of architecture (pp. 18–41). Birkhauser. Rabaté, J.-M. (2018). Rust. Bloomsbury Academic. Rollo, J. (2004). Concrete poetry: Concrete architecture in Australia. Cement Concrete and Aggregates Australia. Rubio, F. D. (2014). Preserving the unpreservable: Docile and unruly objects in MOMA. Theory and Society, 43(6), 617–645. Simmel, G. (1968). Sociological aesthetics. In The conflict in modern culture and other essays (pp. 68–80). Teachers Press.

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Taylor-Foster, J. (2016, January 13). British Prime Minister denounces ‘brutal’ sink estates. ArchDaily. Retrieved May 31, 2020, from https://www.archdaily. com/780253/british-­prime-­minister-­denounces-­brutal-­sink-­estates/ van den Hoorn, M. (2009). Indispensable eyesores: An anthropology of undesired buildings. Berghahn Books. van der Hoorn, M. (2005). 8:01AM, 20,000 people, and 450 kilograms of explosives: Elimination of the Kaiserbau as a secular sacrifice. Focaal  – European Journal of Anthropology, 46, 109–127. Verkaaik, O. (2016). Creativity and controversy in a new anthropology of buildings. Ethnography, 17(1), 135–143. Watts, O. (2016, August 3). In praise of the Sirius building, a ruined remnant of idealistic times. The Conversation. Retrieved February 21, 2020, from https:// theconversation.com/in-­praise-­of-­the-­sirius-­building-­a-­r uined-­remnant-­of-­ idealistic-­times-­63387 Winter, J. (2017). CONCRETE: Re-casting concrete. In R.  Harkness (Ed.), Knowing from the inside: An unfinished compendium of materials. University of Aberdeen. Yaneva, A. (2009). The making of a building: A pragmatist approach to architecture. Peter Lang. Yaneva, A. (2016). Mapping controversies in architecture. Ashgate. Young, J. E. (1999). Textures of memory. Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 10

The Literary Classic and the Underappreciated Significance of Indexical Expressions Alvaro Santana-Acuña

Introduction: The Classic as an Object of Sociological Study Classics of different sorts constitute a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. Many paintings, sculptures, movies, drinks, and literary works, among others, are known to us as classics. They are imagined as such by actors and organizations that had no share in their production. To explain the long-lasting value of classics, the three main approaches in the sociology of arts—art worlds (Becker, 1982), production of culture (Peterson, This is a fully revised and updated version of a section of Santana-Acuña, “How a literary work becomes a classic: The case of One Hundred Years of Solitude,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2014), Vol. 2, 1, 97–149.

A. Santana-Acuña (*) Department of Sociology, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_10

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1997), and cultural fields (Bourdieu, 1992)—have emphasized the classic’s rooting (or embeddedness) in its original context of production, that is, they highlight the people and organizations involved in the making of the classic. But these approaches have paid less attention to uprooting (or disembedding), that is, to how the cultural object transcends its original context of production and how people and organizations outside such context appropriate the object that eventually becomes a classic. Rather than focusing on a cultural object’s rooting, that is, on the study of the vernacular people and organizations that produced the object and helped circulate initially, several researchers (Hennion, 1993; Witkin, 1997; DeNora, 2000; de la Fuente, 2007; Born, 2010; Benzecry, 2011; Domínguez Rubio, 2012; Phillips, 2013; Karush, 2016; Santana-Acuña, 2020) have studied object’s uprooting. They acknowledge that, as it ages, the object is no longer subordinated to vernacular people and organizations of production. This chapter argues that the analysis of uprooting is key to explaining, first, how a cultural object survives once its original context of production disappears and, second, how the object can become valuable in the long term. This chapter analyzes how a particular type of cultural object, the literary work, manages to achieve an independent life outside its original context of production and then turns into a classic. The case study is Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

Indexical Expressions: Distinguishing Between Meaningfulness and Meaning In everyday life, rather than solid structures, people come across a vast array of small units of significance. Such units are what I call indexicals. “This,” “you,” “here,” “now,” and “the people,” among other examples, are indexical expressions. The indexical or indexical expression1 is a contextually dependent reference. Indexicals depend on the larger context in which they are uttered, not for the definition of their unequivocal meaning but for the achievement of effective communication among 1  Indexical expressions are similar to deictic expressions—words that need additional information to be understood. The main difference between them is that deictic expressions are associated with spatiotemporal references, while indexical expressions include a wider range of references (e.g., the arts). In sum, I consider deictic expressions a subcategory of indexical expressions.

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participants (Bar-Hillel, 1954; Silverstein, 1976). There are multiple types of indexicals (Fontdevila, 2010), and they can form orders (Silverstein, 2003). The use of indexical expressions is pervasive in communication. Why? As Collins (1981, pp.  1012 and 996) argues, “human cognitive capacity is limited,” and reality “is too complex for [people] to have to renegotiate all of it (or even very much of it) all the time.” For this reason, the use of indexical expressions allows people to cut, negotiate, and internalize reality into more manageable pieces (the act of abduction, that is, of producing an untested explanation for an observed phenomenon), without losing sight of larger structural principles (e.g., national cultural patterns) upon which the activity they are engaged with relies (e.g., their valuation of a literary work as classic). The use of an indexical expression does not imply a fixed meaning for what is indexed, but it makes it meaningful, that is, the indexical provides what is indexed with meaningfulness. For example, the indexical “now” is not meaningful by itself (i.e., decontextualized). However, the context in which “now” is used makes it meaningful to achieve effective communication among participants and regardless of whether they understand the exact meaning of “now” in that communicative context. What participants understand first is the meaningfulness of “now,” and this act of understanding is a practice different from the practice of meaning-­ attribution. Despite their similarities, the recognition of a cultural object’s meaningfulness and the attribution of meaning to it are different social practices. In literature, indexical expressions function in the same way as the “now” example. As with other cultural objects, indexicals from literary classics are present in everyday life. Before reading Hamlet or Don Quixote, potential readers might have encountered indexical expressions referring to these works in multiple formats (advertisements, movies, jokes, and so on), locations (shops, public transportation systems, bars, and so on), and epochs (childhood, adolescence, and so on). Having been exposed in such quotidian ways to these works before reading them, potential readers are more predisposed to accept that, for example, “to be or not to be” or Don Quixote’s fight against the windmills index in a meaningful way how individuals and social groups think and act under certain circumstances. Similarly, a wildfire in a forest can be of Dantesque proportions, people can suffer from Peter Pan syndrome or Cinderella complex, a situation can become Kafkaesque, or a government can act like Big Brother. In social interactions, these examples operate as indexical expressions whose

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unequivocal meaning remains a subject of discussion. But the meaningfulness of these expressions allows participants’ to communicate effectively about literature and other facets of daily life because they recognize such expressions as meaningful in a social interaction (Bange, 1986). The repeated use of these indexical expressions from literature and their long-­ term collective recognition creates socially shared patterns of meaningfulness that transcend the original context of production of literary works, like the ones mentioned above. Hence, these expressions are recognized as meaningful, decades or centuries later. Therefore, the stabilization of a literary work’s indexical expressions is a key factor in the process of transforming the work into a classic. This chapter examines this argument by studying indexical expressions from One Hundred Years of Solitude. I want to emphasize that the use of an indexical expression does not imply attributing a unique or fixed meaning to what is indexed. In other words, the repeated use of the indexical expressions (e.g., “to be or not to be” or “Quixotic”) manages to stabilize the collective recognition of what is indexed as meaningful beyond national or cultural boundaries, namely, this stabilization makes it possible that “to be or not to be” or “Quixotic” is recognized as an expression endowed with meaningfulness on a transnational scale, but its meaning is not stabilized. For this reason, the distinction between meaningfulness and meaning is crucial since the former precedes the latter. Effective communication is possible even if the recipient of the indexical expression (e.g., the person who hears “to be or not to be”) does not know its specific or complete meaning. But the opposite is not possible. In other words, participants in a conversation can admit that the expression “to be or not to be” is endowed with meaningfulness without agreeing on its meaning and yet are able to communicate with each other effectively. However, effective communication is impossible if the recipient of the indexical expression has not previously recognized it as meaningful (as endowed with meaningfulness). Without recognizing it as such, the recipient will not even have the option to state what the meaning of the expression is and discuss it with other participants in their communication. In short, not only is meaningfulness prior to the attribution of meaning to a cultural object, but also the latter must be meaningful before generating potential meanings. How to study the distinction between meaningfulness and meaning? This chapter chooses to use abduction. The act of abducting consists of formulating an untested explanation (or hypothesis) about an observed phenomenon. Peirce (1965), Eco (1984), and Holland (quoted in Gell,

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1998) agree that abduction needs a delimited context of rules to be effective. Within that context, abduction operates as a particular type of synthetic inference that permits participants to fill the gap between the perceived fact (e.g., to read about Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a “monstrous insect”) and the inference made by the participant seeking to grasp the meaning of such a fact (for instance, the participant’s untested explanation or hypothesis of Samsa’s transformation). As in other arenas of everyday life, abduction happens in art appreciation (e.g., the valuation of a literary work as classic) and is communicated via indexicals (Gell, 1998). In sociology (Liebes & Katz, 1990; Griswold, 1993), the distinction between meaningfulness and meaning has not been developed. Likewise, despite the contribution of ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967; Rouncefield & Tolmie, 2011), the analytical potential of indexical expressions remains untapped (Fontdevila, 2010). Sociological research is mostly concerned with demonstrating that cultural objects have multiple and changing meanings. Undoubtedly, the meaning of “Quixotic” or Ulysses’s reaction to the sirens’ song has changed over time. But what most sociological research (cf. Griswold, 1986) has not answered is the question of why 400 years or three millennia later, people living in different cultural contexts continue to recognize examples such as the ones mentioned above as meaningful. This continued use suggests that, underneath the shifting layers of a cultural object’s meanings, there is the solid basis that I call meaningfulness. The multiple layers of an object’s meaning (e.g., a literary work) are built on this more solid basis beyond meaning, which has begun to attract the attention of sociology in the previous decade (de la Fuente, 2007; Godart & White, 2010; Domínguez Rubio, 2012; Griswold et  al., 2013; Levitt, 2015; Childress, 2017; Thumala Olave, 2018). Ultimately, sociological analysis needs to distinguish between meaningfulness and meaning to explain the resilience of cultural objects such as classics.

Methods and Data Research took place at Harvard University (United States), University of La Laguna (Spain), Luis Ángel Arango (Colombia) libraries, and France’s National Library. It relied on primary and secondary sources selected from the catalogs of the libraries—ProQuest.com, Google.com, LexisNexis. com—and the five bibliographical guides to García Márquez, which contain over 4900 items and cover the period 1947–2007 (Fau, 1980; Fau &

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González, 1986; González, 1994, 2003, n.d.). In addition, I collected data from readers’ comments on six continents (more on this below). The data examine how, between 1967 and 2020, six types of audiences or publics have indexed four elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude, endowing them with meaningfulness beyond specific national and cultural boundaries and, at the same time, without agreeing on the exact meaning of each element. The six audiences are writers, artists, critics, scholars, public figures, and common readers. The four elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude are Macondo (the novel’s setting), the novel’s opening sentence, Remedios’s ascent to heaven (this element served to jointly analyze a character and an event), and the novel’s genre (magical realism).2 To reconstruct the uprooting of One Hundred Years of Solitude from its original context of production,3 this chapter offers as evidence a transnational sample of actors, organizations, countries, and formats. The result is that evidence about indexical expressions linked to these four elements comprises 56 countries and 26 languages. It was produced by the abovementioned six audiences in up to 11 different formats (from printed to audiovisual to digital sources). For information from common readers, I used an underexploited source: comments and reviews posted between 1996 and 2020 in Goodreads (the world’s largest platform for book recommendations with over 90 million registered users and entries for 2.6 billion books) and eight online bookstores: Barnes & Noble (United States), Feltrinelli (Italy), la Casa del Libro (Spain), FNAC (France, Portugal, and Spain), Gandhi (Mexico), Tematika (Argentina), Ozon (Russia), and Amazon stores in 18 countries.4 The credibility of readers’ comments posted on online bookstores and platforms is debatable. Although I discarded doubtful data, it is important to point out two things. First, selected comments were written by readers 2  Other elements are the galleon abandoned in the jungle, José Arcadio’s long penis, the four-year-long rain, Mauricio Babilonia and his yellow butterflies, the insomnia plague, the banana strike and massacre of banana workers, the priest’s levitations, and the novel’s ending. 3  The novel’s original context of production included the writer Gabriel García Márquez, his contemporary peers in literature, literary agent Carmen Balcells, publishers Sudamericana and Seix Barral, contemporary literary critics and scholars, and the first generation of readers. More than half a century after the novel’s publication in 1967, its original context of production has basically disappeared (Santana-Acuña, 2020). 4  Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus the store Amazon en español.

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in 21 countries and over 25 years (having favored as much transnational diversity as possible during the selection) and, second, even anonymous, ill-intentioned comments as well as fake book reviews are also culturally patterned practices, and thus they are quite relevant sociologically because they help a work be more or less meaningful than others and, in the long term, to be indexed as a classic. Furthermore, as a source, readers’ comments have the added value of offering a more holistic and less authoritative understanding of the transformation of a work into a classic, since it shows that the opinion of literary and academic critics does not monopolize such transformation (an important approach in literary and sociological studies (Chong, 2020)). But as this chapter shows, common readers and even nonreaders (people who talk about a book withouth having read it) (Santana-Acuña, 2020) play a key and yet understudied role in a literary work’s attainment of classic status. Finally, the broader goal in collecting evidence about the four elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude was to identify what patterns of meaningfulness emerge when a literary work is received across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. The existence of these patterns showed that multiple audiences come to consider an element of the book as meaningful despite disagreeing about its meaning. For this reason, it is necessary to distinguish between meaningfulness and meaning, because they are two interrelated but different social practices, and, as this chapter claims, they are analytically separable.

Indexical Expressions and Patterns of Meaningfulness in One Hundred Years of Solitude How can a cultural object acquire meanings that transcend those envisioned by its creator and that even go beyond the meanings available in the original context of production of that object? This section studies (1) how four elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude—despite their changing, contested, and contradictory meanings—have gained meaningfulness across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries from 1967 to 2020 and (2) how these elements have become indexical expressions that six audiences in 56 countries have used to stabilize the literary value of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a classic. The analysis of the trajectory of each element for more than half a century permitted to isolate four patterns of meaningfulness: lived experience, universalization, artistic commensuration, and entrenched criticism. Lived

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experience means the use that transnational audiences make of the elements in the novel to refer to situations of everyday life, current affairs, and so on. People can also index elements from One Hundred Years of Solitude to make statements that supposedly have universal resonance. This is the pattern of universalization.5 Another pattern, artistic commensuration, consists of comparing elements in the novel to those in other cultural goods (especially, other classics). And the last pattern, entrenched criticism, is one of the most understudied characteristics of classics. This pattern reveals how audiences index a work’s elements with the goal of expressing their negative opinions about such work. This pattern is particularly revealing because it demonstrates that sustained “negative attention can be reputation-building” (Collins & Guillén, 2012, p. 539), and thus it can be pivotal to stabilize a cultural object’s meaningfulness in the long term. By now, One Hundred Years of Solitude has generations of people who truly despise it. Consequently, entrenched criticism is key to stabilizing the long-lasting value of a cultural object and not just, as is customary to believe, continued praise.6 It is worth pointing out that the indexical analysis about One Hundred Years of Solitude is primarily concerned with identifying agreements about meaningfulness surrounding four elements in the novel, despite the existence of disagreements about their meanings. The goal is to demonstrate that the multiple meanings of these elements can develop and accumulate over time and across space thanks to the existence of a solid basis of meaningfulness. Consequently, the four elements have become not only intrinsic qualities of the novel, but also extrinsic; that is, audiences (common readers, scholars, literary critics, writers, public figures, and organizations) unrelated to the novel’s original context of production use these elements to make sense of literature and other areas beyond literature. 5  This chapter does not argue that classics are so because they have a universal meaning. On the contrary, the fact that an object is classified as universal is the result of cultural conventions shared by a historically situated community (Santana-Acuña, 2020). This process of universalization requires a historical and sociological analysis, like the one offered here. 6  Along with admirers and fans, authors and classics have declared enemies. For example, Voltaire and Tolstoy harshly (and famously) criticized Shakespeare and his plays Hamlet and King Lear. Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf also voiced their negative views of Shakespeare and some of his plays. Not only famous writers but also common readers contribute to entrenched criticism. In platforms such as Goodreads.com, they have written criticism, sometimes cruel, about the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, The Trial, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, among other works (Hancock Rubio, 2015; Foreman, 2016).

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Macondo: A Fictional Colombian Village Becomes Universal Over half a century, audiences on six continents have imagined the meaning of Macondo in multiple and opposite ways. Yet these different meanings have made the village at the center of the novel more meaningful over the decades, as showed by the patterns of lived experience, universalization, artistic commensuration, and entrenched criticism. Lived Experience Multiple audiences have used Macondo to index current events. US scholar Peter Earle [1981]7 indexed Macondo to express his views on the fate of Latin America in the 1980s, when dictatorships and rising violence spread across the region. Similarly, Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez [1992] reported that a Sandinista guerrilla leader used Macondo as his war name in the 1980s, when the violent clashes between the Sandinistas and the Contras surged. Japanese writer Kōbō Abe [1983] also helped uproot the vernacular meaning of Macondo by saying, Macondo “is no longer a [Latin American] region but has become a contemporary question.” Jo Durden-Smith [1994], an English filmmaker living in Russia after the fall of communism, renamed Moscow as “Moscow-Macondo.” For him, the capital of the recently created Russian Federation was “the theater of the absurd on the Moscow River.” This pattern—citing Macondo to index events with global resonance— has continued in the twenty-first century. In 2010, as the media reported widely, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened in the “Macondo well” [2010 and 2013], which was named as such by a group of engineers in a BP facility in Texas in 2008. A few years later, Orhan Miroğlu [2014], a Turkish politician of Kurdish descent, wrote a column for the newspaper Star, titled “Armenians, Macondo village, and centuries of solitude.” He claimed that the insomnia plague that affected the inhabitants of Macondo affects the Turkish government, too. He criticized Prime Minister Erdoğan for forgetting the death of thousands of Armenians in 1915, regarded as one of the first modern genocides. In 2020, when the Covid-19 virus began to quickly spread worldwide and millions of people found 7  Citations and years in brackets refer to data from the data set that I collected for the elements under analysis between 1967 and 2020. Due to lack of space in this chapter, I only indicate basic information about the authorship behind each reference to the elements in the novel. For the full database, go to: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dmmKquw3ZJPG 1eEVK0sbpulZysZ4FQjU

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themselves in mandatory confinement at home, One Hundred Years of Solitude reappeared on bestseller lists around the world. Mass media recommended the novel as an essential lockdown reading, and people on social media found similarities between the coronavirus pandemic and the insomnia plague that infected Macondo. As García Márquez’s son Rodrigo [2020] put it in an opinion column for The New York Times, “Not a day goes by that I don’t come across a reference to…the insomnia pandemic in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.” Among hundreds of thousands of activities canceled by the global lockdown caused by the pandemic was the annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, of the “macondistas,” the members of the Macondo Writers Workshop (founded in 1995 by MexicanAmerican writer Sandra Cisneros). Macondistas’ meetings seek to foster “a global sense of community” through creative writing (Wikipedia, 2020). Also, writers, common readers, public figures, and organizations have indexed Macondo as if it were a real place. So did, for example, Spanish writer Benet [1969], French politician François Mitterrand [1975], an anonymous Amazon Canada reader [2002], and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes [1976]. The latter asked, “Who has not found in the genealogy of Macondo, his grandmother, his girlfriend, his brother, his nanny?” Since 2019, Macondo is also a real place outside the Earth. The International Astronomical Union named star HD 93083 after Macondo, and its satellite HD 93083 b is named Melquíades, the character who, in the novel, “orbits” the village (NameExoWorlds, 2020). For others, the fictional village is a space to escape from reality, with one’s imagination, as Ukrainian reader Natalia did [2001]. It can also be a travel destination; Waldo’s [2015], a travel agency in Suriname, advertised Colombia as the location of Macondo, at the center of the “magical universe of García Márquez,” and said that “coming to Colombia is discovering a whole new world.” The meaningfulness of Macondo is present in objects, material and immaterial. Macondo is the name of a Venezuelan liquor made since the 1970s, a Spanish tarot [1999], the Latin American literary movementMcOndo [1996], a publishing venture [1998] that twenty years later also became the Macondo Foundation, a global nonprofit organization with a focus on environmental protection, and a soccer ball used for over three years by the Colombian National Football Team during the 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifying matches (Pizarro, 2011). Famously, Macondo is the name of a song as well as a telling example of how people appropriate the contents of a cultural object. Composed in 1969 by Peruvian Daniel Camino Diez-Canseco as a cumbia song (a popular music and dance in

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Latin America), “Macondo” retells the story of the village and its main characters: José Arcadio, Aureliano, Remedios, Amaranta, Melquíades, and Mauricio Babilonia and his yellow butterflies. Famous interpreters across the region have sung it: Johnny Arce (Peru), Óscar Chávez, Rigo Tovar and Costa Azul, and Celso Piña (Mexico), Los Hispanos orchestra (Colombia), and the salsa orchestra Billo’s Caracas Boys (Venezuela). The latter orchestra made a popular version thanks to which the events of Macondo and its main characters “entered through the ears, at parties and dances in the 1970s, to Venezuelans and Colombians who had not yet read One Hundred Years of Solitude” (Zapata, 2007, p. 77). Billo’s Caracas Boys toured other countries of Latin America and Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, with “Macondo” in its repertoire. In sum, audiences outside the original context of production of One Hundred Years of Solitude consider that the use of Macondo as an indexical expression is a meaningful way of communicating information about current affairs and the naming of everyday objects. Universalization Macondo has become a (contentious) indexical of the history of mankind. This use occurs when audiences uproot references to Macondo from its original literary context (the novel is set in Colombia’s Caribbean region) and next they universalize the village when talking about it. Already in the early 1970s, rather than a fictional Colombian village, for US critic Alfred Kazin [1972], Macondo is the place “through which all history will pass.” For English scholar James Higgins [1990], it is “a microcosm of a larger world.” For Hungarian translator Vera Székács [1997], Macondo “is eternal.” Not only critics but also common readers have said that Macondo is a “microcosm of human history,” as Amazon Japan reader Kotaro Minami posted online [2008].8 Scholars have used the fictional story of Macondo as if it were real history. In Imagined Communities (published in 1983 and reissued in 1991 and 2006), an influential book on nationalism that has sold over a quarter of a million copies worldwide, China-born, Irish historian Benedict Anderson cited Macondo to indicate how the village’s fictional story exemplified the actual geographical isolation of many parts of Latin America. Finally, another telling example of universalization is the 8  Similar evidence about the universalization of Macondo was found for years 1971, 1978, 2006, 2007, and 2012.

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adjective macondiano (Macondian) that has entered into language and is spreading (Barcia, 2007). For Colombian politician G. Bell Lemus [2000], macondiano is “a universal adjective, such as Quixotic and Kafkaesque.” Whereas some media, like Taiwanese news media site The Storm [2019], claim that simply “Márquez fictionalized his hometown of Aracataca in the town of Macondo,” others have added to Macondo’s meaningfulness by opposing universalization and claiming that the place is simply “a tiny, fictional Colombian town,” as pointed out by Canadian editor Caitlin Kelly [1980], just like English writer Angela Carter [1982] and German scholar Vera Kutzinski [1985]. So did the Herald [2018], Zimbabwe’s largest newspaper with a circulation of five million, in a piece about the greatest books ever written. This piece used as its source not an African publication but the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is a sign of how not one but several people and organizations can mediate readers’ access to information about One Hundred Years of Solitude. Artistic Commensuration Over the years, the uniqueness of Macondo in the history of literature has been a meaningful subject of debate. For US scholar, José Saldívar [1991], “nothing like Macondo appears in world literature” and for Mexican-­ American writer Ilan Stavans [1993], the place is “a landmark.” For others, on the contrary, Macondo has clear similarities to modernist classics Ulysses, The Waves, or Absalom, Absalom!, according to US scholar Morton Levitt [1986], and to the story of Ancient Greek heroes “the Argonauts,” according to Swiss scholar Siebenmann [1988]. Furthermore, as early as 1968, audiences started to debate Macondo’s links to other classic literary settings, such as Marcel Proust’s Combray, according to French journalist Philippe Lançon [2003]; the Megalokastro of Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis and the Kfaryabda of Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, according to Australian writer Renee Bittoun [1995]; and especially Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. On this Faulknerian connection, for Juan Bosch [1968], a Dominican Republic politician, Macondo “has nothing to do with Yoknapatawpha”; for Italian scholar Darío Puccini [1989], Macondo “might suggest Faulkner’s ‘nearby’ Yoknapatawpha County”; and for US writer David Young and scholar Keith Hollaman [1984], “the relations between Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and García Márquez’s Macondo are fascinating to contemplate.” Over the years and across different audiences, a pattern of meaningfulness has established and made Macondo commensurate to Yoknapatawpha [1987]. And this keeps occurring in the

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twenty-­first century, even if the meaning of that commensuration remains contested among transnational audiences. The connections between Macondo and Yoknapatawpha attracted the attention of Catholic writer Juan Manuel de Prada [2017], who wrote for L’Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the Pope’s Vatican City State: “The creation of Macondo itself could not be understood without the antecedent of Yoknapatawpha.” Despite being a Catholic newspaper, de Prada’s piece on the novel was not about its relationship with a religious text. The year before, on the contrary, Ríkisútvarpið [2016], the National Broadcasting Service of Iceland (a majority Lutheran country), selected One Hundred Years of Solitude as book of the week. This national media company stressed the connection between Macondo and the Book of Genesis. Finally, as Yoknapatawpha served as inspiration for García Márquez, so did Macondo for future writers. For example, the spelling and sound of a character’s name in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon [1977] recalls that of Macondo: Macon Dead III. Entrenched Criticism Since the 1970s, by questioning Macondo’s “reality,” “universal” reach, or literary value, detractors keep contributing to its stability as an indexical. For instance, Colombian critic Mejía Duque [1973] referred to “the plague of macondism,” and, four decades later, an anonymous Barnes & Noble reader [2005] concluded that Macondo “is clearly a world readers fail to directly relate to.” In conclusion, while Macondo keeps generating meanings that are multiple, shifting, and controversial, audiences foreign to the original context of production of One Hundred Years of Solitude have come to agree that indexing Macondo is meaningful. This practice is a collectively sanctioned and recognized way of conveying meaningful information beyond cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries about lived experiences, artistic value, and themes perceived as having universal reach. An Imitated Opening: “Many Years Later, as He Faced the Firing Squad…” Lived Experience The opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude reads, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” For some

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audiences, rephrasing this sentence has become the best way of sharing with other people memorable life experiences. For example, Canadian critic Geoff Hancock [1986] compared his discovery of the totem poles in Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, to Colonel Buendía’s discovery of ice. Others prefer to index the opening by recalling when they first read it. For Rob Crawford [2011], an Amazon UK customer from France, it “became a touchstone in my memory 36 years ago.” So felt US writer Stephen Koch [1976] after an editor said to him: “Read the first sentence. Just the first sentence.” He did and wrote, “I remember it still.” Others summarized their amazement about the opening in one or two words: “superb,” for the anonymous Time magazine reviewer [1970], “arresting,” for US scholar Brian Conni [1990], or “immortal,” for English journalist Ed King [2008]. Others recall that the opening is written to “trick readers,” in the opinion of the US scholar E. Waters Hood [1993], to disorient them, according to Irish scholar Patrick O’Neill [1994], or to catch them: “I was absolutely hooked,” wrote P. Sadler, an Amazon UK reader [2010]. Others, in trying to recall the opening, make mistakes, such as Philippine businessman Antonio R. Samson [1999], for whom the discovery was not about ice: “I look forward already to…relive the trip to that mythical village of Macondo and the first experience of ice cream.” And for others, this sentence is an opportunity to honor people different from García Márquez. In 2016, The New York Times turned its obituary of the novel’s translator Gregory Rabassa into a lengthy explanation of his craftsmanship when translating the opening. The obituary [2016] explained why Rabassa preferred “firing squad” over “firing party,” “remember” over “recall,” “discover ice” over “know ice” or “experience ice,” and “distant” over “remote.” Universalization Although the opening remains a meaningful transnational reference, understanding its meaning has prompted multiple interpretations using different approaches that have nothing in common with the novel’s original context of production. The meaning of the opening sentence is Freudian according to Argentine scholar Josefina Ludmer [1972], semiotic according to Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov [1978], religious for Romanian scholar C.-A.  Mihailescu [2003], postmodern for Canadian scholar John Moss [1985], and cinematic according to Italian writer Elena Clementelli [1974]. Furthermore, German writer U. M. Saine [1984] and South African writer André Brink [1998], respectively, found connections

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between the opening and the theory of relativity: “the inability to tell…space from time, which is characteristic of relativity [shows] on the first page of the novel” and “Just as Einstein invented, from the old Newtonian categories of time and space, the new concept of spacetime, Márquez here establishes his own distinctive language-time.” Contrary to such interpretations, scholars, critics, and writers in Uruguay, Colombia, United States, Trinidad and Tobago, England, Belgium, Hungary, and former Czechoslovakia [1969, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1983, 1988, 1989, 2009] preferred to stick to more descriptive meanings of the opening, such as “the narrator involves us in three aspects of time” or “performs the simultaneity of three time levels.” Celebrities have contributed to the universalization of the opening, too. US talk show host and television producer Oprah Winfrey [2004] presented it to the hundreds of thousands of readers of her book club as “one of the most fabulous openers in the history of literature.” An anonymous Amazon UK reader [2000] had a similar opinion four years earlier: “One of the best and most memorable opening sentences in literature.” And US writer Eric Ormsby [2005] concluded, “it seems always to have existed, in precisely those words, in our own English tongue.” In so doing Ormsby uprooted the opening from its Spanish linguistic context and contributed to manufacturing its universal value. Other people and organizations also index the opening on special occasions, further contributing to uprooting the opening. A month after García Márquez’s passing, 20 Minutes [2014], a daily newspaper distributed for free among public transportation commuters in at least ten of France’s biggest cities, published a piece on the extraordinary success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The piece informed the newspaper’s over one million readers, “in Latin America, readers know the sentence by heart.” Sometimes the audience is smaller and more limited. 65ymás.com [2019], a Spanish digital newspaper for those aged sixty-five years or more, started the article “García Márquez: el hombre que reinventó la literatura” by citing the opening as capital to his reinvention of literature. Artistic Commensuration Critics as well as writers and artists seeking a professional reputation have imitated the novel’s opening sentence, contributing to stabilize its long-­ term meaningfulness. Imitation is pervasive across major and lesser-known literary works and even films. Early in his career, British Indian writer Salman Rushdie [1981] emulated it in the first chapter of Midnight’s

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Children, the novel that brought him international commercial success and professional recognition, starting with the prestigious Booker Prize. His sentence reads: “Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple of the hill, he would try to recall his childhood springs in Paradise.” Chilean Isabel Allende [1982], at the time an unknown writer, also imitated it in the last pages of her breakthrough and best-selling novel The House of the Spirits: “At the end of his life, when his ninety years had turned him into a twisted fragile tree, Esteban Trueba would recall those moments with his granddaughter as the happiest of his whole existence.” Allie Fox, the main character in Paul Theroux’s novel The Mosquito Coast (1981), is a brilliant inventor, like Colonel Buendía’s father in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fox decides to move with his family from the United States to the jungle in Central America. During a key scene about the fabrication of ice in the jungle, Fox famously says, “Ice is civilization.” The Mosquito Coast became an international bestseller, won multiple awards, and was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster in 1986, with Harrison Ford in the leading role and scriptwriter Paul Schrader (author of Taxi Driver’s screenplay). In his review for The New York Times, critic John Leonard (1982, p. C–31) wrote that the main character reminded him of “Lord Jim, John Galt, Henderson the Rain-King, Ahab, and one of the crazier Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez, remember, had ice in his tropics).” The similarities between this novel and The Mosquito Coast remain a subject of discussion on social media on whether Theroux plagiarized García Márquez’s text (Santana-­ Acuña, 2020). In another contemporary film, Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), the main character presented a block of ice to the leader of the Jivaros tribe. Its members took the ice as a sign of the white man’s magic. In his movie review for the local newspaper, The Stanford Daily, reviewer Steve Vineberg (1982, p. 10) criticized the “scene (perhaps inspired by a marvelous incident in García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude) [because it] has no climax.” The opening has also motivated aspiring artists. Maryam Pajotan [2007], an Iranian BBC News reader, confessed that if she ever writes a book, “it will start by saying: ‘And a hundred years later’.” In addition, different audiences across cultural regions have compared this opening to ones of literary and nonliterary classics. For US writer John Barth [1980], it is comparable to the opening sentences of Anna Karenina and Finnegans Wake; the oldest operating bookstore in the

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world, Livraria Bertrand [2013] in Lisbon, Portugal, founded in 1732, compares it to “the celebrated…opening words of Don Quixote or In Search of Lost Time”; for an anonymous Amazon UK reader [1997], the opening “is almost a ‘Ben Hur’ effect”; for US scholar Michael G. Cooke [1987], it is a “Virgilian scene,” and his colleague Matthew J. McDonough [1991] compares it to Don Quixote; for Italian scholar Franco Moretti [1996], the opening functions as a Wagnerian leitmotif in The Ring of the Nibelung or in Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, commensuration has also transcended the artistic arena: Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas [1968] and English scholar Robin W. Fiddian [1995] have stressed the opening’s biblical connotations: “begins with a paradise-like vision of the world” and “mimic[s] the idea of Creation at the very moment that the narrative process of the text gets underway.” Entrenched Criticism Along with unconditional admirers, the opening has also had, over the decades, its share of detractors. Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo [2002] asked, “Where is the originality?” For him, the novel simply begins by saying, “One hundred years later, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that time.” And Goodreads reviewer Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis [2017] wrote, “One hundred years of reading the opening paragraph over and over,” in reference to how boring the novel was, and he wondered why the author received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Remedios’s Ascent to Heaven: Indexing a Character and a Literary Event In Chapter 12 of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Remedios the Beauty and two other women were folding sheets in the garden of the Buendía house when, suddenly, Remedios rose to the sky and disappeared forever. Despite disagreements among fans and scholars about the origins of this event and what it really means, it has become one of the novel’s most stable indexicals over time and globally. Since the novel’s publication in 1967, García Márquez has insisted that Remedios’s ascent was not a supernatural event. Rather, it was based upon a real local story: a girl eloped with her lover (García Márquez & Vargas Llosa, 1968). The novel itself clearly mentions it a few sentences after she supposedly ascended: “The outsiders, of course, thought that Remedios the Beauty had finally succumbed to her irrevocable fate of a queen bee

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and that her family was trying to save her honor with that tale of levitation.” In the real case, to avoid the mockery of the community, the girl’s family proclaimed publicly that she ascended to heaven. For a reader sharing the cultural code of García Márquez’s Caribbean region in Colombia, the vernacular meaning of Remedios’s ascent is clear: she ran away with a lover. This is the meaning that Germán Arciniegas [1992], a historian from Bogotá, Colombia’s inland capital, found by interviewing a neighbor from García Márquez’s hometown in Aracataca, located in the Caribbean area of the country. The historian asked her: “You believed that Remedios ascended, right?” But the neighbor replied that García Márquez was a “liar,” denying that the ascension was the real story. The neighbor’s reaction suggests that the vernacular meaning of this literary event has not escaped locals. It has also not escaped some experts on One Hundred Years of Solitude, such as English scholar Michael Wood [1990] and German translator Dagmar Ploetz [2000]. But this local meaning has escaped most readers outside Caribbean Colombia, that is, outside the vernacular geographical region of One Hundred Years of Solitude. For instance, US critic John Leonard went as far as to state, “I believe [in] Remedios the Beauty, plucked up by the wind and flown to God” [1970]. Since the early 1970s, foreign audiences have indexed Remedios’s ascent differently, giving it multiple meanings that have uprooted the interpretation of the character and the event from the novel’s original context of production. For Spanish scholar María E.  Montaner [1987], she does not go up but “stays on earth.” For Mexican writer Guillermo Samperio [1997], her ascension was necessary “for the salvation of the family.” For Cuban scholar E. Camayd-Freixas [1998], “the loss of virginity is represented by the opposite.” And for US scholar Shannin Schroeder [2004], aware of the importance of alchemy in the novel, her ascension “coincides with the stage of alchemy where metals and the soul begin their ascent toward gold.” For writers, scholars, and common readers in Catholic countries like Spain, Peru, and Italy [1978, 1984, 2008], Remedios’s ascent indexes a famous religious scene: the Assumption of the Virgin. And even in this case, there is no agreement about the meaning of the event among readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The reference to the Virgin’s ascent is “ironic,” according to Belgian scholar Jacques Joset [1980]; it is “parody,” as claimed by the Director of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language Víctor de la Concha [2007]; or a literary version “of popular depictions of the event in religious prints,” for a Cuban scholar [1982]. Despite being so rooted in the Catholic tradition,

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this event is also meaningful among non-Christian readers. In the eighteenth-­century Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, the character Qin Keqing is a beautiful woman who also exits the novel mysteriously (Zeng, 2009). Unlike the previous cases, Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán [2014] took another approach. For him, the real question is not why Remedios ascends to the sky but rather “where she goes after reaching cruising altitude.” He asked this question in a piece published in O Globo, one of Brazil’s leading print and digital newspapers, which selected seven writers to recreate the stories of García Márquez for Brazilian readers. Lived Experience For some readers, Remedios is above all meaningful because she brings back the memories of personal experiences. “I always tell my twelve-yearold daughter that she reminds me of Remedios the Beauty,” commented Giselle Díaz [2002], a customer of Casa del libro bookstore in Spain. Colombian writer, Santiago Gamboa [2013] claimed that tourists would feel Remedios’s presence when visiting the town of Aracataca, which served as inspiration for the novel: “the literary ghosts of Úrsula Iguarán or Remedios the Beauty arise.” In recalling the event, US knitting pattern designer Nikol Lohr [2012] had to admit her failing memory: “I very distinctly remembered Remedios the Beauty ascending through a hole in the bathroom roof after her bath, surrounded and carried of by a cloud of yellow butterflies. I was a little surprised to read it again and discover how wrong I’d gotten it.” In the months leading up to the global outbreak of the #MeToo movement, Nadia Celis [2017], a Colombian scholar based in the United States, declared that the ascent is not “the climax of her purity, but her flight from a world that could not accept her being free.” Remedios had to leave to avoid being the victim of sexual violence, Celis concluded. Finally, other audiences used her ascent to make sense of García Márquez’s own lived experiences. Argentine critic Tomás Eloy Martínez (quoted in Martin, 2009, p.  309) referred to one such experiences in recalling the writer’s success in 1967, after the novel’s publication in Buenos Aires. “[García Márquez and his wife] were about to sit down when someone shouted ‘Bravo!’ and broke into applause. A woman echoed the shout. ‘For your novel!’ she said. The entire theater stood up. At that precise moment I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beauty.”

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Universalization Information on the universality of Remedios’s ascent is not abundant compared to previous indexical expressions—perhaps due to the unusual characteristics of the event. But references to it can be found across audiences and national boundaries. For US writer Paul Hedeen [1983], her ascension symbolizes the “revolt against the day to day relinquishing of individuality to the drab commonality of solitude.” For Ecuadorian scholar H. E. Robles [1985], the event can be understood as part of a longer literary tradition that acknowledges people’s understanding of such kind of events as supposedly having a pseudo-providential foundation: “[García Márquez] is rendering one more version of a myth intelligible only through faith.” For Peruvian critic G. Faberón-Patriau [2003], her ascent represents “the fatality of beauty,” as if the event functioned as a universal principle. Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s most read newspapers, shared a similar idea with its half a million readers. The author of the piece, writer Romana Petri [2015], said that Remedios was a “cruel beauty.” Artistic Commensuration This pattern of meaningfulness yielded numerous results, ranging from ancient and modern literary classics to contemporary painting. For US critic William Plummer [1976], Remedios’s ascent refers to Eula’s abduction in Faulkner’s The Hamlet. For Canadian scholar Amaryll Chanady [1986], it is a transformation comparable to that of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. For Korean scholar Byung-Joo Park [1989], the sheets that surround Remedios as she ascended “remind us of the flying carpets in One Thousand and One Nights.” For Mexican scholar Ignacio Sánchez Prado [2019], “a similar scene happens in Recollections of Things to Come” by Mexican writer Elena Garro. Beyond literature, a Venezuelan journalist claimed that Remedios is similar to the Mona Lisa (Zapata, 2007, p. 132), and for Uruguayan critic C. Martínez Moreno, the event is described “as if we have in front of our eyes a Chagall canvas” [1969]. Remedios’s fate has become a meaningful artistic theme that continues to inspire new visual artists and musicians globally. For example, graphic designer Andrés Marquínez’s “La ascensión” (Colombia, 1999), graphic designer Claire Niebergall’s “Remedy V” (United States, 2011), illustrator David Merta’s “Remedios the Beauty” (Slovakia, 2012), guitarist Bill Frisell’s song “Remedios the Beauty” (United States, 1988), and Modena City Rambler’s song “Remedios la bella” (Italy, 1997).

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Finally, there have been efforts to make Remedios real on the screen. For instance, in 2018, user Giuliana HMA posted on YouTube a comment about a short film adaptation of Remedios’s story done by a group of Colombian students: “the girl is attractive but she does not fit my image of Remedios the Beauty,” and for that reason, she thought, the screen adaptation fails to convince viewers that eventually she could fly to the sky. Other people have tried to simulate Remedios’s ecstatic experience by other means. For example, “Rumedios” was the name of a refreshing tropical alcoholic drink served to one thousand guests in Austin, Texas, during the opening of the Harry Ransom Center’s international exhibition on García Márquez’s life and works [2020]. Entrenched Criticism Whereas for Spanish scholar and writer Juan Manuel García Ramos [2016], the ascent of Remedios “is the most poetic episode of the entire work of García Márquez,” entrenched criticism surrounding this event is common across audiences. For many of its detractors, her ascension is clearly an example of Macondism. This word refers to a stereotypical view of Latin America and its peoples as an undeveloped land where magic and tradition rule over reason and progress. Indeed, non-Latin American audiences have produced clichéd views about this novel by referring to specific situations in the novel as they were part of widespread behavior in the region. According to US writer Thomas Pynchon [1988], “folks routinely sail through the air” in One Hundred Years of Solitude. So claims US scholar A.  Kim Robertson [1996]: “Virgin beauties [ascend] to heaven with the sheets of the house.” The next step is to generalize from this novel to “colonize” the reality of Latin America, as critics of magical realism continue to denounce (see section on magical realism [1981]). Entrenched criticism is equally present in the debate about whether Remedios’s ascent is “the best of the book,” as put by an anonymous Casa del Libro reader in Spain [2006] or the worst. For example, it “is not acceptable,” according to Spanish scholar O. Carreras González [1974]; “the weakest aspects of his technique—the flying carpets, the sudden ascents to heaven,” according to US writer Michael Greenberg [2009]; “totally out of place,” for Jamrock, an Amazon reader in England [2010]; and “it would not occur to me to ascend a character [to heaven],” in the opinion of Argentine writer Andrés Neuman [2011]. Critics have also disapproved of the event for not being original in literary terms, as argued by Argentine critic Agustín F. Seguí [1994]. Furthermore, even those who

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share García Márquez’s Caribbean cultural background have criticized the ascent, including his mother Luisa Santiaga Márquez (quoted in Santana-­ Acuña, 2020, p.  249). She questioned the most basic fact: the real Remedios the Beauty was, she said, “very ugly.” Magical Realism: Universalizing a Literary Genre The globalization of magical realism has been key to uprooting One Hundred Years of Solitude from its original context of production. Across nations, languages, and cultures (and at least since the early 1980s), literary critics and common readers started to use the expression magical realism in reference to a genre that is supposed to give access to a deeper understanding of reality and human nature (Siskind, 2014). Lived Experience For Soviet Union critic V.  Andreev [1983], the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude “reflect[s] exactly the magic of real life”; for an anonymous Amazon UK reader [1999], the style of the novel is “a magic way to summarize the story of humanity”; and for an anonymous client of French bookseller FNAC [2004], it captures “a world very similar to ours.” Martin Elfert [2016], a Canadian priest in Vancouver, British Columbia, reacted the same way. He found in the magical realism of García Márquez (not in a religious sacred text), the words he was looking for to make sense of the fact that in the morning “a man took a dump in the church garden.” And he preached these words to his online community on Facebook. When he saw the man, “I remembered immediately…the ambiguous or blurred relationship between the real and the metaphorical.” In 2020, as hundreds of fires were spreading out of control throughout Australia during the bushfire season, local volunteer firefighter and novelist Jennifer Mills [2020] wrote that, for writers interested in “climate fiction,” magical realism gives them narrative tools but “the Anthropocene brings its own challenges.” Universalization In the novel’s early years, critics, scholars, peer writers, and journalists only referred to the fusion of magic and reality in One Hundred Years of Solitude (so did Spanish critic Dámaso Santos [1968]) and to the genre’s precise geographical location: Latin America (so did Mexican journalist Francisco Cervantes [1970]). This indexical usage remains stable, as shown by

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references of journalists, scholars, and readers in Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, Argentina, Paraguay, and Spain [1976, 1982, 1988, 1994, 1996, 1997]. However, since the mid-1970s, there has also been a tendency to uproot García Márquez’s writing style from its original context of production. This uprooting was a preliminary step to universalize his style. For instance, theologian T. Aparicio López [1980] connected magical realism to previous Latin American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, while Spanish critic José Antonio de Castro [1972] found traces of magical realism in modernist European writers Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Among scholars and writers from Canada, England, Nigeria, India, and Taiwan, magical realism emerged as the style that best defined new literature in Canada (as scholars Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski did [1986]), Africa (e.g., Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and English scholar C.  L. Innes [1992]), the postcolonial world (according to Indian scholar Homi Bhabha [1990]), and globally (according to English scholar Stephen Hart and Taiwanese scholar Wen-Chin Ouyang [2005]). This indexical use of the expression magical realism tends to silence the original context that produced One Hundred Years of Solitude as part of the movement of “the new Latin American novel” (Santana-Acuña, 2020). Despite the fact magical realism was created by other Latin American writers and no less than 25 years before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, transnational audiences in countries outside Latin America, such as Austria, Germany, and China [2008, 2011, 2013], continue to refer to One Hundred Years of Solitude as the best example of magical realism more than five decades after its publication. Others do so by explicitly (and incorrectly) indexing García Márquez as its “creator” or “father” of that genre, according to Argentine journalist F.  J. Caeiro [2006], and the National [2014], the main newspaper in Papua New Guinea. And others do so by asserting, like Egyptian writer Alaa el Aswany, that García Márquez’s style “has given us a model” [2007]. This is the model followed by Puerto Rican screenwriter José Rivera in his off-­ Broadway play Cloud Tectonics, as the newspaper Indian Express reported in 2015, when an all-Indian cast performed his play at Akshara Theatre in New Delhi. Three years later, Iraqi Shahad Al Rawi became the youngest female author to be shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This award, also known as the Arabic Booker Prize, is given to the best novel published in Arabic each year and is supported by the Emirates Foundation in Abu Dhabi. The then nineteen-year-old Al Rawi, an admirer

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of One Hundred Years of Solitude, was nominated for The Baghdad Clock, which eventually won the First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Scotland. In his review of the novel for the newspaper the National in the United Arab Emirates, Malcolm Forbes [2018] said that Al Rawi’s “attempts at magic realism (a dog whose actions predict future events; a woman who finds a whale in her kitchen) lack purpose and fail to charm.” These are telling examples of how multiple audiences, by indexing One Hundred Years of Solitude, participate in the global circulation of magical realism. Artistic Commensuration Whereas the meaning of the genre magical realism remains contested, its meaningfulness has increased over time, making One Hundred Years of Solitude more visible as an object of commensuration. For French journalist Régis Debray [1977], magical realism “coincides with socialist realism”; for English critic Meckled-Morkos [1985], “anti-rationalism [is] one of the essential contents”; for US scholar Irvine D.  S. Winsboro [1993], it “oscillates between super-realism and super-fantasy”; for Canadian scholar Dean J. Irvine [1998], it contains “strains of postcolonialism and postmodernism”; for Polish critic M.  Szewczyk [2000], it actually “represents a kind of reversal of the literature understood as magic realist”; for Amazon Japan reader Bunocio [2009], it consists of an “exquisite blend of realism and the indigenous”; and for Amazon France reader Marine [2012], the novel’s style is “science fiction.” Entrenched Criticism Critical voices have been important to stabilize this indexical, because challenging One Hundred Years of Solitude as the best example of magical realism has made more meaningful the indexical connection between the novel and the genre among new generations of common readers, critics, scholars, and so on. For Costa Rican reader Gregory Bascom [2003], its style resembles a more pedestrian one, that of “grandmothers, when telling a story to youngsters.” An anonymous Amazon Germany reader [2001] commented that there is no “consolation” in García Márquez’s magical realism, but there is in the magical realism of other non-Latin American authors, such as Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison. In this last case, it is worth noticing that this common reader, in indexing García Márquez’s style, helped expand magical realism beyond its Latin American origins to India and the United States. Already a decade earlier, people

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were criticizing such expansions of the term. US scholar Regina Janes [1991] denounced that the genre had progressively “colonized Latin American reality.” From a different angle, to react against this, scholars Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B.  Faris [1995] argued, “Readers know that magical realism is not a Latin American monopoly.” The following decade, English editor Robert McCrum [2002] proclaimed magical realism “dead or at least ready to receive the last rites.” In 2010, Argentine critic Martín Schifino [2010] reacted against Macondism by denying that magical realism has any similarities to the reality of Latin America. For Todung R. [2019], a Goodreads reviewer in Indonesia, García Márquez’s “magical realism is sometimes so outrageous that it’s hard to understand.” Even more critical was Sam Jordison [2017] in an article for the English newspaper The Guardian. He called it “dark magic realism [of] raped women, abandoned mothers and abused children…contented, warm-hearted, well-treated prostitutes.” These cases show how entrenched criticism against magical realism has unexpectedly contributed to stabilizing the meaningfulness of One Hundred Years of Solitude, too.

Conclusion This chapter offered a new approach to indexical analysis in order to understand how a cultural object needs to be uprooted from its original context of production as a previous step to its potential transformation into an object endowed with long-term meaningfulness. This approach differs from art worlds (Becker, 1982), production of culture (Peterson, 1997), and cultural fields (Bourdieu, 1992). These three approaches continue to emphasize the cultural object’s organizational rooting or embeddedness in its original production context to explain its long-lasting value. Yet, as the cultural object ages and its original context disappears, only an explanation focused on uprooting can offer a solid understanding of an object’s consecration as a classic. In this chapter, the uprooting of One Hundred Years of Solitude was documented through the use of indexical expressions taken from the novel. Since readers cannot remember all the details from One Hundred Years of Solitude, they invoke some by using indexical expressions (a character, a sentence, an event, the style, and so on). By using such expressions from the novel, they have stabilized its meaningfulness and created patterns that six transnational audiences in 56 countries use to better access (i.e., to have a more collectively sanctioned access) to macro-sociological

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planes that, via literature, inform human cognition (cf. Silverstein, 2003). In short, the stabilization of a literary work’s indexical expressions is an essential factor for its transformation into a classic (Santana-Acuña, 2020). The indexical analysis offered in this chapter goes beyond the usage proposed to date by ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967; Rouncefield & Tolmie, 2011). The analysis here can serve as a tool to reconcile internalist and externalist approaches to literary analysis. The internalist approach—common in the fields of literary criticism and comparative literature—chooses to explain the literary work on the basis of the intrinsic structure of the text and, at the same time, minimizes or rules out external factors (e.g., the power of publishers and literary agencies). On the contrary, the externalist approach—common in the fields of history and sociology of literature—chooses to explain the literary work in terms of external factors and considers the analysis of the text as secondary. Using indexical analysis allows the reconciliation between the two approaches because the indexical expression refers to (1) an inherent textual attribute (a character, a passage, an event, and so on) that (2) only obtains its meaningfulness thanks to human interaction (via book clubs, academic discussions, and so on). Thus, indexical expressions are suitable for textual analysis as well as for understanding the social processes they index (e.g., a literary work’s transformation into a classic). The indexical analysis in this chapter made more salient the need to distinguish between meaning and meaningfulness. Such a distinction is necessary to address an important problem in the humanities and the social sciences in the last decades: the tension between the shifting meanings of cultural objects and the remarkable and intriguing long-term meaningfulness of these objects. This distinction can reconcile the multiplicity of meanings of cultural objects with the presence of stable principles and conditions that render their contents meaningful over time. The indexical analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude made it possible to study a literary text and its cultural uprooting for five decades in 26 languages and more than 50 countries on six continents without concentrating on the contingent fabrication of meaning (cf. Griswold, 1987). This is possible because indexicality is part of a collective process that stabilizes the meaningfulness of a cultural object, that is, patterns of meaningfulness set the boundaries of what cultural object can be meaningful. But these patterns do not determine the object’s meanings. This chapter showed how audiences outside the original context of production of One Hundred Years of Solitude have transformed elements such as Macondo into

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meaningful expressions for conveying information on multiple aspects, while the meaning of Macondo continues to be the subject of debate among new generations. Finally, the distinction between meaningfulness and meaning allows us to expand the boundaries of cultural sociology if the latter is defined as being not only concerned with “the ways [in which] meaning shapes social life” (Alexander et  al., 2012, p.  22) but also with meaningfulness: the more solid ground that supports the multiplicity of meaning. To move cultural sociology into this direction, rather than a research agenda concerned with “discovering and deciphering” the meanings of a cultural object, the alternative proposed in this chapter is the analysis of cultural objects centered on their meaningfulness. If taken in that direction, the study of meaningfulness can help develop more robust explanations of cultural objects such as classics, at the same time that these explanations are compatible with the recognition that these objects have changing, multiple, and contradictory meanings.

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Chong, P. (2020). Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. Princeton University Press. DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press. Domínguez Rubio, F. (2012). The Material Production of the Spiral Jetty: A Study of Culture in the Making. Cultural Sociology, 6(2), 143–161. de la Fuente, E. (2007). The “New Sociology of Art”: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts. Cultural Sociology, 1(3), 409–425. Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Indiana University Press. Fau, M. (1980). Gabriel García Márquez: An Annotated Bibliography, 1947–1979. Greenwood Press. Fau, M., & González, N. (1986). Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1979–1985. Greenwood Press. Fontdevila, J. (2010). Indexes, Power, and Netdoms: A Multidimensional Model of Language in Social Action. Poetics, 38(6), 587–609. Foreman, A. (2016, April 22). As You Dislike It: The Anti-Shakespeare Club. Wall Street Journal. Accessed May 30, 2020, from http://www.wsj.com/articles/ as-­you-­dislike-­it-­the-­anti-­shakespeare-­club-­1461339431 García Márquez, G., & Vargas Llosa, M. (1968). La novela en América latina: diálogo. Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall. Gell, A. (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Clarendon Press. Godart, F., & White, H. (2010). Switchings Under Uncertainty: The Coming and Becoming of Meanings. Poetics, 38(6), 567–586. González, N. (1994). Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel Garcia Márquez, 1986–1992. Greenwood Press. González, N. (2003). Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel Garcia Márquez, 1992–2002. Praeger. González, N. (n.d.). Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 2002-on. Accessed February 4, 2013, from http://media.library.uiuc.edu/ projects/ggm/ Griswold, W. (1986). Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576–1980. University of Chicago Press. Griswold, W. (1987). The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies. American Journal of Sociology, 92(5), 1077–1117. Griswold, W. (1993). Recent Moves in the Sociology of Literature. Annual Review of Sociology, 19, 455–467. Griswold, W., Mangione, G., & McDonnell, T. (2013). Objects, Words, and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis. Qualitative Sociology, 36(4), 343–364. Hancock Rubio, J. (2015, December 21). Los clásicos de la literatura también reciben críticas crueles. El País. Accessed May 30, 2020, from http://verne. elpais.com/verne/2015/12/21/articulo/1450701484_895908.html

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Hennion, A. (1993). La passion musicale: une sociologie de la médiation. Edition Métailié. Karush, M. (2016). Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music. Duke University Press. Liebes, T., & Katz, E. (1990). The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. Oxford University Press. Leonard, J. (1982, February 11). The Mosquito Coast. New York Times, C31. Levitt, P. (2015). Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. University of California Press. Martin, G. (2009). Gabriel García Márquez: A Life. Alfred A. Knopf. NameExoWorlds. (2020). Approved Names. Accessed May 30, 2020, from http:// www.nameexoworlds.iau.org/final-­results Peirce, C. (1965). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Peterson, R. (1997). Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press. Phillips, D. (2013). Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form. Princeton University Press. Pizarro, C. (2011, November 17). El balón “Macondo”, de la literatura a la cancha. Radio France Internationale. Accessed May 30, 2020, from http://www. rfi.fr/es/deportes/20111117-­macondo Rouncefield, M., & Tolmie, P. (2011). Ethnomethodology at Work. Ashgate. Santana-Acuña, A. (2020). Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. Columbia University Press. Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In K. Basso & H. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 11–55). University of New Mexico Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 193–229. Siskind, M. (2014). Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Northwestern University Press. Thumala Olave, M. A. (2018). Reading Matters: Towards a Cultural Sociology of Reading. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 6(3), 417–454. Vineberg, S. (1982, October 28). Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo: Eraserhead on the Amazon? The Stanford Daily, 10. Wikipedia. (2020). Macondo Writers Workshop. Accessed May 30, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macondo_Writers_Workshop Witkin, R. (1997). Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity: Olympia Revisited. Sociological Theory, 15(2), 101–125. Zapata, J. (2007). Gabo nació en Caracas no en Aracataca. Alfa. Zeng, L. (2009). Chinese Interpretation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Journal of Southwest University (Social Sciences Edition), 2.

PART IV

Deepening Reception Analysis: Aesthetic Experience, Evaluation and Critique

CHAPTER 11

Objects, Emotion and Biography or How to Love Opera and Football Jerseys Again Claudio E. Benzecry

Introduction: How to Restabilize Attachment to a Cultural Object The scholarship on aesthetics and materiality has studied how objects help shape identity, social action and subjectivity. Objects, as ‘equipment[s] for living’ (Luhmann, 2000), become the ‘obligatory passage points humans have to contend with in order to pursue their projects’ (Latour, 1991). They provide patterns to which bodies can unconsciously latch onto, or help human agents work towards particular states of being (DeNora, 2000, 2003). Objects are central in the long-term process of taste construction, as any attachment to an object is made out of a delicate equilibrium of mediators, bodies, situations and techniques (Hennion and his collaborators (Hennion & Fauquet, 2001; Hennion & Gomart, 1999)). In all of these accounts, objects are the end result of long-term processes of stabilization, in which the actual material object (a musical piece, a sculpture, an art installation, a glass of wine, the oeuvre of Bach as we

C. E. Benzecry (*) Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_11

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know it) is both a result and yet a key co-producer of its own generation. Whereas the literature has been generous and detailed in exploring the processes of assembling and sustaining object-centred attachments, it has not sufficiently engaged with what happens when the aesthetic elements of cultural artefacts that have produced emotional resonance are transformed: What do these artefacts morph into? What explains the transition (or not) of different cultural objects? And relatedly, what happens to the key aesthetic qualities that were so central to how the objects had been defined, and to those who have emotionally attached to them? To answer these questions, this article uses as exemplars two different cases of attachment, predicated on the distinctive features of a cultural object—the transcendence of opera and the authenticity of a soccer jersey—that have undergone transformations. Comparing these two very different cases of object attachment—one of ‘highbrow’ culture, the other more ‘lowbrow’—I aim to identify patterns emerging across multiple cultural forms to examine how the destabilization of cultural artefacts—and their affective resonances—unleashes a series of re-stabilizing strategies by which actors try to restore what the previous object afforded. I elucidate the work stakeholders engage in to re-establish the object of their affection. First, actors engage in ‘denial’ work, as agents look for what from their immediate context allows them to keep acting ‘as if’ the object has not been destabilized; second, they work on reconstituting the chain of equivalence,1 the bundle of assumptions, that helped to make sense of the object in the first place; and third, the transitional stabilization of what I have called a ‘partial’ object, which affords some of the same lines of actions that the previous object did—but not others. This new ‘partial’ object also allows for new paths for the pursuit of projects. This chapters reveals how the object and the self solidify together, so much so that the destabilization of one means the destabilization of the other. They also point to the crucial fact that accounts2 as actions need to be validated by the objects, and the central role accounts play in both subject- and object-stabilization as stakeholders aim for self-congruency in 1  I take this term from the work of Laclau and Moufee (1985) and Laclau (2005). I’d like to highlight from that literature the semiotic work behind forming an equivalential chain, in which the agreement over the meaning of a practice is produce through multivocality, and in which previously differentiated practices or objects are presented and perceived though a logic of equivalence. 2  I’m following here the well-known pragmatist conceptualization of giving an account as a particular kind of action (Austin, 1975).

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how they explain the long-term relationship between objects and themselves. By doing this, the article highlights the work ‘culture’ does in explaining object re-stabilization.

Objects in Cultural Sociology Cultural sociology has analysed the long-term purchase of particular objects, by establishing a one-on-one set equivalence between objects, individuals and collectives, in which objects mean only one thing to a particular group of people and there is a taken-for-granted link between meaning and emotion. One tradition, for instance, emphasizes the role of cultural structures, focusing on the collective effervescence produced by rituals that aim to produce fusion and catharsis between the object qua totem and the collective. This tradition is traced back to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965) and has been continued and refined by scholars such as Victor Turner (1967), with concepts like social drama and breach, in which change is an odd occurrence, and continuity is achieved through rituals that restore the previous order; Randall Collins (2004), whose theory of interaction ritual chains points at the highly contextualized ways in which an object becomes emotionally resonant with a collective; and Jeffrey Alexander (2008), whose writings reveal the productive character of the distinction between sacred and profane and the totemic role played by objects in producing ‘iconic consciousness’, and, in turn, becoming ‘vehicles’ for social action. Bourdieu (1984) has also looked at how stable the meanings of objects are by emphasizing the role of homologies and dispositions in guaranteeing that objects (a) have only one available set of instructions and uses, (b) are closely related to particular positions in the social structure and (c) serve as boundaries that create distinctions between competing groups (on this also see Lamont, 1992). The limitations of these traditions is that they start with the premise of the world as comprising objects already integrated or stabilized, with only a few moments of destabilization soon to be redressed. As such, they obscure the work of stabilization and re-stabilization in the social life of objects. Others have thought of it the other way around, with fragmentation and contingency being constitutive, and stabilization being an accomplishment collectively and laboriously achieved. For example, the recent work of Steve Shapin on the sciences of subjectivity (2012) has recovered a genealogy that goes from Becker (1953) to Hennion (2001, 2007), which includes my own work (Benzecry, 2011), and which focuses on

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how connoisseurs produce an experience of tastes in interaction with other individuals and objects, and, in turn, stabilize the self and the object in question. Within this tradition, DeNora (2000, 2003), in order to explain how music is a resource for world building, describes how objects provide opportunities for perception and potential lines of action. More recently, Domínguez Rubio (2014) has explored the role of materiality in producing, disrupting and sustaining practices of evaluation and conservation over the long run, by looking at how installations and performance art complicate the work of conservation at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). In this chapter, I’m interested in developing a synthesis between approaches that emphasize assemblage and those that appeal to cultural structures as the main cause of stabilization, an approach that emphasizes the dynamics of ebb and flow in the status of objects. Is there a way to find some common ground in which we could show the productive character of cultural representations generated by stable objects, the fragmentary and always precarious character of the stabilization of self and objects, and what the potential new avenues are for stabilization once the object (and its representation) becomes de-routinized? How can we analyse the long-­ term purchase of particular objects (usually the terrain of cultural sociology), with object-centred sociologies? Aiming to establish a bridge between these two traditions, I show in this paper the specific ways in which materiality and cultural structures can be thought of as interacting in the de- and re-assemblage of attachment.

Data and Methods The data for this analysis come from tracing the trajectories of two cultural artefacts in contemporary Buenos Aires. The first project, on the transcendence of opera, was a multi-year ethnographic project that focused on the cheaper, upper-level floors of the Colón Opera House, one of the key houses for the globalization of opera as a genre. The upper floors are a relatively self-enclosed world, where 400 to 600 people assemble for three to four hours at a time, three to four times a week. The secluded character of the experience provides an in situ laboratory in which to observe the variations in intense engagement by people from diverse social positions who share, nevertheless, a cultural practice in common. Fans ‘fall in love’ with opera, and then learn how to make sense of and sustain that first thrill

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for a long time. Sustaining it requires making an emotional commitment, dedicating oneself to learning and informally socializing with other fans. The second project, on the biography of the Boca Juniors’ soccer jersey, was conducted through a content analysis of e-commerce sites, sports newspapers and interviews with selected informants—people who had a substantial yet modest Boca Juniors jersey collection. Research for these projects was conducted between 2002 and 2010. More than studying the diffusion or trajectories of objects within different contexts, I aim to show on a case-by-case basis how objects become stabilized, re-stabilized, de-figured and reconfigured, and the actors involved in each case. Because I have pursued this theory-building strategy, the novelty it provides relates to the nature of the synthesis it offers by reasoning with these cases and highlighting analogous processes across them. My approach is both inductive and synthetic. It is inductive because the theorization exercise is based on having tried to make sense of different empirical cases. It is synthetic because it aims to find what explains the turning points in the generation of attachment in a way informed by diverse theoretical contributions.

What’s in an Opera? In the pages that follow, I focus on how operatic transcendence was assembled in Buenos Aires, how it recently became destabilized and the large number of strategies undertaken by fans in their attempts to stabilize both the cultural artefact and themselves. Opera as a Stabilized Object The object-opera was put together in the following way. Firstly, it was organized around the spatial division of the Colón Opera House. Audience members in the standing room were divided not only from the expensive seats and boxes but also from the seating areas within their floors.3 There, new fans—who were impacted by either the musical, visual or theatrical qualities of opera—learned how to control, reproduce and extend the pleasure they felt in their first encounter. They did this by learning how to behave in foro interno and in foro externo—by learning where to stand, 3  This is key because for the fusion of object, meaning and emotion to continue in time, they must be (a) successful and (b) isolated from competing interpretations and activities.

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when to clap and how to ‘feel’ and also how to show that feeling to others. While amateurs plunge into opera alone, they do so prepared by an intensive sociability, made out of refined but not esoteric knowledge, mostly transmitted by ‘elder’ connoisseurs who serve as running commentary to the attempts by new fans to stabilize what they have felt thanks to the sonic and visual peculiarities of the genre. While fandom requires one to know recordings, as well as dates, casts and performers, how that knowledge is acquired is important. This is the element that has novices in awe of older audience members. While a person may know a lot about opera, she or he must experience it live. Showing one’s sacrifice, enthusiasm and knowledge validates the claims of the most committed opera fans, which they assert through comparison with others. The stabilization of opera as an object gets tied to their stabilization as selves of a particular kind. So next to their bodily attachment to particular facher—big voices within the lower portion of the register—or the preference for certain passages or the attempt to use acquired knowledge to still be ‘surprised’, fans also stabilized themselves as a particular kind of people: superior to those in other parts of the opera house (and outside of it), able to achieve personal transcendence thanks to an ethic of self-sacrifice, extensive knowledge and bodily attachment. Other fans serve as a key resource for this stabilization. Most of them come to the opera alone, and while they do not become friends, they become mirror images of each other, providing an audience for the performance of who they think they are. Given the level of commitment and investment, it is hard to communicate to non-enthusiasts what they feel and think every time they attend. They depend upon other passionate fans to share their experiences with, to discuss the music with and to enact their love. Being cut off from outside ties and non-enthusiasts also reinforces this pattern; the punctuation and clarification of what operatic fragments do to them parallels how they define their self-understanding. Disrupting Opera The economic crisis of 2001, which eroded the value of the peso against the US dollar, forced the ‘nationalization’ of seasons, with soloists recruited mostly from the secondary circuit, and erected the ultimate wall that distinguishes the present from what was a golden age. That season, the soloists for The Rake’s Progress were the same two singers who were to perform the parts at the Met in 2003. In this particular story, shared with

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me by connoisseurs, amateurs flocked from the main opera house of the city, a symbol of high culture and cosmopolitanism, to provincial halls— the adjective referencing here both the out-of-town character and minor musical quality of these venues. If it is true that it is only by its mediators that music can have any durability (see Hennion, 2007, or Becker et al., 2006), what happens when one of the elements within the assemblage between bodies, techniques, situations and object becomes temporarily disassembled? What happens when the object is destabilized—in this case by the lack of resources to perform it at the level that afforded its enjoyment within the parameters I have described? And what are the strategies for re-stabilization that are advanced by different fans? I find three strategies for amateurs invested in making the object-opera constant: denial ‘work’, exit (either to audiophilia or from opera at large) and the movement to the secondary opera circuit. Re-establishing Opera, Anew First, in denial work (Zerubavel, 2007), fans find refuge in their intense sociability in order to avoid the downfall of the quality of the object that had awoken so many passionate behaviours. The intense work of re-­ enchanting is helped by the spatial configuration of the Opera House, in which the standing-room-only zones are isolated from other areas, attended instead by members with potentially competing interpretations of what goes on at the opera. The space is mostly inhabited by people who go on their own and cannot withdraw themselves from the intense sociability and the many exchanges that happen before, during and after the performance. The space helps produce both a clear interpretation of what matters in opera and a ‘contagion’ that fans provoke in others around them about what is exciting about opera. Denial is obtained via the valorization of the past by fans. The past is re-activated, called upon, made to speak for, to replace the current live experience lacking in glitter and resources. If international stars have stopped coming and the local environment of the house has become degraded, fans re-stabilize opera both by acting like the fans from the past and also by the constant mention of stars that once visited the house and reminiscing about past epic performances. Passionate fans resemble those from the past by highlighting a few elements that help make sense of how their attachment has survived changing conditions. These fans associate

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through a series of heroic narratives from the past that centre on the audience and demonstrate how rich sociability used to be: the superior knowledge fans from the past possessed, the passionate debate they sustained, how they reacted to and engaged with a world of divas and stars (i.e. of ‘real artists’). They do so by telling nostalgic stories of a lost past (remember when?), comparing the degraded present unfavourably to the past or getting lost in a soundscape of past recordings. What is being re-enacted is a model of cultural affiliation in which heroism, intensive and extensive knowledge and attendance are keys for audience members to model themselves upon as part of a community of passionate fans, regardless of how little of what happens on stage today resembles the performing model that actually made sense for that model of engagement. Despite all that, amateurs keep acting ‘as if’. This sociality among strangers is maintained through a deference to elders, who sing praises of the past and present themselves as living proof of what constitutes an operatic life. Passionate fans keep seeing divos and divas and talk about all-­night queues that haven’t happened in over fifteen years as if they were everyday events; they reminisce together, even if they are only in their late thirties, about how great Birgit Nilsson was doing Wagner, and battle in the present tense about whether Calls or Tebaldi was better. The exact golden age referenced is not as important as the form that this engagement with music takes and the shared understanding that the present is always in decline. This is evidenced perfectly in one fan’s description of a much older friend who has been coming to the opera for some sixty years (the fan himself has been coming for fifteen): ‘He started when he was really young. He saw Toscanini’s debut conducting Beethoven’s Fourth. That was the first time he [the friend] came to the Colón. After that, everything went downhill’. For those who can’t deny how much opera at the Colón has become disfigured from the meanings they associate with it, there is a prevalent strategy: the movement to minor halls. Although the new companies might not get close to those historical standards and cannot engage international stars, there is an uncorrupted enthusiasm that renews the opera experience, imbuing it with passion once more. The categories they bring up in conversation are the very same ones used to negatively characterize the Colón: enthusiasm, vocation and organization. These fans emphasize that, in a time when the main opera house can no longer differentiate itself from other houses by the international stars it can afford to present, the secondary circuit—which is not burdened by strikes and sudden

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cancellations, where musicians and singers are always in costume, where ushers are attentive and the space, if not as magnificent, is at least clean— should be considered the centre of opera in Buenos Aires. Opera at the secondary circuit affords two lines of action to the fans. On the one hand, the new opera allows for particular claims on the fans themselves: it maintains the ethic of sacrifice that is central to the organization of selfhood thanks to a series of activities. While the nature of the sacrifice differs in its specifics—instead of standing in line for hours for consecrated singers and productions, they travel far from their comfort zones to engage in ‘treasure hunts’, be it for unheard young singers or seldom heard operas—the component of the identity is re-established. It also provides for a new audience of opera enthusiasts to perform their knowledge against, allowing for a new resonance chamber for their ‘war’ stories and encyclopedic displays of trivia. On the other hand, it allows fans to get reacquainted with operatic roles of the repertory excluded from the main opera houses, either because of the modernization of stage direction standards or the canon at large. Roles like Lucrezia Borgia or Adriana Lecouvreur are not only presented on these stages, but they are performed with all the mannerisms of a great diva, with very little stage movement, a lot of bombastic gestures and period-appropriate costumes and settings. Fans try to re-stabilize their way of ‘doing’ and feeling opera in the secondary circuit either by looking for its re-enactment in specific parts, in specific singers who used to play those parts on the big stage beforehand or in specific voices that resemble those that elicited a particular kind of physical enjoyment. In the reconstruction of the chain of equivalence, the lash-up (Latour, 1987) between opera, soprano, diva is rebuilt as much by seeing a period appropriate staging of Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra or Anna Bolena as it is by following Tiziana Fabricini (the soprano who played Violetta—the favourite role of Maria Callas—in Milano for the first time after the diva retired), or local lirico spinta Patricia Gutierrez (who, because of her voice, was syndicated potentially as a minor and local Callas). In all these examples, we get to see the active and productive work of fans-cum-mediators. The same work of restoring the chain of equivalence within the available resources can be seen among those who leave the live experience of opera— be it at the Colón or at minor houses—only to re-encounter it in a mediated way: either by becoming audiophiles or by going to the 25 de Mayo Movie Theater to watch live operas from the Met and Covent Garden in HD. Of course the opera-object becomes something different in both cases, but

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there are two continuities from how opera was stabilized before. First, fansturned-audiophiles emphasize live performance—even for records and DVDs. None of the fans feel they would get the same pleasure if the opera they were delighting in was not a live recording of the experience. Second, while watching or listening alone and with others does not allow for the organization of the self around the same ethic of sacrifice I have described, it does allow for something lost at the minor halls: the claim to a cosmopolitan superior selfhood that the Colón can’t deliver anymore. Moreover, it affords another opportunity to collect, if not unexpected treasures gathered in provincial stages, a roster of classic and contemporary stars. What I want to emphasize in this section of the paper is that the destabilization of the loved object engenders re-keying strategies, aimed at reconstructing the bundle of assumptions that helped to make sense of the relationship between the aesthetic features of the object and claims to selfhood in the first place, but with the resources at hand. The substitutions or permutations allow for new associations that resemble (even if only in a minor way) opera as it was. In some cases, this emphasizes some dimensions of the previous configuration (like the organization of the sacrificing self around a series of demanding activities). In others, it emphasizes features that go to the opposite pole in regard to how it had been multivocally instituted (like those set on restoring the cosmopolitan character attributed to the experience of listening to opera live at the Teatro Colón). Opera went from being an experience of transcendence anchored in a decadent setting, full of like-minded people and the presence of international stars, which fuelled an ethic of sacrifice, to being a series of related activities in many settings (e.g. the Colón, the secondary circuit, the HD opera shows), in which pleasure is only partially afforded. This case gives us a hint of how an object could become quickly re-stabilized after a crisis had de-institutionalized it.

What’s in a Football Jersey? To explore these claims further, together with how we go from a partial re-stabilization like the one in opera to the full institutionalization of a new object-configuration, I introduce one last case, anchored around the following question: what guarantees the authenticity of a football jersey? Comparing what opera fans have done to re-stabilize the object of their affection with what football fans have undertaken should give us a window into what happens to re-stabilization when (a) there are not many

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alternative routes for stabilization, and (b) the bundle of things that were originally associated with the object is a smaller chain. Jersey as a Totem for Football Professional football developed in Argentina in a double movement of popularization and creolization, whereby recent Italian and Spanish migrants quickly adopted the practice, ‘making it Argentinean’ (Archetti, 1999). This occurred by the national style constituting itself in opposition to the British style, emphasizing how the Argentinean male was less disciplined and mechanistic but rather more skilful, individualistic and agile. Masculinity was also associated with virility, courage and strength, so the ideal national football team was composed of both individual ability and grit. As teams transitioned from amateurism to professionalism, they began to be closely associated with the identity of the neighbourhoods (Frydenberg, 2011). Teams established their identity via an agonistic relationship with a local other (even when territoriality was transcended in the mass period). Boca Juniors originated, as a team, in the early 1900s and distinguished itself from then nearby River Plate team. The two teams are the most popular in the country and represent, in the Argentinian ‘imaginary’, two very distinctive and opposing views: River is the team of skill, while Boca has historically been associated with grit. The football jersey is of iconic significance, defining a club’s visual identity through its role as sporting uniform and fan identifier. The uniqueness of the team colours is usually established via an ‘origin story’. In Boca’s case, the colours of the club were those of the flag of the first boat that passed by the nearby dock in 1908. The idea was so well received that the participants went to wait for the first ship, which was a Swedish oil tanker. Almost everyone liked the design of the Swedish flag. In 1913, the club began to wear the jersey they still wear today: blue with a horizontal yellow stripe. The continuity of the design over time was such that it is difficult to distinguish between a squad from 1938 and one from 1965. The absence of advertising (and of sponsor for the equipment) meant the absence of worries about whether the jersey was an original or a copy, as the only elements needed were the blue and yellow.

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How Is Authenticity Destabilized? In Fig. 11.1, the image on the left dates from 1983, and it shows two players from Boca Juniors, one of Argentina’s top football teams, posing after a game. Their jerseys have a barely readable advertising logo (for a cheap brand of wine sold in tetra bricks). Perspiration marks on the shirt of the player to the right has revealed a second belonging to the company that imprinted the main ad onto the jersey. The picture to the right shows a Boca Juniors jersey from the 2012/3 season, with the logo of its new sponsor, the French bank BBVA, fully integrated into the jersey, almost as though it was an organic part of the team uniform printed directly onto the jersey. In contrast, the less clear image of the sponsor’s logo on the 1980s jersey fabric resulted from a patch being ironed onto the jersey. The following pages narrate how the team went from just having logos on a football jersey as part of a desperate effort to make money to turning the ad itself into the key guarantor of a soccer jersey’s authenticity. Most Argentinean aficionados point to the San Lorenzo Club as the catalyst for the destabilization of football jerseys as they used to be, as they were the first team to include advertisements on their jerseys in 1981.They had been hit badly by an economic and sport crisis that resulted in it being relegated to the second division of Argentinean football. The idea of

Fig. 11.1  Two Boca Juniors’ players posing during the 1983 National Championship. To the right, the Boca Juniors jersey for the 2012/3 season

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selling the front of the team’s jersey to a local candy brand had been derided as a desperate measure, and closely attached to the wane in powers of the team. Diatribes against advertising flourished, and later on were followed by jeremiads against the intrusion of sponsors and new jersey designs to replace the old version, which most fans regarded as and responded to as a totem, a non-circulatory symbol that stabilized both the object and its meaning, as well as the selves attached to it. Tradition, in their eyes, was presented as the guarantor of identification. Complaints about changes were usually presented in the form of a ‘we look like [another team]’ comment. For instance, the 2003 jersey (which lacked the yellow stripe on the back) was received with complaints such as ‘we look like Brazil’s Cruzeiro’ or ‘we look like Italy’s national team but with yellow numbers’. Changes in the jersey were considered as acts of treason against the club’s main symbol, usually associated with the continuity of the power of the team. It thus becomes clear that being misidentified or misrepresented dilutes the powers and prowess of the jersey in the eyes of all those involved. These strident complaints involved prominent political figures, like Senator Cafiero, who complained in a 1998 newspaper editorial about Nike’s dry fit technology and what it would do to a team whose main identity was based on passionately ‘sweating the jersey’, as well as famous football idols, like Diego Maradona, who complained in 2000 about the design changes by saying that the team would be impossible to recognize, and compared it to the national flag and how Argentineans would not change it even if the USA were to give them 200 million dollars. The debates were also reflected in newspaper coverage. Fans complained in multiple fora that, over time, the team’s yellow and blue colours had been ‘destroyed’ by alternate jerseys with orange or fuchsia colours. Restoring Authenticity Given this resistance, it is perplexing then that by the 2000s, one of the largest spikes in sales for the team was not brought about by a particular championship, or by the arrival of a new design. To both the purist’s and the designer’s eyes, the 2002 Boca Juniors jersey looks the same: the colours are the traditional blue and yellow, the neckline is the same, the fabric is still dry-fit, the stripes are the same thickness, the insignia is in the same place and there is no new team inscription. The sponsor of the team is the only element that changed.

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The commercial sponsor, once seen as degrading authenticity, has over time been woven into the very notion of the object’s authenticity. One interviewee, when asked which Boca jersey he had, answered, ‘I have a Parmalat, circa 1992. The one used by Manteca Martinez and Márcico’. He referred to the players who marked that era, but also identified the object according to its advertisement. It was easier than referring to the maker of the time, Adidas, since there have been Adidas jerseys with other advertisements. It was visually more compelling and obvious to refer to the advertisement since the brand appears in every TV and print image, but also because it stays in our memory in ways that made a River Plate supporter tell me: ‘I have the glorious [jersey], the Fate one’. Fate sponsored the team when it won its first and only Club World Championship in 1986. But it is not only these supporters that frame their references to jerseys and points in history by means of a vocabulary that refers to, and reduces them to, the name of the sponsor. A quick look at the e-commerce site Mercado Libre (Argentina’s poor man’s eBay) supports our hypothesis; ‘La de Sanyo. Auténtica’ is the header for the link to Adidas’ 1994 River Plate design. The sponsor for that season was a Japanese appliance brand, Sanyo. In this context, the usual way of phrasing the product is to list the team, designer and advertiser in that order. The year of the jersey is optional, and is usually used to refer to minor variations. When the past needs to be symbolized, sellers do so either by including the name of a player of that era or by a reference to an advertiser that lasted a short period of time (such as Sanyo in River). Looking at 144 items for sale on the shopping site, Boca’s shirt had approximately 40 references to the advertiser in their headlines. The reference to advertisers became such an important way of guaranteeing the authenticity of the product that facsimile producers have incorporated advertisements into their jerseys. If what had previously distinguished originals from copies was the presence of an advertiser as an incorporated part of the jersey, then one of the few ways of trying to maintain the privilege of dictating the codes of use of a particular product and its availability was shattered. In Fig. 11.2, taken outside of a stadium in Mendoza for the 2012 tour of Boca Juniors, we see how the changing of sponsors reflects what is on display—jerseys with old sponsor LG identify those for the idolized striker Martín Palermo, who retired at the end of 2011. The designs, which were at first resisted, have, over the long run, now been re-appropriated by consumers, thereby generating a new

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Fig. 11.2  Counterfeit jerseys of Boca Juniors for sale during the team’s 2012 tour to Mendoza

configuration. The new object afforded something that the previous one could not: how to make temporal sense of the different iterations of jerseys and teams thanks to the new designs and sponsors. Also, particular jerseys get closely aligned with the fate of the team, so if the team wins the championship, cup or league, the brand and advertiser become both temporal and status markers for the fans, and all this while still affording fans the opportunity to demonstrate their love for their team, as expressed in their love for the team’s ‘authentic’ jerseys. Moreover, the changes in design allowed fans to further ‘express’ their love for their team in shopping for as many design variations as possible (every time there was a change in sponsor, or a new alternate design, for instance). For those who still insist on interpreting the authenticity of the jersey under the pre-existing framework where authenticity meant non-circulation of the original jersey design, there is but one design option: attaching themselves to a ‘retro’ design and investing their emotional energy into a simile that valorizes a ‘pastoral past’ which negates the current state of affairs. Much like the case of opera, the above are some of the options available to fans to sustain the continued attachment to the football jersey-object as it was, pointing not

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towards the new established configuration but to the competing partial objects offered by the football jersey that enable some of the previous effects and claims on the self. I understand these ‘self-concepts’ (Gross, 2003) as shaping attachment, whereby people are affectively motivated to experience a sense of congruity or resonance between the affect they perform and the kind of person they understand themselves to be.

What Does Love Have to Do with All This? Drawing on these two different cases, we can now examine the following questions: What happens after the key aesthetic element of an object, which had produced an emotional attachment, when the object is transformed? What are the new avenues that open up to re-stabilize the object and/or reproduce a partial version of the previous attachment? In answering the last question, the paper develops its main contribution to this debate, showing what happens when there are new resources available to sustain or find a simile for the object that first generated that kind of attachment. In the concluding section I will develop, in full, a second claim I established earlier in the article: to explore the role ‘culture’ plays in understanding both how closure and stabilization work and additionally to explore the potential new trajectories of the objects. In both cases, what used to be a ‘cemented’ chain of associations became abruptly destabilized, to the point that instead of an ontology made of taken-for-granted activities, opera (or football jerseys) became two very different objects, and the affect that both objects gave became de-routinized. The series—in a nutshell—was, as we can see in one case, a very long chain. It could be conceptually synthetized in the following manner: Opera is a titillating fragment of live singing performed by a woman of a particular voice type, who performs ‘big voice’ roles, which causes in a man a particular kind of thrill in a decadent setting, where he can display and acquire knowledge about it, in order to refine his pleasure, be surrounded by fellow folks who understand and share his interest, as well as support particular claims about the special kind of person he is. In the second case, a football jersey at first is authentic only if it never changes, and men attach to it in a non-­ circulatory/totemic manner, only for the lash-up (Latour, 1987) to be transformed later to: a football jersey is guaranteed as authentic by its advertisement, which allows men to make sense of its temporal and status

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location, and make of those men a special kind of people among other similar aficionados. So what is it that these cases have in common, what differentiates them and why does it matter for the argument I am aiming to advance? The length of the chain of activities, settings and devices matters, in that the changes in what opera meant could occur in different parts of the chain, allowing for a slower pace of destabilization and re-stabilization as well as for—potentially—many more configurations. In some cases, what changed was related to the setting (the Colón); in others, it was those who surrounded the amateurs (connoisseurs or neophytes); and in yet others, it was the quality and style of the singing. Each of these permutations along the chain re-stabilizes opera in a different way. The multivocal character of the arrangement also means that there are multiple contingent paths towards new configurations. In the football jersey example, on the other hand, the combination of a shorter chain of associated activities, settings and bodies, along with the entrance of an outside stakeholder, Nike, which now had almost monopolistic power over the design, destabilized things in a more abrupt fashion and allowed for fewer avenues for re-stabilization. What both cases share is the rhythm and sequence in which objects and selves become de- and re-stabilized. At first, the changes in the resources transform the context under which practices are made meaningful. The object becomes de-routinized and de-institutionalized, so the link between practice and meaning is rendered null and void. What we observe then is how the object becomes destabilized, and yet a combination of activities from the different stakeholders involved and the resources available allow for (a) re-stabilization or (b) the production of a new simile that could partially generate the same kind of emotion and attachment. Explaining how closure and stabilization work in the long run, that is, what causes the object to open up and be transmuted into a new configuration with minor modifications (or an attempt to replicate the old one), allows us to explore the mechanisms these cases have in common. These include (a) the role that sociability plays in framing the perception about how much the object has changed, (b) the role that individual commitment plays in constraining the object transformation, (c) how the resources available authorize or de-authorize certain interventions and (d) the work of reconstructing closure partially by using the equivalential chain left behind to make sense of a previous configuration. Sociability is key to understanding intragroup stabilization, since as much as the object gets stabilized, through the repetition of routines,

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practices and meanings, the group gets stabilized too. So, for instance, in the case of opera, the transformation of the quality of what happened on stage was deflated by the isolation from competing interpretations and the repetition of particular routines—that is, the discussion in present tense about both the stars and the fans of the past, as well as ‘heroic’ behaviours that are not actually needed anymore, and like being in line for hours to get tickets or to enter the opera house when there is no competition for either. Passionate fans draw on a lost past to partially reproduce an attitude towards opera born in that past but persisting through and in present-day action and discourse. Instead of finding an automatic adjustment between circumstances, disposition and practice, what we have learned from the empirical analysis is that the community resources, the group sociability and its isolation from competing interpretations are all key factors in mediating the production of adjustment or discrepancy between resources and practice. This is also true for football enthusiasts, not through the work of denial so much as in the acceptance of the new designs. It is only after football enthusiasts themselves have reappropriated the new designs that the logic of Nike changing designs to boost sales made sense; these totemic meanings cannot be manufactured from the top-down by big business, they must emerge from within fan culture. How long individuals have committed themselves to a particular version of the object is central too. For opera fans, whose personal identities were refined and punctuated in parallel to what from opera they specifically enjoyed, it meant some of them navigating towards the secondary circuit—where they could still find big voices, according soprano roles and non-avant-garde staging. In both cases, the ‘career’ character of how their process of individuation was organized meant a long-term commitment that congealed resources over time, but also a constraint of the range of options once the artefact had been transformed by other actors—as it happened with Nike transforming the football jersey. In some cases, as in the opera fans that opted instead for audiophilia, or the football fans that stopped buying jerseys—or even stopped going to the stadium—the only option was exit. Part of the explanation for the exit resides in how those careers resulted in the self-production of long-term narratives about their selves, especially with respect to the opera or football. The processes that sustain those individuation templates are always precarious and unstable, the fruit of both accumulated and continuous labour. Some of the potential diverging trajectories I have mentioned can only be explained by the presence or absence of resources that might partially afford

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the same affect that a previous version of the object had. So, in order to understand the potential afterlives of artefacts like a football jersey or opera, we can look at how agents attach some of the same meaning and libidinous energy to other like-objects that can produce at least some of the same feelings. Unfulfilled demands are transferred to what I have deemed a ‘partial object’4—like the ‘pastoral’ jerseys in football, which still afford a totemic relationship with the team, or live opera from Covent Garden screened at the movie theatre in HD. Movie theatre showings of live opera can afford claims to cosmopolitan selfhood and can provide for ‘feeling’ a powerful voice without the intervention of recording technologies that would alter it, as well as the presence of other like-minded individuals who find a similar enjoyment. It cannot, however, afford the ethic of sacrifice or the connection from diaphragm to diaphragm that an embodied presence would. The last point of this section is about the semiotic work that agents engage in to produce closure in a destabilized object. Following Bijker (1995), in both cases we observed how much previous meaning attribution limited the flexibility of latter attributions. The concept of ‘floating signifier’ elucidated by Laclau (1990, 2005) is also of importance here; as previous object closure tends to rest on the multivocal and open-ended character of the attribution of meaning to the object (in our case, opera or football jerseys), new attempts to produce closure will probably aim first to capture some of the new elements of the configuration under the discursive chain that had been previously used to make sense of the object. This kind of semiotic work, in which agents aim to establish equivalences in their interpretations of and between the new and previous object, can be observed with both the object-opera and the football jersey. Opera fans reconstitute one of the links of the chain (‘soprano’) by making it equivalent with the roles and parts sung in the provincial halls, and with some of the minor stars that, despite their obvious lack of equivalence with singers like Callas or Tebaldi, are nevertheless re-signified (thanks to the presence of some commonalities) as producing the same affect and closure that the aforementioned stars did. Football fans engage in the same kind of work when, in professing to adhere only to the colours of their club, they reject the new iteration of their team’s main uniform but still buy all 4  I take the term partial object (or object a) from Lacan (2007). I do this to emphasize how much what I theorize about the relationship between self and object resembles what Lacan conceptualized as object a largely overlap.

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of the available permutations. Moreover, the emphasis on buying commemorative one-of-a-kind jerseys (as when the team inscribes in the jersey a new championship) paradoxically follows the same totemic—‘this is unique, does not circulate’—logic as the attachment to the traditional jersey.

Conclusion So what is the work that ‘culture’ does in all of this? How do we specify the role of culture in the lash-up between meaning, personal investment and cultural artefacts? The first way to do so is to focus on how accounts and claims about the self (actions that have in the literature been derided as inflated versions of culture) are important kinds of activities. Accounts are activities which can or cannot be supported by the object, and thus prompt agents to narrate what are the most important lines of actions or states of being afforded by the object (as in the case of people who, for instance, do indeed go to the opera house to be able to present themselves as cultural mandarins) and what happens when objects change. Accounts of the self—especially those that have been validated at the individual level throughout a long-term career—also have to pass trials of strength that validate them in the eyes of those stating them and others who confront them on a quotidian basis. This is also true of accounts of the ‘aura’, ‘authenticity’ or ‘charisma’ of particular artefacts. The study of subjective knowledge claims (‘the singing was beautiful, right?’ or ‘I’ll follow Boca Juniors to the end of the world’) needs to be understood as the study of interaction between people and objects, but also between people and people. As I have shown, the object and the self solidify together and constrain as much as they co-produce each other. This also includes the bodily capacities through which people train themselves in order to be ‘true’ connoisseurs of a particular realm, usually impossible to translate to other activities. Understanding the long-term engagement of people with an object should force us then to look at the elaborate ‘moral careers’ of those who report the deprivation and sacrifices they go through in order to follow what they love. To address this we need to complement actor network theory (ANT) accounts of cultural activity with a pragmatist perspective that emphasizes the role played by the more or less stable self narratives in which people recount to themselves and others the kind of people they are or aspire to be (Gross, 2003). Thanks to ANT-inspired accounts of cultural activity,

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we now see how objects facilitate practices and subjectivities over a short period of time; how amateurs are people who have an intense engagement, develop a specific set of skills and invest in a discipline full of constraints and specialized knowledge; and how they engage in a diverse array of practices that pave the way for the experience of being ‘carried away’. Nevertheless, we still do not know as much about what models of selfhood for which cultural activity allows for in the long run, or how it affects the long-term narratives people make about themselves based on that precise attachment; nor do we understand the nature of the individual investment in a configuration that can no longer be supported by the object, or how the change forces amateurs to act accordingly. This brings me to the last point about the work of culture in objects: the work of semiosis that is produced in order to re-stabilize objects and produce closure. Thanks to object-centred sociologies, we know that the object/work is an active part of the explanation; as with dead labour, previous interpretations are already incorporated into the object in performance, interacting in affording or constraining meaning. Objects are the felicity conditions of certain interpretations; we can see that in how previous interpretations aim to capture new objects, attempting to reconstruct—at least partially—the older equivalent chain in what I have called a partial object. Laclau helps us to think of object stabilization as an accomplishment in which the interlock between meaning, practices and ‘objects’ is a temporary closure and also provides for a more ‘culturalist’ explanation. Accepting this would result in the production of sociological models in which practices are devoid of any other meanings than those uttered by the practitioners themselves; yet, in these models we would still find some semblance of stabilization, but instead of the field, as a set of grammatically appropriate possibilities, the structure would have a much larger degree of openness and indeterminacy. Under this framework, for instance, the end of opera-as-it-was-known should unleash a series of re-stabilizing strategies by competing actors, aiming to provide the amateur practices with a new closure about what counts as legitimate in terms of what is good opera, and what are the appropriate practices for someone who calls himself an opera connoisseur. Part of the work of finding such closure would be to look to practices that have been loosely associated, and see whether these practices can actually afford some of the same meaning and emotion that the previous ones did. Since what has been instituted by the closure is a multivocal arrangement, and not a strict one-to-one

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relationship between objects, meanings and practices, are there any preexisting practices that can be enrolled as part of a chain of equivalence? Have they all been rendered null and void in such a way that it is impossible to find a way to re-stabilize selves and objects and we approach something like a paradigm’s crisis? Scholars in cultural sociology have explored objects as totems (Durkheim, 1965; Alexander, 2008; Collins, 2004); as the site for the imprinting of competing claims (Zubrzycki, 2013); as fetishes that give out instructions of use that constitute the boundary between groups (Bourdieu, 1984); or as highly contextual stabilizations of agents and resources (symbolic interactionism). The final plea of this paper is to understand all of these conceptualizations as gradients of cases, in which even in totem-like situations there is always the potential for more than one affordance; always the potential for the correspondence between affect, individual and object to be less than a one-to-one homology; and in which what we need to investigate—and never take for granted—is the work of holding those correspondences together, including what ‘culture’ does.

References Alexander, J. (2008). Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26(5), 782–794. Archetti, E. (1999). Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina. Berg. Austin, J. L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press. Becker, H. (1953). Becoming a Marihuana User. American Journal of Sociology, 5(2), 235–242. Becker, H., Faulkner, R., & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (Eds.). (2006). Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations. University of Chicago Press. Benzecry, C. E. (2011). The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession. University of Chicago Press. Bijker, W. (1995). Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Harvard University Press. Collins, R. (2004). Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press. DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press. DeNora, T. (2003). After Adorno. Cambridge University Press. Domínguez Rubio, F. (2014). Preserving the Unpreservable: Docile and Unruly Objects at MoMA. Theory and Society, 43(6), 617–645.

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Durkheim, E. (1965). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press. [First published in 1912]. Frydenberg, J. (2011). Historia Social del Fútbol. Siglo XXI. Gross, N. (2003). Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Ideas. Theory and Society, 32(1), 93–148. Hennion, A. (2001). Music Lovers: Taste as Performance. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(5), 1–22. Hennion, A. (2007). The Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology. Cultural Sociology, 1(1), 97–114. Hennion, A., & Fauquet, J. M. (2001). Authority as Performance: The Love of Bach in Nineteenth-Century France. Poetics, 29(1), 75–88. Hennion, A., & Gomart, E. (1999). A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Blackwell. Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton. Laclau, E. (1990). New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. Verso. Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso. Laclau, E., & Moufee, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Verso. Lamont, M. (1992). Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1991). Technology Is Society Made Durable. The Sociological Review, 38(1), 103–131. Luhmann, N. (2000). Art as a Social System. Stanford University Press. Shapin, S. (2012). The Sciences of Subjectivity. Social Studies of Science, 42(2), 170–184. Turner, V. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press. Zerubavel, E. (2007). The Elephant in the Room. Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. Zubrzycki, G. (2013). Aesthetic Revolt and the Remaking of National Identity in Quebec, 1960–1969. Theory and Society, 42(5), 423–475.

CHAPTER 12

How Contemporary Art Is Evaluated: The Artistic Quality Criteria of the Quebec Arts and Letters Council Marian Misdrahi

Introduction In an artist’s career, obtaining a grant for artistic creation by public organisms is especially important, since it provides artists with financial support while at the same time publicly recognising their talent  (Bellavance & Fournier, 1992). However, little is known, from a sociological perspective, about the process of evaluation and the artistic criteria implemented by the evaluators who are responsible for determining which artists will receive a grant. Indeed, there is a dearth of research regarding the evaluation of the arts in general (Heinich, 1997b, c; Hekkert & Van Wieringen, 1998; Misdrahi, 2015). Given the current limitations in our understanding of the subject, discussions within the artistic communities have arisen because the selection process for projects (and with it the recognition of artists receiving a grant) may imply favouring certain artistic currents at

M. Misdrahi (*) Dawson College, Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_12

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the expense of others. In this sense, the recognition of artistic quality must face a plurality of criteria and criticisms which make the definition and meaning of contemporary aesthetics an increasingly ambiguous task.1 This chapter focuses on the evaluation process of applications for grants in the contemporary visual arts filed in the period 2005–2006 to the Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec (CALQ). This organisation is the most important of its kind in the province of Quebec (Canada) and is responsible for supporting artistic work produced in the province. More specifically, this chapter seeks to define the attributes and criteria of artistic quality implemented by the jury committees of the Council during the scholarship granting process, as well as to analyse the mechanisms and the dynamics of the evaluation that allows them to make consensual decisions. Given its status as a distinct society within the confederation of Canada and its unique Francophone heritage in North America,2 the province of Quebec has drawn upon cultural innovation as a banner of identity affirmation to distinguish itself from the rest of Anglophone Canada. Hence, it is particularly interesting to study the decision-making process and quality criteria in Quebec’s contemporary art scene.

Art and Professional Salaries Art is the vocational profession par excellence (Sapiro, 2007; Heinich, 2009), and it is also extremely competitive  as a profession. Indeed, for most artists, there exist very few opportunities for professional recognition, and the ability to earn a living from one’s art is even rarer. This is especially true in Québec for visual artists (CALQ, 2006; Fournier & Roy-­ Valex, 2002). The visual arts scene in Quebec is characterised by low media visibility (CALQ, 2006: 3) as well as an undynamic market for art (Deschênes, 2003: 8–9), both of which translate into low levels of art sales and 1  With regard to aesthetic criteria, consult Michaud, Y., La crise de l’art contemporain. Utopie, démocratie et comédie, Presses Universitaires de France, France, 1999; Michaud, Y., Critères esthétiques et jugement de goût, Jacqueline Chambon, Nîmes,1999; Uzel, JP., «L’art contemporain autochtone, point aveugle de la modernité», in Bellavance, G. (eds.), Monde et réseaux de l’art. Diffusion, migration et cosmopolitisme en art contemporain, Liber, Québec, 2000, pp. 189–203. 2  See the special volume «Le Québec, une autre Amérique–Dynamisme d’une identité» de la revista Cités, n° 23, 2005/3.

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purchases within the province. As an example, only 6% of Québec’s population claimed to have purchased a work of art in 1999 (CALQ, 2006: 30). According to figures from Canada’s census, the average annual wage in 2005 was $41,401 CAD. By contrast, for painters, sculptors, and other full-time visual artists, the average annual income was $15,779 CAD (Statistics Canada, 2006). However, according to the Coalition of Visual Artists in Québec (RAAV), the average annual income of visual artists in Québec was around $25,000 CAD, of which half was estimated to come from work not related to their artistic production (Bellavance et  al., 2005).3 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that artistic creation within Canada and Québec depends to a large extent upon public funding. In fact, between 1999–2000 and 2006–2007, public funding of the arts accounted for almost 80% of the revenues of visual artist centres (Statistics Canada, 2006).

The CCA and the CALQ Given these financial conditions, state agencies have played a central role in facilitating the emergence and consolidation of artistic careers at both the federal (Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) and provincial (Council for Arts and Letters of Québec (CALQ)) levels. These bodies have provided the material support necessary for supporting artistic creation, as well as officially recognizing  the importance of the national arts scene. Accordingly, these two agencies have had an important impact on the artistic trajectories of Canada and Québec, as well as contributing to the shaping of the scene itself. The CCA was created in 1957 as an independent organization founded on the Arm’s Length Principle, which seeks to avoid state interference in funding arts and culture. The body was modelled on the Arts Council of Great Britain. The CCA’s creation resulted from a recommendation submitted in 1949 by the Royal Commission on the National Development of Arts, Letters and Sciences. However, it was one of the Commission’s recommendations, others of which led to, amongst other things, the establishment of a university assistance programme in 1952, and the creation of the National Library of Canada in 1953. The central objective of the state’s intervention in the arts and culture was to strengthen national 3  The response rate to the Bellavance, Bernier and Laplante survey represents 40% of 3207 registered artists in Québec cultural associations and organisations.

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unity while ensuring the dissemination of culture among the population (Saint-Pierre, 2003: 74). Turning our attention to Québec, the provincial government approved on June 19, 1992, a new cultural policy for the province called Our Culture, Our Future. Its three main objectives were (1) the assertion of Quebec’s identity, (2) support for the arts and its creators and (3) citizen access to and participation in Québec’s cultural life (Saint-Pierre, 2003: 206). It is important to emphasise that Quebec’s cultural policy underlined the need to support local artists to preserve and promote the province’s unique cultural assets. One product of this new cultural policy was the creation of the CALQ on December 21, 1992, whose activities officially began on April 1, 1994 (Ministère des affaires culturelles, 1992). The CALQ is an autonomous organisation dedicated to the funding of artists, as well as artistic and cultural organisations throughout the province. Furthermore, the Cultural Industries Development Corporation (SODEC) was created in 1994, and its mission was to promote and support the creation and development of cultural enterprises in Quebec (Gouvernement du Québec, 1994). The grants granted by the CCA and the CALQ, besides constituting an important source of financial aid for artists, also represent a source of recognition by their peers, which in turn legitimises their work and artistic status. The prestige associated with obtaining a grant from one of the two agencies comes from the grant evaluator’s level of autonomy, as well as the procedures and mechanisms that constitute the basis of the art  work’s evaluation process. The allocation of resources is based upon a standardised procedure, based on the peer-review system, which depends upon artists’  participation as jurors in the evaluation committees. This evaluation method is intended to limit any political interference, attributing to the committees the power to choose which projects are to be funded (De Nooy, 1988). In this context, impartiality and objectivity are considered fundamental requirements for a legitimate decision-making process.

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The Allocation of CALQ Scholarships This section examines the allocation of grants within the framework of the CALQ’s4 visual arts Research and Creation programme, as undertaken during 2005 and 2006. To analyze this process, we will proceed using the following questions: Which evaluation mechanisms are used by the jury and the CALQ to classify and determine the artistic value of candidates’ applications? Which criteria are used to identify artistic quality? What decision-making mechanisms allow evaluators to reach agreements about which artists deserve to receive grants? Are the determination of artistic value and quality the outcome of previously standardised artistic criteria, or is it instead the product of a process of consensus-seeking by the jury members during the committees? We assume that artistic values are defined in situ, in concrete situations (in our case, during the evaluation committees) and within a specific institutional context (the CALQ). Therefore, artistic evaluation is embedded within specific and concrete social dynamics. This places our research in the field of sociology of arts and in the field of a sociology that privileges the analysis of the institutional context, and whose objects are the values that underlie the artistic evaluation.

Methodology The artistic evaluation carried out by the CALQ consists of several processes involving different actors: programme agents, evaluators, as well as the executive committee of the CALQ. Once the applications are received by the agency, candidates’ eligibility for the programme in question is

4  CALQ’s 2006–2007 budget was $84.8 million, of which $9.2 million was attributed to the scholarship programme for artists and writers, including $2.1 million for artists in the visual arts. During the same period, the CALQ received 4553 scholarship applications from artists from different disciplines, such as architecture, circus arts, audiovisual arts, multidisciplinary arts, visual arts, crafts, song, music, dance, literature and storytelling and theatre. In total, 1166 scholarships were awarded. The grant rate of artists and writers in 2006–2007 was 25.6%. However, for the visual arts committees observed in the 2005–2006 period, the average grant rate was 16.4%. See CALQ (2006–2007). Annual report 2006–2007, http:// www.calq.gouv.qc.ca/publications/rapann_20062007a.pdf

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verified.5 An evaluation committee is then created, consisting of three to six artists, depending on the grant applications received. Furthermore, this committee is supposed to be as representative as possible concerning to age, gender, experience and place of residence (Montreal, Quebec City or its regions), as well as representing the different disciplines of the potential evaluators (painting, sculpture, engraving, photography, installation, mixed techniques and performance). The list of potential evaluators is created by the programme manager. The executive committee is then responsible for approvals, and the final selection of artists, who will then be invited to participate as evaluators for the contest in question. Our corpus of data is based on observations made during the evaluators’ deliberations and includes both on-site observations of the four juror committees’ deliberations and 13 semi-structured interviews with members of the committees observed.6 It is important to note, however, that this is an exploratory investigation; therefore our results should not be generalised. The prestige of the CALQ is built upon one fundamental factor: its transparency. For this reason, the organization clearly sets out the criteria and weightings jurors should adhere to when evaluating grant demands. These are the quality of the artistic work (constituting 40% of the final mark), the interest or relevance of the project concerning the candidates’ artistic trajectory (30% of the note), the interest of the project for the discipline (10%), the artist’s contribution or influence in his community (10%) and the project’s feasibility and the realism of its estimated budget (10%). The jury members have access to two types of materials upon which they must rely to carry out the evaluation. The first is the candidate’s file, which includes his curriculum vitae, his artistic project, the budget requested, as well as press or media articles discussing the candidate’s work. The second type of material is a portfolio or a visual sample of their previous work, which is shown to the jury members in the deliberations 5  The CALQ grant programme defines “artist” as “any person who declares himself to be a professional artist; Creates works or practices an art on his own account or offers his services in exchange for remuneration, as a creator or artist, […] gaining the recognition of his peers; disseminating publicly or interpreting their works in places or in a context recognized by their peers.” CALQ (2015). Programme of bourses, http://www.calq.gouv.qc.ca/ artistes/arts_visuels.htm 6  Each of the 13 interviews, having an average duration of one hour, was transcribed verbatim, codified and studied by the qualitative analysis programme Atlas.ti.

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room. Members of the jury are also given the CALQ programme objectives and evaluation criteria, along with their respective weightings. During the deliberations, jury members exchange views on the value of the different projects and works, as well as the arguments that explain their decision to give a grant to one candidate and not another. During our investigation, we classified the impressions and arguments expressed by the jurors according to the following value regimes proposed by Nathalie Heinich (1997a): purifying, singularity, hermeneutic, aesthetic and esthetic. In addition, we decided to add two more value regimes: recognition and morality. Each of these regimes can be defined as follows: –– Purifying (purificateur): this regime includes the arguments which refer to the object’s artistic nature. –– Singularity: the singularity of the work as expressed by its authenticity, as well as the originality and innovative value of the proposals. –– Hermeneutic: the meaning or depth of the project or artwork. –– Aesthetic: qualifies the work’s beauty, harmony or technical quality. –– Aesthesic: emphasises the effect produced on the senses, whether it provokes visual, auditory or sensory pleasure or displeasure, as well as its attractivity or poetic sense. –– Recognition: emphasises the artist’s reputation, training and trajectory. –– Morality: This regime includes arguments that focus on the artist’s personal qualities or commitments, such as honesty or generosity, and aspects of their career, such as the number of previous grants received or any additional information about the artists’ pathway. The final evaluation results can be considered the product of a collective decision-making process in which jurors make agreements as they decide the future of the applications. In the case of the observed committees, it was possible to identify four types of decision-making: (1) Unanimous consensus, that is, approval of the same option by all participants; (2) Apparent consensus, where at least one participant who disagrees with the majority decides not to oppose and therefore gives tacit consent (Urfalino, 2007: 54, 64); (3) Negotiation, when one participant agrees to support one proposal in exchange for receiving support for another; and (4) Voting, which consists of a decision-making mechanism used in the case of insurmountable disagreements.

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Table 12.1  The evaluation process according to the quality profile of the candidates Non contemporary

Junior

Grey Zone

Meritorious

Meritorious plus

Exceptional

Evaluation Object

Artwork

Artwork Project Trajectory

Artwork Project Trajectory

Artwork Project Trajectory Context / Person

Artwork Project Trajectory Context / Person

Artwork Project Trajectory Context / Person

Evaluation Logic

Formal

Formal

Formal

Substantive

Substantive

Substantive

Short Deliberatiion

Short Deliberation

Medium Deliberation

Long Deliberation

Long Deliberation

Short Deliberation

Unanimous Consensus

Unanimous or Apparent Consensus

Unanimous or Apparent Consensus

Negotiation or Vote

Negotiation or Vote

Unanimous Consensus

Decisionmaking method

Likewise, each grant applicant/candidate was classified according to their final mark and their position in the final ranking once the jurors had completed their evaluation. Thus, candidates were grouped into six categories, or quality profiles (see Table 12.1): The Non-contemporaries, the Juniors, the Grey-zone, the Meritorious, the Meritorious plus and the Exceptionals.7 These categories or quality profiles are analysed in depth below. Finally, our analysis involves the articulation of the jurors’  arguments, the objects, situations and the logic of evaluation through each one of the candidacies’ quality profiles.

7  In his book Art Worlds, Howard Becker classifies artists according to the type of relationship they establish with the world of art. Inspired by his work, we elaborate the typology of the candidates of our study, while integrating it within the theoretical framework of Boltanski and Thévenot’s modes of justification (1999). See Becker (1982). Art worlds, University of California Press, United States.

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Theoretical Framework: Critical Sociology The sociology of critical capacity formulated by Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) is based on the idea that many situations in social life, especially disputes, can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. The authors use the legitimation of agreements that avoid appealing to domination or contingency as a central element of their theoretical proposal to solve disputes or disagreements (ibid.). When people argue in a situation of disagreement, it is necessary to appeal to a set of ideas, objects and subjects to establish links between them to strengthen their argument. Therefore, whilst searching for an agreement, a form of generality is pursued to transcend the relationship between the person and the particular situation. This  generality links the situation in dispute with other similar situations. In this way, the authors offer a grammar (grammaire) of “common worlds” that describes the subjects, the objects and the relations related to diverse modes of justification. By borrowing the conceptual framework of Boltanski and Thévenot, we focus on the objects and subjects mentioned by the jurors, as well as the development that follows from particular situations during the jurors’ deliberations. The evaluation’s central objects are the artworks and the candidates’ proposals. However, depending on the situation and the interest that a candidate could generate, jurors will additionally focus, more or less explicitly, on other aspects such as the trajectory of the artist, their working and economic conditions, their age or on any other distinguishing factor, such as the successes and difficulties encountered during the candidate’s artistic career. As Québec’s artistic community is relatively small, jurors are often already acquainted, at least informally, with the candidates’ personalities  and careers. In several cases, the judges used this knowledge to evaluate the candidate in question. It was possible to identify two evaluation logics implemented by the jury members (Table 12.1), with the method being used depending upon the candidate in question. Both logics resemble two definitions taken from the sociology of justice (Maynard & Manzo, 1993). The first is formal justice, where the antecedents and circumstances of the parties will be relevant to decision-making, but only to the extent that they refer to something specified by pre-established standards. The second is substantive justice, which is based on social values  and everything that may be known about a case (Ibid, 172). For the purposes of this research project, the terms “formal” and “substantive” are used to characterise the evaluation logic used by members of the jury. Henceforth, we will use the term

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formal logic of evaluation to refer to the situation in which the members use exclusively artistic criteria to evaluate the project presented by the candidate. We will use substantive logic of evaluation to refer to the situation in which jury members use artistic criteria in addition to other considerations to evaluate an application, such as age, the number of grants received previously or the personality of the candidate.

Categories Used to Evaluate Artistic Quality in the Field of Visual Arts Out of Time, Out of Place: The Non-contemporary Category This category8 includes the candidates who received the lowest scores and were therefore immediately excluded from obtaining a grant. The juries considered that most of these applicants did not belong to the contemporary art scene or, even in some cases, to the art world. These candidates’ evaluations’ main object or focus was their previous works of art. Neither their proposals nor their context constituted essential aspects of discussion during the deliberation. Consequently, the logic of evaluation implemented by the juries was formal, which means that the jurors used exclusively artistic criteria to evaluate the applications. One particularity of the evaluation process used to assess the candidates, which we have placed in the non-contemporary category, is that the juries evaluated their portfolios or previous works quickly, and were identified as not belonging to the contemporary art world by consensus. It should be noted that the arguments which justified these assessments were few and unvarying. Still among them, we observed criticisms that could be classified, on the one hand, as purificatory, and on the other, as singular. As for the former, the juries questioned the artistic or contemporary nature of the artworks. For example, a jury member said of one particular work that “it has nothing to do with art!”, or “this is just decorative”. Similarly, the jurors noted some of the artworks “amateurish” quality. As for the singular arguments, the jurors remarked on an absence of “a question or a contemporary inquiry” in the treatment of the materials in previous works or the current proposal’s approach. On the other hand, although 8  From the total number of candidates examined (451), the proportion of artists classified as non-contemporary is 19.5%, with a slightly higher percentage for men (22.2%), than for women (17.2%).

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the juries recognised certain technical qualities or even beauty in some of the works, the “aesthetic obsolescence” and the lack of a “contemporary language” excluded these candidates from any possibility of obtaining a grant. In conclusion, the ensemble of these candidates’ applications was perceived by the jurors as being aesthetically “obsolete” and as being “naive” or “popular”, factors which reduced the purpose of these works to simple representations or illustrations of a subject. This artistic assessment was reinforced by the applicants’ scarce or marginal trajectories in the arts field. The Voiceless, or the Beginners: The Junior’s Category This category9 includes candidates who also scored low. However, unlike the non-contemporary category, the members of the jury recognised the contemporary nature of the works, and therefore, neither their artistic legitimacy nor their belonging to the field of art was questioned. For the members of the jury, the artists of this category were not yet sufficiently mature to display an artistic voice of their own. Consequently, these candidacies were not serious contenders for a creation grant. While discussing these applications, the jury focused their attention on the work itself, the creative project and the trajectory of the candidates to a lesser extent. Consequently, the logic of evaluation was predominantly formal. The collective appreciation of the value of these proposals was consensual, and the attribution of scores happened quickly. The main criticisms expressed by the members of the jury towards the artists in this category can be classified as either hermeneutical or singular. Addressing those hermeneutical aspects, the evaluators made two types of observation. The first type illustrates the complexity of certain documents, the weak or absent relationship between the creative project in question and the artist’s previous work or the “dispersed” nature of some projects. For example, a juror said of one project: “I do not understand the project, there are all kinds of possible leads that go in different directions”. The second type of criticism refers to the proposal’s lack of artistic orientation, intention, questioning or reflections. One juror put it this way: “The small elements of his work are attractive, but they say nothing”, while another

9  Artists in the juniors category (93 cases) represent 20.6% of all candidates, where 17.9% are men and 23% are women.

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jury said about another candidate’s work, “ I see certain qualities in the colours, but it is empty of meaning”. Similarly, the members of the jury frequently used adjectives such as “superficial”, “trivial” or “empty” to describe the proposals in this category. With respect to the criticisms formulated from the singularity regime, the evaluators emphasised the lack of originality and authenticity of the works and projects. “Conventional”, “impersonal” or lacking a “personal voice” were some qualifications attributed to this type of candidacy. To sum up, the junior category appears to represent the starting point of candidacies which are considered legitimate, that is, they do belong to the contemporary art field. However, in the eyes of the members of the jury, their corpus of works and projects still lack the merits required to obtain a grant. These are artists who have failed to incorporate new forms of creation into their methods or who have just started their careers and therefore employ artistic practices which are still “immature”. “I Like It, but…”: The Grey Zone This category10 refers to those candidates who, in the opinion of the juries, had potential but did not stand out enough to become favourites to receive a grant. The evaluation in this category of candidates was focused on the work, the project and the trajectory of the candidates. As with the previous categories, the logic of the evaluation was formal, although the deliberation process took more time than the categories mentioned previously. Furthermore, in the case of these grey zone candidates, evaluators used a wider range of arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of the artworks and projects compared to the non-contemporary and junior categories. The grey zone category generally includes candidates whose artworks or proposals are, according to the juries, “promising, but not yet convincing”. This is particularly emphasised when the corpus of candidates’ works has an “uneven” quality to them. The evaluators appreciated the proposals of these candidates, but they acknowledged that “something is missing”. According to the arguments made during the deliberations, that something consisted mainly of those merits which belong to the regime of 10  Artists in the grey zone category accounted for 30.4% of the total number of candidates, and women are more represented in this category with 33.2%, compared to men with 27.1%.

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singularity. In this sense, the members of the evaluation committee pointed out on several occasions the lack of “originality” of specific artworks and, consequently, their “conventional” or “déjà vu” character. In particular, jurors noted the lack of “exploration and development” of some candidates’ aesthetic language, themes and creative worlds. One of the most frequent remarks made by members of the juries referred to the “repetitive” character of some candidates’ artworks or the use of the same “recipe” already present in previous successes. In addition, the members mentioned the lack of “something new in relation to the artistic discipline”, that is, the presence of proposals full of “highly exploited themes” or “clichés”. Less frequently, the reviewers made arguments from the esthetic regimen. For example, the “coldness” of certain artworks, or the fine technique of another despite its lack of “emotion”. In this category, we also identified criteria of the hermeneutic regime, such as the lack of “intention or depth” in the candidate’s previous works or artistic proposal. In this sense, a member of the jury said: “The images are seductive, but the subject is very aesthetic and there is no questioning”. Other aspects valued by the jurors included the internal consistency of the artwork, as well as the coherence between their previous creations and their current proposal. Accordingly, the lack of connection between the project and the previous artworks was the current criteria of the hermeneutic regime often mentioned in the case of the candidates of the grey zone. With regards to the recognition regime, the juries expressed concern about the limited number of individual and collective exhibitions of some candidates. Finally, regarding the artistic merits highlighted by the evaluators, most of them belong to the aesthetic, esthetic and hermeneutical regimes. As regards the aesthetic regime, the evaluators emphasised aspects such as the “colour quality”, the “beauty”, but, above all, the “technical control” of some artworks. Concerning the merits of the esthetic regime, the evaluators mentioned the “poetic nature” of certain artworks, as well as the “sensitivity” of the artist. Finally, as regards the hermeneutical regime, the jury members pointed out the interesting ideas expressed by certain projects or artworks.

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Potential Fellows: The Meritorious Category Meritorious candidates11 are those whose previous artwork or current projects of creation strongly attracted jurors’  interest. However, they failed to obtain a grant despite the jurors’ recognition of their quality due to the disproportionate number of applicants compared with the available budget. This category includes candidates who received good or very good marks and were recognised by the evaluators as talented and worthy artists. In this category, we find a wide range of arguments with respect to artistic quality. When the judges began to define the list of potential grantees, the arguments became more comprehensive, and the evaluation focused on the artist’s work, proposals, career path and context. In this sense, the evaluation logic can be qualified as substantive, that is, the members of the jury used artistic criteria as well as other kinds of considerations such as the age, the number of grants received previously by the candidate or his personality. Unlike the case of the previous categories, the decision to award a grant took longer to achieve, and the decision-making mechanisms involved mostly negotiation, and to a lesser extent voting (see Table 12.1). Among the merits pointed out about these candidates, we find arguments belonging to the esthetic and singularity regimes. Often, the members of the jury mentioned the “poetic”, “intriguing”, “profound”, “seductive” or “suggestive” nature of particular  artworks. They also emphasised the originality, singularity or thorough exploration of a theme. One of the most frequent criticisms was regarding the unequal quality of a given candidate’s corpus of artwork, which affected the evaluator’s certainty about the quality of the candidate’s proposal. On the other hand, some of the criticisms were framed in the hermeneutical regime, which included observations regarding the lack of clarity or coherence of the creation project. In the same way, the lack of “renewal” of the artistic discourse became an aspect penalized by the evaluators, especially given the importance that the CALQ assigns to the promotion of innovation. In this context, the selection of candidates who are ready to take “creative risks” or who, in the words of jurors, dare to propose a work “outside their comfort zone” 11  The meritorious candidates represent 13.3% of the total number of candidates. The proportion of men in this category is 14.5%, and 12.3% of women.

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are welcome. However, the artist who dares to take risks must also have a successful trajectory to reassure the juries about the feasibility of their proposal. In other words, once the quality of candidacies is not called into question (as in the case of meritorious candidates), the members of the jury will consider other aspects that allow them to form judgements such as the candidate’s recognition or prestige. These aspects serve the jurors to strengthen their confidence in the ability of the artist to bring their creative project to fruition. In this sense, arguments of the moral regime are more frequently mentioned in the deliberations, for example, considerations regarding the candidate’s age, seriousness and professionalism, as well as their status as a regional artist, or the number of subsidies received previously. These considerations take greater importance when juries are confronted by two equally talented candidates and only a few grants remain to attribute. However, criteria such as the number of previous CALQ or CAC grants received by a candidate functioned as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, evaluators considered a candidate who had been awarded several grants in the past as someone whose artistic quality is guaranteed and whose ability to meet the institutional requirements for the completion of a project is confirmed.12 On the other hand, jurors also develop a greater sympathy towards candidates “less supported” by the institution, for example, candidates who are starting their career or artists who do not have a well-paid job to carry out their artistic project without a grant. In this sense, a member of the jury said: “The project of (name of the candidate) does not take risks, besides it is not a fragile moment in his career”. This way, during the deliberations, ethical considerations are sometimes added to the strictly artistic criteria. The Rewarded Quality: The Meritorious Plus Category Like meritorious candidates, the meritorious plus category13 includes artists considered by the evaluators as talented. Nevertheless,  unlike the 12  The CALQ establishes that the grantees must finish their creation project in the time stipulated in their grant application, as well as write a report of the activities carried out in relation to the presented project. 13  Artists in this category (42 cases) represent 9.3% of the total number of competitors. In proportional terms, 11.1% of the participants are male and 7.8% female.

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c­andidates of the previous category, the juries awarded them a grant. During the deliberations in these cases, evaluators evoked a wide range of arguments and evaluated more thoroughly the artworks as well as the artistic proposals, trajectories and circumstances of the artists’ careers. The logic of evaluation was substantive and the mode of decision-making favoured was negotiation, although in some cases decisions were resolved through a vote (see Table 12.1). Despite the positive evaluation of the candidates in this category, one of the criticisms mentioned by the evaluators was the lack of clarity of their projects. However, when judges were captivated by the candidate’s work, the ambiguity of the project was not necessarily a determining factor in the decision to award the grant. In this sense, a member of the jury said: “Actually [artist’s name] does not explain [in his project] where he is going, but this does not worry me when I see his work”. Likewise, jurors mentioned negative aspects of the regime of singularity, including the lack of evolution, novelty or originality. In this regard, a jury commented: “Their system is solid, it’s going to be a good job, but it will not be surprising”. Another jury pointed out: “I love his work, but it’s starting to become redundant”. As in the meritorious case, the aesthetic regime dominated the repertoire of merits of these candidates. In other words, the juries mentioned certain works’  interaction, subtlety, energy, sensitivity or magic. In the same way, the members of the jury highlighted attributes of the various projects, such as originality, singularity or thorough exploration. On the other hand, members of the jury highlighted the “good ideas” of certain projects, “intention”, “reflection”, “precision” or “coherence”, arguments from the hermeneutic regime; and “the quality of the trajectory” was highlighted within the regime of recognition. Finally, in this category it is possible to find the greatest concentration of positive arguments from the moral regime. On the one hand, some juries pointed out the involvement and hardships in the career of some candidates and, on the other hand, the juries referred to personal qualities of certain candidates, such as their “honesty”, “seriousness” and “work ethic”.

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Quality by Unanimity: The Exceptional Category This category14 applies to those candidates who scored the highest marks, whose quality and merits were not questioned by the evaluators and who therefore were awarded a grant. The evaluation included the previous artworks, the artistic proposals, the trajectory and the artist’s context, which means that a substantive logic of evaluation was favoured. As in the case of the candidacies of the junior and non-contemporary categories, after a brief deliberation the evaluators reached a consensus regarding attributing a grant (see Table 12.1). While the presence of negative reviews cannot be considered a common trait in this category, the evaluators noted, in some cases, a “lack of surprise” or the absence of a new contribution to the discipline. Likewise, but less frequently, the members of the jury emphasised the diffuse nature of some proposals, or an artistic and aesthetic discourse that they disagreed with. For example, one member stressed: “It’s not my aesthetic, but it’s something you do not see often, and he has his own voice”. On the other hand, the evaluators sometimes expressed their concern about candidates who already have sufficient financial resources to produce their creative project, or candidates whom the organization had constantly subsidized. As for the merits highlighted by the evaluators, those which stood out come from the hermeneutic, esthetic and singularity regimes. With regards to the arguments of the hermeneutical regime, the evaluators generally emphasised the “coherence” and “clarity” of the project or corpus of work. Similarly, the members of the jury highlighted “the reflection” and the artistic questioning of several proposals. As for the aesthetic regime, jurors emphasised aspects such as the “sensibility”, as well as the “poetic” or “emotive” nature of the artworks. Finally, the members of the jury emphasised the merits pertaining to the singularity regime, such as “an incarnation”, “a particular vocabulary” or a “bold” proposal that could boost the creative evolution of the artist’s career.

14  Exceptional candidates represent 6.9% of the participants; the proportion of men in this category is 7.2% compared to 6.6% among women.

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What Is Excellence in Contemporary Art? The selection of fellows, and therefore the candidates who received the recognition of their peers, can be understood as the result of a meticulous procedure, in which various actors participated under particular conditions and situations. However, in the light of the arguments and criteria expressed by the evaluators during the deliberations, the present study shows that the criticisms directed mainly at the set of candidates, which we grouped under the non-contemporary category, become a de facto first “filter” for those candidates who are not part of the contemporary art field. In this way, the arguments from the purifier regime constitute an implicit frontier of the Québec artistic field. On the other hand, we might be forgiven for thinking that “beauty”, a central criterion of the aesthetic regime, would dominate the criteria repertoire during the deliberations. However, it is scarcely mentioned, illustrating a vital aspect of the identity of contemporary art, which is that notions of beauty and good taste are no longer relevant to the definition of an artworks’ quality (Heinich, 1998: 76–77). Beauty is not the element that distinguishes an artistic work from an ordinary object, or, in Melot’s words (1999: 195), “the creation of an art object is totally independent of the aesthetic qualities that are recognized”. Likewise, the secondary nature of the aesthetic arguments during deliberations can be attributed to the context of the evaluation. As Heinich (1997c: 132) points out, qualifying or disqualifying a work owing to its beauty or ugliness could easily be perceived as a matter of personal taste, as these arguments fall within the realm of personal values, and therefore lack legitimacy in the context of an institutional evaluation. Only on rare occasions were arguments relating to the “personal taste” of the evaluator used to justify a choice. This does not mean that evaluators’ tastes did not influence their decision to defend or overlook a candidate, but that their inclination towards one project never became an open issue and every choice and decision had to be sustained with arguments that went beyond merely personal values or tastes. Once the candidates and their projects are deemed “artistic”, the arguments belonging to the regime of singularity came to be frequently evoked during the evaluations. In fact, the lack of uniqueness was the criticism most frequently mentioned by members of the jury, and it was also one of the central merits that facilitated the distinction between meritorious, meritorious plus and exceptional candidates from the rest of the competitors.

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In the search for recognition, artists must be able to appropriate a way of making art that is not attributable to anyone else, and in addition the candidates must be able to place their proposals in a logical continuity with their previous works. At the same time, they must be able to create or propose something new or at least something different from the production of other artists. Following this statement, the identification of originality requires a vast knowledge of contemporary local and international artistic production  from the evaluators. Thus, the more informed the juries are, or the more they are in close and frequent contact with artistic networks, the less likely they are to be impressed by the candidates’ proposals. On the other hand, the prevalence of hermeneutical regime criteria during the evaluation process shows the importance of communication between the artwork and the audience. The discourse of the artwork, far from being a mere tool of artistic appreciation, attributes a meaning to the object and gives it value (Bourdieu, 1977: 42). This characteristic is even more critical when it comes to the evaluation carried out in the context of an organisation such as the CALQ, mainly since the understanding of the artwork and its coherence are indispensable to assess the potential of an artistic proposal. As for the arguments relating to the recognition regime (which refers to the experience, impact or reputation of the candidate), these become part of the debate once the artwork or project attracts the attention of the evaluators. Hence, the artist’s trajectory serves to assure the jury of the candidate’s ability to carry out his project properly. As Heinich (1998: 298) points out, even if the work seems unique, when young artists have not yet demonstrated whether they are “true” artists, juries rely on their trajectory to assess the potential of their project. With respect to non-­ artistic considerations, such as the number of previous grants, age, professionalism or the stage of the artist’s career, although they are not frequent or decisive criteria in the overall evaluation process, they are a part of the debate when juries are deciding the attribution of the final grants. Furthermore, our analysis illustrates the development of a collective discourse which serves as the standard framework to bring out originality, singularity, authenticity, sensitivity or coherence as central criteria of artistic quality. However, interpretations of the latter can diverge among the jury members. However, those jurors with more discursive resources and higher reputations have greater powers of influence over the others.

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The quick and consensual identification of artworks that do not belong to the artistic field, or the quick identification of the exceptional candidates, suggests a remarkable degree of convergence and integration of Québec artistic field conventions15 among the artists invited to participate as evaluators. However, the evaluation becomes more complex when it comes to candidates and artworks that have not been distinguished by the members of the jury, either for their excellence or their lack of artistic value. In such cases comparing  applications is crucial to achieving a decision. Using other sources of evaluation beyond the work or the project itself creates a space for debate about the trajectory of the artist, their socioeconomic context, as well as the circumstances in which their application was submitted. Reputation becomes a “reducer of uncertainty” (Menger, 2009: 358), and the recognition of artistic talent also becomes a decision which relies on projections linked to a particular moment of the life and career of the candidate. This leads the juries to implement a substantive logic of evaluation, where all the artistic and personal information about the candidate will be considered todecide on granting a grant. In this logic, the jurie implicitly  reference collective values such as equity or representativeness. Indeed, candidates who received a grant, and who were evaluated in light of their age, place of residence, number of previous grants or the circumstances of their career, are valued for their artistic quality and for belonging to a generational stratum, a gender or a specific artistic stream. This means jurors are aware that they must evaluate not only as experts in art, but also as citizens with a civic responsibility to grant funds in a representative way.

Conclusions This chapter sought to contribute a better understanding of the evaluation mechanisms in contemporary art, the values that underlie such an evaluation, as well as a sociological study of peer evaluation. Additionally, we sought to highlight the systems of contemporary artistic recognition. 15  According to Becker (1992: 48), the ability to recognise the value of artworks is associated with the integration of evaluators in their discipline. From it, they learn the codes necessary to interpret the artworks and, therefore, to decide on their value. In other words, as actors enrolled in a disciplinary world, jurors have acquired skills that allow them to have emotional and cognitive responses using a specific aesthetic vocabulary.

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The selection of fellows and, consequently, the candidates to whom the recognition of their peers is granted is the result of a process which combines different conditions, situations and actors. In fact, the definition of artistic value was not based on predefined criteria, but rather the members of the juries used their own skills and frameworks of interpretation, which are jointly the product of disciplinary conventions, of personal appropriation or interpretation of these conventions, as well as the context of the evaluation process. Therefore, the jury members select the candidates who will receive a grant as the deliberations advance, and as points of comparison are established between candidates. In general, in spite of their differences, members succeed in establishing consensus-based judgements, even if they have difficulty verbally articulating what defines “good” artwork. According to Becker (1982: 155), the “reliability” of artistic judgements is associated with the systematic application of similar criteria carried out by experienced artists. In this respect, it can be said that the art world has specific norms to define what a work of art “is” and these norms emerge from a previous consensus. In the case of the CALQ, our analysis allows us to suggest that once the non-contemporary candidates are excluded, the main arguments raised by the evaluators gravitate around the singularity, originality, intention, depth and sensitivity of the artistic proposal or artwork. These constitute, according to the current conception of art, qualities which are typical of any creative process in contemporary art. On the other hand, the implementation of non-artistic arguments denotes a decision-making process that seeks to reconcile artistic evaluation with an equitable allocation of funds. This exercise can be described as complicated and delicate, since evaluators must integrate two logics of evaluation that initially appear contradictory: an artistic logic and a political-­institutional logic. The first is a priority for the evaluators during the deliberations and includes “universalist” selection criteria, typical of the contemporary art field. In contrast, the second focuses on equity issues and favours a “particularistic” selection criteria, such as age, sex, region of residence and artistic discipline (Fournier & Misdrahi, 2014: 105). However, if the peer-review model integrates equity considerations, it may turn out that the funding, which qualifies as both a right and a privilege, becomes exclusively a right (Gaudreault-Desbiens, 2000: 238). This could jeopardise the legitimacy of one of the pillars of the peer-review system: the exclusion of considerations that are not strictly artistic.

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It is important to mention that decision-making mechanisms impact the outcome of the evaluations, especially in the case of candidates with the potential to receive a grant. One of the objectives of the committees formed by peers is to achieve a joint decision that is the product of an agreement and not the product of imposition by a majority, as happens in the case of decisions taken through voting. Therefore, in cases where opinions are divergent, decision-making depends on the persuasiveness of evaluators and the influence they may have on their colleagues, as well as on the ability of the evaluation committee to build a commitment. That is, in the ability of the members of the jury to sacrifice certain elections and adhere to the majority’s  opinion, hoping that they will be reciprocated when the jury faces another disagreement. Hence, members of the jury must understand the extent to which it is possible to argue for a vote without provoking a relationship of force which might lead to a non-­consensual decision. In summary, applications for arts’ grants are not always awarded or eliminated for the same reasons, or through the same process. Evaluation outcomes are partially the result of mechanisms of collective decision-­ making. We agree with Michèle Lamont (2009: 125) who observes that in social and human sciences evaluations: “committee members tend to favor a pragmatic understanding of evaluation”, which means in our study case that members of the jury evaluate an intrinsic quality of the artworks, but without neglecting the political implications present in the world of creation (such as gender equality, the creation of art in the city versus rural regions, or the desire for a balance between young and more experienced artists). Comprehensive empirical research in artistic quality is scare. If the study of aesthetic perception benefits from an analysis of the social conditions of “production of jurors”, and in particular the conditions under which verdicts are elaborated (Bourdieu, 1984: 98), the construction of artistic excellence in situ is understudied. From a theoretical point of view, the contextual and relational nature of the evaluation (Lamont, 2009: 241) will be able to benefit from integrating various conceptual universes, in the case of our study, the modes of justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999) and sociology of values (Heinich, 1997a, 1998). The next step is to produce a coherent theoretical framework which provides a better understanding of the cognitive and social process that legitimates the exercise of high-impact decision-making.

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Beyond shedding light on the ambiguity of the meaning of aesthetic contemporaneity in the arts (Michaud, 1999a, b; Uzel, 2000), we hope that the implications of this study may lead to enrich a broader discussion about recognition and reward systems, in arts and sciences, and the place of innovation in these systems as well.

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Gouvernement du Québec. (1994). Loi sur la Société de développement des entreprises culturelles. L.R.Q., c. S-10.002. http://www2.publicationsduquebec. gouv.qc.ca/dynamicSearch/telecharge.php?type=2&file=/S_10_002/ S10_002.html Heinich, N. (2009). The Sociology of Vocational Prizes. Recognition as Esteem. Theory, Culture and Society, 26(5), 85–107. Heinich, N. (1998). Le triple jeu de l’art contemporain. Sociologie des arts plastiques. Les Éditions de Minuit. Heinich, N. (1997a). L’art contemporain exposé aux rejets. Études de cas. Hachette littératures. Heinich, N. (1997b). Expertise et politique publique de l’art contemporain : les critères d’achat dans un FRAC. Sociologie du Travail, 2(97), 189–209. Heinich, N. (1997c). Les frontières de l’art à l’épreuve de l’expertise. Politque de la décision dans une commission municipale. Persée, 10(38), 111–135. Hekkert, P., & van Wieringen, P. (1998). Assessment of Aesthetic Quality of Artworks by Expert Observers: An Empirical Investigation of Group Decisions. Poetics, 25(5), 281–292. Lamont, M. (2009). How Professors Think. Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement. Harvard University Press. Maynard, D. W., & Manzo, J. (1993). On the Sociology of Justice: Theoretical Notes from an Actual Jury Deliberation. Sociological Theory, 11(3), 171–193. Melot, M. (1999). La notion d’originalité et son importance dans la définition des objets d’art. In R. Moulin (Ed.), Sociologie de l’art. L’Harmattan. Menger, P.  M. (2009). Le travail créateur. S’accomplir dans l’incertain. Gallimard-Seuil. Michaud, Y. (1999a). La crise de l’Art contemporaine. Utopie, démocratie, comédie. Press Universitaires de France. Michaud, Y. (1999b). Critères esthétiques et jugement de goût. Jacqueline Chambon. Ministère des affaires culturelles. (1992). La politique culturelle du Québec. Notre culture notre avenir. Ministère des Affaires culturelles. Misdrahi, M. (2015). Être « découvert » ou se faire « reconnaître» ? Le processus de détermination de la valeur artistique dans l’attribution de bourses en arts visuels. Sociologie et sociétés, 47(2), 65–83. https://doi.org/10.7202/1036340ar Saint-Pierre, D. (2003). La politique culturelle du Québec de 1992: continuité ou changement? Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Sapiro, G. (2007). La vocation artistique entre don et don de soi. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, (168), 4–11. Statistique Canada. (2006). Recensement de la population de 2006. https:// www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-­recensement/2006/index-­fra.cfm Urfalino, P. (2007). La décision par consensus apparent. Nature et propriétés. Revue européenne des sciences sociales, XLV(136), 47–70. Uzel, J.-P. (2000). L’art contemporain autochtone, point aveugle de la modernité. In G. Bellavance (Ed.), Monde et réseaux de l’art. Diffusion, migration et cosmopolitisme en art contemporain (pp. 189–203). Liber.

CHAPTER 13

A Sociology of Art, Protest and Emotions: Disrupting the Institutionalisation of Corporate Sponsorship at Tate Galleries Marta Herrero

This chapter integrates the study of emotions into the analysis of institutional work, examining the practices disrupting the legitimacy of an institutional, corporate logic in the field of non-profit art museums. Its focus is on activist group Liberate Tate’s (2010–16) artistically performance protests (APPs)1 aimed at ending BP’s (beyond petroleum) sponsorship of Tate Galleries.2 It is based on the premise that Tate’s corporate sponsorship, financial support received from a business in return for 1  The term ‘artistically performed protests’ as used in this chapter, is used, broadly, to describe a specific type of protest that follows aesthetic and theatrical conventions, representing ideas with the help of music, dance and synchronised movements (see Adams, 2002). 2  Tate Galleries include Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, as well as Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives in Cornwall. The protests analysed in this chapter take place in both Tate Modern and Tate Britain.

M. Herrero (*) University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_13

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publicity, is legitimised by its embeddedness in an institutional, corporate logic. The formation, reproduction and disruption of institutionalised practices, and of the institutional logics legitimising them—sets of guidelines for action, organising cognitive frameworks, cultural norms and symbols shaping individuals and organisational actors’ practices (Thornton et al., 2012; Jones et al., 2013)—are treated here as instances of institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Such work is disruptive when it is aimed at undermining the belief systems and practices that have helped create and maintain institutions (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Liberate Tate’s APPs against BP’s corporate sponsorship provide a case study on institutional disruption that can help exemplify, more generally, the role emotions can play in processes of affection to, and disaffection from, institutions (Flam, 2005). Liberate Tate’s intervention against BP’s sponsorship of Tate is framed within a sociological approach to art; at its centre is the deployment of art, in this case, in the form of Liberate Tate’s theatrical performances, to mobilise public attention for the activists’ cause and promote bonding amongst existing and future collective’s members. The chapter brings in a sociology of art into the study of artistically informed activism and artistic performance protests (APPs) by combining two literatures: firstly, sociological approaches to the utilisation of art as a means of protest by social movements (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Adams, 2002, 2005), which show that art is a powerful means not only to communicate discontent, but also to mobilise others with the help of emotional messages; secondly, Collins’ (2001, 2004) sociological approach to emotions exemplified in the workings of ‘interaction rituals’ (IRs), collective gatherings which lead to the production of emotional energy. An initial focus on institutional disruption helps identify how taken-for-granted mechanisms for financial support of arts organisations, for example, corporate sponsorship, become the locus of critique and questioning. However, in this chapter, I argue that the type of sociology of art which takes as its starting point APPs as IRs and thus emotion-makers helps elaborate further how institutional disruption processes do actually occur. Corporate sponsorship of art museums and the culture sector has received critical attention from scholars, exposing the unequal extent of business marketing and promotion involved in such partnerships (Shaw, 1993; Rectanus, 2002; Wu, 2003; Chong, 2013; Philips & Whannel, 2013). However, institutional approaches remain largely absent from these accounts with some exceptions (see Chong, 2013). By contrast, the

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possibility of institutional disruption on behalf of individual or collective actors has been highlighted in institutional theory (Selznick, 1996), and in more recent research on institutional change in fields and organisations (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996; Scott et  al., 2000; Greenwood et  al., 2002; Maguire et al., 2004; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Attention has been paid to shareholder activism (O’Rourke, 2003; Sjöström, 2008), and to activism by outsider groups attempting to influence corporate social change (den Hond & de Bakker, 2007; King & Soule, 2007). In addition, researchers have examined the effects of social movements and collective mobilisation (Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008; Hiatt et al., 2009), and of protests’ characteristics and tactics on institutional change, whether at organisational and/or at field level (den Hond & de Bakker, 2007). However, institutional research has yet to identify artistically informed activism and protests against corporate sponsorship as an example of institutional disruptive work, and reflect on their ability to instigate change. The chapter is divided into five parts. Firstly, it frames the study of Liberate Tate’s protests within sociological approaches to art and protest. Secondly, it elaborates on the advantages of Collin’s theory of emotional energy via IRs for the study of performative protests. In particular, this section will articulate the idea that institutional disruptions are always framed in ritualistic interactions. Thirdly, it contextualises the emergence of Liberate Tate and analyses some of its most publicised protests. The chapter concludes by arguing that APPs are a key example of how institutional disruption occurs within artistic fields. They are particularly apt as a critique against a museum culture built upon the acceptance of corporate sponsorship as a legitimate source of income. Emotive performances are specially designed to be enacted within the physical space of Tate Galleries, thus enabling protesters to express loyalty to their cause, and to launch a critique against institutionalised ways of financing art museums and their collections.

Protest and Institutional Disruptive Work: Bringing in Arts Sociology This chapter adopts the concept of institutional work in the study of disruptions to Tate’s corporate institutional logic by activist protests against BP’s sponsorship. It draws on institutional theory and its argument that institutions are sets of practices that have become legitimate and taken for

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granted. These ‘enduring elements in social life’ have a ‘profound effect on the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individual and collective actors’ (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 216). Each institutional sector of society— the family, the religions, the professions, the state, the corporation and the market—provides a distinct set of often conflicting or complementary logics that form the basis of institutional conflict and conformity. These sectors have parallel conventions in lower-order logics (Thornton, 2002), for example, the corporate institutional sector finds its expression in Tate’s institutional corporate logic. Individuals and organisations are aware of differences in such logics, in the cultural norms, symbols and practices they endorse, and incorporate this diversity into their thoughts, beliefs and decision-making. Deinstitutionalisation processes occur when organisational, group or individual struggles question an institution’s legitimacy, potentially dealing with the abandonment of institutionalised practices that have lost their original meaning (Maguire & Hardy, 2009). The meanings of existing institutionalised practices are, however, not easy to change, since they stem from belief systems that are well entrenched. Some form of purposive disruptive institutional work—attacking the mechanisms that lead members to comply with institutions—is necessary to undermine and disassociate core assumptions, beliefs and the moral foundations attached to institutions (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). One often-mentioned attempt to destabilise institutions is the work of social movements (Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008). Acting as outsider challenges, they assert new visions of order, mobilising competing institutional logics, which can lead to the disruption of policies. Groups like ACT UP and Earth First! use protests, boycotts and direct actions to dramatise problems and directly disrupt daily operations and routines (Elsbach & Sutton, 1992; Hoffman, 1999). Other research suggests that social movements can instantiate new logics by evoking controversy and debate. Creed and Scully’s (2000) study of gay rights/GLBT activists shows how movements can help establish new practices by exploiting contradiction and multiple logics, importing or redeploying logics across settings, and articulating or recombining new elements with prevailing models, myths or concerns. Institutional approaches to social movements have drawn attention to how protests and mobilisations target institutions at various levels; for example, at field level, when anti-corporate forces promote communitarian alternatives to corporate capitalism, they intervene at field level, but social movements can also target institutions within and between organisations (Creed & Scully, 2000; Scully & Creed, 2005), as in the case

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of Liberate Tate whose main and only target is a non-profit arts museum, Tate Galleries, and its sponsorship by BP. But a starting insight that can further understanding of what is distinctive about the work of institutional disruption in art museums is the fact that art and cultural fields, as Bourdieu defines them, operate according to a logic of ‘belief in the value of art’ (1993). In other words, cultural, artistic value is a belief, and a shared belief, that is produced collectively. The practices of curators, museum directors, critics and artists endow artworks and arts organisations with value, that is, prestige. Accordingly, Tate Galleries is an influential, and at times undisputed, arbiter of value for international contemporary art. But the production of belief, Bourdieu adds, takes place within ‘an economic world reversed’ (Bourdieu), where the principles operating in the larger economy do not apply, and where self-interest and the accumulation of economic capital is not perceived as the main impetus for action.3 Rather, artistic fields are embedded in a logic of interest in disinterestedness because the main object pursued is not financial, but symbolic, the accumulation of recognition, reputation. Liberate Tate’s protests against BP’s sponsorship throw into sharp relief two main issues: firstly, that an interest in disinterestedness is in itself a fiction; museums do need financial capital—the arts do not survive, at least in the UK, without the financial support of businesses. Secondly, if the belief in the value of art is a shared, collectively fabricated belief, it is also susceptible of being debunked, destabilised; as Bourdieu (1993: 30) notes the artistic field is also ‘a field of struggles’. Bourdieu’s work raises two important questions for our case study: what particular forms of ‘belief’ are collectives like Liberate Tate targeting with their protests, apart from their dissatisfaction with BP’s sponsorship? Do their artistic performances help expose, discredit ‘beliefs’ that other forms of protest might not be able to achieve? A wealth of literature has explored the role emotions play in social movements, from the initial motivations that lead people to participate in them, to the specific public protests they carry out (Goodwin et al., 2001, 2004; Aminzade & McAdam, 2002; Flam, 2005; Jasper, 2011). Overall, these authors problematise the use and application of cognitive-based definitions and concepts to social movements research, which do not allow for the incorporation of emotional processes and practices (Goodwin et al., 3  This applies most clearly to the field of restricted production as opposed to the field of large-scale production where commercial interests prevail (see Bourdieu, 1993).

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2001). As Goodwin et al. (2001: 6) argue, the notion of cognitive framing, which has been used to explore individuals’ motivations to participate in movements, has a great deal to do with emotions, as ‘[c]ognitive agreement alone does not result in action’. Similarly, social networks through which social movements recruit are important not only because they connect people with already shared assumptions and beliefs, but also because affective ties ‘bind and preserve the networks in the first place, as well as give them much of their causal impact’ (Goodwin et al., 2001, p. 8). Thus, every cognitive frame also implies emotional framing (Flam, 2005). These points have been taken up by scholars who have examined, more specifically, artistically informed activism or protest (Eyerman & Jamison, 1995). Music, for instance, can stir emotions in individuals and groups which can be helpful to social movements in various ways; it can reinforce pleasure (Jasper, 1998) or remove fear or despair. Sociological studies of artistic protests have examined the distinctive outcomes these can generate when used as a means of critique and opposition. A well-known study in the field is by Eyerman and Jamison (1995), where they focus on the importance of popular music to the activities of social movements during the 1960s in America. Their main argument is that whilst social movements emerge within specific socio-political contexts, the work movements do leads to the transcendence of such context. Temporarily at least, they create ‘new contexts, new public spaces for addressing the particular problems of the time’ (Eyerman & Jamison, 1995: 450). Thus whilst social movements articulated a critique of militarism in American life, it was through popular music, the performance and singing of songs, that ideas from political radicalism, prevalent within small groupings of critical intellectuals and political activists, were communicated and turned into a widely available language, an ‘accessible idiom’ (Eyerman & Jamison, 1995: 464). In particular, it was the singing of songs from popular music repertories that helped create a sense of belonging and social cohesiveness to those involved. The use of emotive language and rhythms brought together ‘the musical and the political’. And yet, the bonds created by music were temporary—the sense of common understanding and common experience were transitory. Ultimately, the incorporation of music into more commercial channels meant that it lost its radicalism, its ability to operate a translation device between politics and wider audiences and its revolutionary potential. Adams (2002, 2005) research into the production of arpilleras, or arpillera-making—brightly coloured patchwork pictures—explains how these were initially used as a form of protest against Augusto Pinochet’s

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dictatorship in Chile (1973–90). Made mostly by women, who literally sow images and writings that conveyed political messages, these handmade patchworks helped them express the poignant emotions associated to the events in Chile. The sale of arpilleras outside Chile was a means not only to raise income for the movement, but to convey important politically and emotionally charged messages outside Chile. In practical terms, arpillera-making helped articulate three framing tasks critical to social movements: a diagnosis, that is, identification of a problematic aspect; a proposed solution; and a ‘rationale for engaging in collective action’ (Adams, 2002: 23). And yet, arpillera-making was also a means of mobilising non-financial recourses for the movement. These could take the form of labour or technical expertise. In particular, Adams (2002: 27) notes, two mostly ignored key resources art helped mobilise were ‘hope and determination’ (2002: 25). The utilisation of emotions via arpilleras was a deliberate attempt and crucial part of the work Chilean women did; they were ‘directed to produce arpilleras that would pull on people’s heartstrings’ (Adams, 2002: 34). They knew, and thus acted accordingly, that arpilleras had to work at both cognitive and emotional levels. Arpilleras would thus show a person being beaten by a soldier, blood oozing out of a head; or children waiting to be fed with food from the soup kitchen. Arpilleras were made by women who themselves struggled to feed their families, and they knew how to communicate the very cause of their struggles through their art-making, in emotionally laden ways. So far, we have seen that art does more than provide a mechanism for protest by communicating oppositional views to audiences. Whether group singing the songs, or by sowing coloured patchworks of pictures, artistically informed activism or protests can help arouse emotions in those involved. Most importantly, such processes are not accidental, but an integral part of the agency of those involved. To lend further specificity to the argument that artistic performances can lead to the production of emotions, I turn next to Collin’s micro sociological theory of IRs and emotional energy.

Emotions and Interaction Rituals: Artistic Protests Put into Action In what follows, I focus on Collins’ (2004) theory of ‘interaction rituals’ (IRs) which I argue helps lend further specificity to analyses of how social movements use artistic performance as a way of arousing emotions. He

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argues that IRs produce ‘emotional energy’ which helps accomplish two purposes: the reproduction of the movement and its cause, and the widespread communication of their views to the wider public. IRs are particularly apt at explaining in detail how Liberate Tate’s protests not only illustrate the workings of IRs, but they also exemplify the specific mechanisms in art performances directed at institutional disruption: undermining the taken-for-granted status of corporate sponsorship as a legitimate form of financial support for art museums. Collins draws inspiration for his theory of IRs from Ervin Goffman’s studies of small gatherings, assemblies, congregations and audiences, which he adapts to Emile Durkheim’s analysis of formal rituals,4 to include everyday small-scale rituals. It is in these small gatherings or rituals, Collins argues, that ‘solidarity is generated in the little transient groups of everyday life, at the level of the encounter’ (2004: 28). These gatherings, or experiences, combine the articulation of collective meanings which in the ritual process are created, denigrated or reinforced, and initiate emotions, which in successful rituals result in the generation of social emotion par excellence, that is, emotional energy (Collins, 2004). Collins’ IR theory pays particular attention to the cognitive and emotional aspects of rituals, as well as to the specific ways in which IRs work to transform and reproduce emotions. IRs consist of three main ingredients: firstly, the presence of bodies together in the same place, and the inclusion of at least two individuals. This bodily presence is essential to his theory because it enables a ‘physical attunement’ that then leads to ‘currents of feeling, a sense of weariness or interest, a palpable change in the atmosphere’ (Collins, 2004: 34). Secondly, a shared focus of attention, such as the performance of shared actions (chanting, gesturing). Thirdly, the existence of an object, activity or symbol that becomes a mutual focus of attention and enables participants to become aware of each other’s awareness, of a shared sense of a group focusing together (Collins, 2001). This is the aspect of rituals that contributes to the formation of a collective consciousness of the group itself, a form of ‘heightened intersubjectivity’ (Collins, 2004: 35). The participants’ homogeneous movements, for 4  Durkheim analyses the reproduction of solidarity in religious group rituals that produce belief, using the example of tribal gatherings of Australian aborigines. However, whilst Durkheim’s work on rituals addresses a fundamental issue in sociology, that of what holds society together, it also obliterates the role emotions play in the production of moral solidarity (Collins, 1990, p. 27), and this particular aspect is what Collins’ theory seeks to unravel.

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example, ‘uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object’, give them a sense of participation in a group activity, making them aware of what everyone else is doing, and thus enhancing a sense of group consciousness (Ibid). The presence of these ingredients leads to feelings of group solidarity in individual participants, who ‘become pumped up with enthusiasm and confidence’ (Collins, 2001: 28). This is what Collins describes as ‘emotional energy’ (Collins, 2001: 29), ‘feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action’ (Ibid: 42), and a standard of morality for the group, or ‘the conception of what is good’ (Ibid: 39). Such rituals operate as emotion transformers; they amplify an initial emotion, (outrage, anger, fear), which the collective focus of the group makes stronger. These stronger, collective feelings of morality, a form of emotional solidarity, facilitate the group’s formation of its own standards of right and wrong. Individuals participating in IRs can accumulate stocks of emotional energy and of membership symbols, which lead them to participate in other similar IRs.

BP’s Sponsorship of the Arts: Tate Galleries BP’s sponsorship of Tate exemplifies the organisation’s embeddedness in the corporate institutionalisation affecting the UK’s art sector. Indeed, BP has been a key player in this institutionalisation process with its support of the arts and culture in the UK, which spans over 35 years5 and includes, apart from Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House, the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company, in addition to the London Olympic Games (2012), and the related Cultural Olympiad programme of events.6 At present, BP sponsors three activities at Tate: the ‘BP British Art Displays’, which involves support for the display of the collection at Tate Britain, allowing for the rotation of collection displays on a regular basis. Tate’s website makes clear the benefits of such support, which ensures ‘that the breadth and variety of the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day is available to the public free of charge’;7 the ‘BP British Art Lecture’, a public event with a high-profile guest speaker invited 5  http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/press/press-releases/national-portrait-­ gallery-­announces-family-affair-shortlist-for-.html 6  BP was a premium sponsor of the London Cultural Olympiad, which included twelve weeks of concerts, exhibitions and events across the country that ran alongside the Olympic Games. 7  http://www.tate.org.uk/join-support/corporate-support/cross-platform-partnership

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to discuss British Art; and ‘BP Saturdays’, four Saturday events run across the year designed to attract a specific audience, from toddlers and families to young children and their families, as well as young people and adults. The successes of BP’s sponsorship are listed on Tate’s website: over 31 million people have visited Tate Britain during BP’s years of support; around 70% of visitors to Tate Britain in 2010 came to see the BP British Art Displays; in 2010 over 7000 visitors attended the four BP Saturday events, and the BP British Art Lecture has been given by artists and celebrities such as Yinka Shonibare, Jeremy Paxman and Steven Poliakoff.8 The BP British Art Displays and A Walk Though British Art are permanent exhibitions supported by BP on display at the recently refurbished Tate Britain’s Millbank site, after a £45 million investment. In addition, BP’s sponsorship of Tate Britain is listed on Tate’s website as a success story, making reference to Tate’s ability to generate significant return on investment for the sponsor. Activities funded with BP’s financial support are renamed with the initials BP, for example, the BP British Art Displays, and always display BP’s logo. Tate’s website also makes specific reference to those activities that have benefitted from long-term BP’s sponsorship with the words ‘celebrating 25 years of the BP & Tate partnership’.9 Overall, the above shows how despite adverse events, such as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP has nonetheless gained the loyalty and gratitude of its sponsored organisations, and the arts and business community. However, such loyalty and gratitude are to suffer a blow with the emergence of Liberate Tate.10 In the following section, this chapter provides a background to Liberate Tate’s emergence to illustrate the beginnings of institutional disaffection practices, seen here in the types of statements and emotions mobilised by the activist group in their opposition to BP’s sponsorship of Tate.

Art Protests in Action: Liberate Tate’s Activism, 2010–2016 Liberate Tate was founded during a two-day workshop commissioned by Tate, titled ‘Disobedience Makes History: Exploring creative resistance at the boundaries between art and life’, which was held in January 2010 and  http://www.tate.org.uk/join-support/corporate-support/cross-platform-partnership  http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-walk-through-british-art 10  BP has been the object of attacks and critiques by a number of protest groups. However, Liberate Tate is the only group that has specifically targeted BP’s sponsorship of Tate. 8

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gathered a total of 33 participants. The underlining question to explore was: ‘What is the most appropriate way to approach political issues within a publicly funded institution?’ Tate invited John Jordan, co-founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, a collective that merges art, activism and permaculture,11 to run the workshop. But the art activists running the workshop were told by Tate curators that they could not ‘host any activism directed against Tate and its sponsors’, even though Tate very much welcomed and encouraged a ‘debate and reflection on the relationship between art and activism’. Workshop participants refused this censorship and debated instead the current climate crisis and the fact that BP was a major sponsor of Tate, whose former CEO, John Browne, had been appointed Head of Tate’s Board of Trustees. The workshop ended with an intervention that placed the words ‘Art Not Oil’ on the windows of the Tate Modern’s top gallery floor (Jordan, 2010). The collective Liberate Tate was set up the following spring. The initial workshop and the ensuing emergence of Liberate Tate illustrate an attempt to encourage the distrust and opposition to BP and, by extension, of its sponsorship of Tate. The initiating emotion of anger against Tate’s staff for its opposition to ‘any activism directed against Tate and its sponsors’ was moral outrage, but the workshop itself facilitated a ‘collective focus’ for the group, thus making the feeling of outrage stronger, as it is clear from the ending of the workshop with the words ‘Art Not Oil’. Arguably, the workshop offered an ideal space for the articulation and transformation of workshop participants’ beliefs, ideas and emotions of outrage and anger, into collective, group emotions, feelings of solidarity and standards of morality. Needless to say, activism against the oil industry is not new. BP’s partnership with Tate is part of a trend for multinational oil companies to sponsor leading London-based cultural organisations.12 This form of sponsorship has been criticised by activist groups that see these associations as means to ‘buy in’ publicity, and to compensate for some of the industry’s unethical business practices. Since its formation in 2010 Liberate Tate established alliances with a network of such activist groups, becoming  http://beautifultrouble.org/author/johnjordan/  BP sponsors Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House, the British Museum, whilst Shell sponsors the science Museum, the National History Museum, the National Gallery, the National Theatre, The South Bank Centre and the National Maritime Museum. 11 12

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part of a coalition named Art Not Oil, which include Rising Tide UK, Platform and the Reclaim Shakespeare Company (RSC), against BP’s sponsorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shell Out Sands, against Shell’s sponsorship of Southbank Centre, and the UK Tar Sands Network with the purpose of ending oil sponsorship of the arts. The Art Not Oil campaign has been railing against cultural oil sponsorship since 2004.13 Liberate Tate’s positioning within this network is important here because it helps lend legitimacy to its remit and performance-based protests. Liberate Tate is not the only activist group to target a specific organisation, with RSC being another clear example. However, it is so far the only collective that has targeted Tate Galleries and BP’s sponsorship. Further, within this network it has produced the most distinctive type of performances with the use of formulaic and ritualistic oppositional movements and actions, as we shall see, inside a given art museum.

Liberate Tate’s Performances, Interaction Rituals and Emotions Since its formation in 2010, Liberate Tate carried out a total of eleven performances, which usually took place either in Tate Modern or in Tate Britain. These were video recorded and posted on the group’s website. This section analyses a selection of six performances that took place between 2010 and 12, based on the short films posted on the group’s website.14 This selection is designed to explore how Liberate Tate resorted to the encouragement of collective emotions, and standards of morality, public discontent, dissatisfaction and opposition to BP’s sponsorship of Tate. These APPs are characterised as examples of IRs, and are directed at the creation, denigration and/or reinforcement of collective meanings, as well as the production of emotional energy. As it will become clear, the performances contain the main ingredients of IRs: they are group performances of shared, synchronised actions, where inclusion in the group is 13  Rising Tide UK and the Rising Tide National Group, which are, in turn, part of the International Rising Tide network, started in 2000 and inclusive of countries such as North America, Australia, Ecuador, Mexico and Finland, started the campaign. Platform is the longest standing organisation in the Art Not Oil campaign; started in 1983, it focuses on the impacts of the global oil industry and combines art activism, education and research ‘to create projects driven by the need for social and ecological justice’. See http://risingtide.org.uk and http://platformlondon.org/about-us/ 14  http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/

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signalled by the participants’ clothing, dressed in black and most often covering their face with black veils; they carry out orchestrated, organised movements; sometimes the groups utter words of protest or sign chants, as in the case of Exorcise BP. These movements are designed to centre the focus of attention on a specific activity or object. The symbol most often used is BP’s logo, whether this is to be found on a pouring can, on paint tubes or on black barrels containing an oil-like substance. The logo focuses the attention of IRs participants, and at the same time, it contributes to the formation of a collective, group consciousness. BP is what all protesters are fighting against; this fight and the anger, and the rage associated with BP’s practices, are captured and encapsulated in those cases where the BP logo is tarnished with oil. Importantly, Liberate Tate does not have a specific symbol that designates group membership, but arguably, a common symbol in all performances is what they are against: BP’s oil extraction practices. In May 2010, Liberate Tate performed its first intervention, License to Spill15 in the midst of Tate Britain’s Annual Summer Party on its celebration of 20 years of BP’s sponsorship. The video shows the performance participants arriving at Tate Britain in a taxi, their faces covered with black veils, whilst one participant in the group talks about the performance and the overall aims of Liberate Tate. Some of the things mentioned are as follows: ‘We are ready for this performance; we have worked on it for quite a few weeks, it’s going to be really beautiful.’ This is followed by a statement about how the group supports a culture of life, not a culture of death; how art is about creativity and not destruction; and how the future is not about fossil fuels, not to do with corporations that pump fossil fuels out of the ground supported by the UK’s political elite and art galleries. A group of around ten people veiled and dressed in black carried black barrels with the BP logo. They poured hundreds of litres of black ‘oil’ (molasses) in these barrels at the entrance of Tate Britain, covering the spill with hundreds of feathers; the BP logo at the entrance is covered in black oil. The protesters walked away, leaving behind a scattering of barrels on the floor. Inside Tate Britain two women covered the floor with a black oily substance, which they spilled from under their inconspicuous dress. The video shows them wearing a white plastic overall with the BP logo printed on it and preparing to clean the spill using their shoes; but the spill is quickly cordoned off and cleaned by Tate’s staff. The long version of the video  http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/licence-to-spill-june-2010/

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shows some of the invitees’ anger and shock at the performance. One of the guests angrily says: ‘this is a very bad publicity stunt; I disapprove of this. You can make your point differently’; another adds: ‘Yes, I am very angry. What’s the point? Just to draw attention to themselves, and they are all chicken anyway because they wear veils.’16 A set of four performances Sunflower (September 2010), Human Cost (April 2011), Exorcise BP (2011), Floe Piece (January 2012) took place in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall from 2010 to 12. Sunflower was a rather large performance, with fifty people dressed in black entering the Hall with only their faces remaining visible, and each carrying a BP branded oil paint tube. On entering the gallery, they formed a line and then arranged themselves in a circle. Once in position, they all stamped on tubes, spraying out dozens of litres of paint in a huge burst over the floor. After this, they left the Hall in line, in the same processional manner as they had entered it. This was a silent performance, lasting over three minutes, and it was designed to anticipate Ai Wei Wei’s forthcoming installation Sunflower Seeds in the Turbine Hall sponsored by Unilever.17 Human Cost was designed to mark the first anniversary of BP’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico and was part of a BP Week of Action.18 It was performed in the Duveen’s Hall of Tate Britain where the exhibit Single Form: The Body in Sculpture from Rodin to Hepworth was on display. The exhibit was part of a series of ‘BP British Art Displays’ staged throughout Tate. Three silent figures entered the Hall and a nude member of Liberate Tate group assumed a foetal position on the floor in the middle of the room, whilst veiled figures dressed in black poured what appeared to be oil (ground charcoal and sunflower oil) over him from containers emblazoned with BP logos. The two veiled figures left the hall leaving the naked man covered in oil on the floor. Eventually museum security  http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/licence-to-spill-june-2010/  Reference to Ai Wei Wei’s installation which consisted in millions of hand-crafted porcelain seeds, which are designed to challenge first impressions, ‘what you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means’ (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-­ modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei/interpretation-text). Liberate Tate’s performance thus alludes to BP’s public reputation as a sponsor of Tate, which it seeks to challenge (http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/sunflower-september-2010/) 18  The BP Week of Action was called by Liberate Tate, Art Not Oil, Climate Camp London, UK Tar Sands Network, Climate Rush, Indigenous Environmental Network and London Rising Tide. Under the slogan ‘BP and culture: time to break it off’, the groups held a number of public campaigns. 16 17

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directed visitors out of the hall, placing a screen around the area to hide the action from public view. After protesters left the museum, a clean-up crew dealt with the aftermath. The performance lasted eighty-seven minutes, one for every day of the spill. Using the body covered in oil is  a process of emotional movement, a widening of ‘we’ beyond the bounds of the present situation, as it represents those ‘not here, yet still with us’, those who have been affected by the spill. Not only, literally, those whose bodies have been covered in oil, but also those whose lives have been affected by the devastating consequences of the spill. A similar style of performance was Floe Piece, where four veiled figures dressed and veiled in black lifted a 55 kg block of Arctic ice onto a sledge and walked it in procession across the Thames on the Millennium Bridge, and into Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The ice was placed at the bottom of the Turbine Hall, whilst the four figures stood silently around the melting ice for fifteen minutes before leaving the building. An Arctic researcher had donated the ice block to the UK. Exorcise BP took place in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and it shows a rather different pattern for the performances described so far. Even though the performance took place in Tate, and was clearly a protest against BP’s sponsorship, it was endorsed by Liberate Tate in conjunction with environmentalist groups UK Tar Sands Network, London Rising Tide, Art Not Oil and Climate Rush. The performance is posted on Liberate Tate’s website, and from an IR’s perspective it follows a very similar pattern to Liberate Tate’s own protests. American actor and activist Bill Tallen, under the pseudonym of Reverend Billy, performed Exorcise BP, which was a parody of an attempted ‘exorcism’ of BP. Tallen’s ‘model of politicized’ ‘theatre disturbance’ or ‘theatre activism’ (Lane, 2002: 61) is aimed at what he calls contested spaces, those urban sites subjected to commercialisation. This genre, the ‘comic theatrical service’, includes performances of ‘comic church services, complete with readings from the saints (or the devils), public confessions, collective exorcisms, the honouring of new saints, donations to the cause, a lively choir, and a rousing sermon’ (Ibid). In Exorcise BP’s ‘mass exorcism’, Tallen appears dressed as a preacher in a white suit and religious collar. He stands at the centre of a group, a circle of individuals dressed in green tunics. He kneels down next to a display of BP’s logo and starts ‘preaching’, but soon the group starts pouring ‘oil’ on him. Both Tallen and his group sing a song with the lyrics: ‘Power, I think that something is burning. We have been drilling’. In the process, the ‘oil’ tarnishes the BP logo. Next Tallen stands by an exhibition panel

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with BP’s logo, which he blackens with the oil covering his body. Both the body and the logo are now black. Tallen walks out of the gallery holding up the BP logo with his hands to continue ‘preaching’ against the atrocities carried out by BP. The performance was recorded on video and posted on Liberate Tate’s website.19 In October 2016, it was announced that BPs sponsorship of Tate was to come to an end. A feature of the announcement in The Guardian newspaper carried an image from Exorcise BP with Reverend Billy20 leading a procession of protesters upholding a BP logo smeared in black. Even though BP did not blame Liberate Tate’s protests as the cause for the end of the sponsorship, the collective did take credit for Tate’s ‘liberation’ from BP, considering the decision ‘a great victory’.21

Conclusion: Art, Protest and Emotions—A Sociological Agenda The main argument in this chapter is that APPs are a key example of how institutional disruption occurs within artistic fields. They are particularly apt as a critique against institutionalised, taken-for-granted ways of financing museums, such as the acceptance corporate sponsorship as a legitimate source of income. Institutionalisation is successful if the legitimacy of corporate sponsorship as an undisputed funding mechanism for the arts remains unchallenged. However, the emergence of opposition groups such as collective Liberate Tate throws into array the taken-for-­grantedness of institutionalised sponsorship, and the workings of institutional disruption work. This argument has been built around a sociological framework specifically tailored for the study and analysis of Liberate Tate’s artistic performance protests (APP) against BP’s sponsorship of Tate Galleries. This includes two key elements: the use of APP as a form of collective opposition and the utilisation of emotions in the form of IRs in order to lend poignancy to the collective’s ideological messages. A starting point has been to conceive the specific type of logic underlying the artistic field in which, as Bourdieu (1993) notes, art exists in the form of a shared ‘belief’ in its value. More specifically, shared beliefs in the  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luoL5A-SHQk  The Guardian, 11 March 2016. 21  https://hyperallergic.com/288254/liberate-tate-activists-look-back-on-six-years-offighting-bp-sponsorship/ 19 20

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value of art are pursued as a form of ‘disinterestedness’ so that economic advancement is disguised as not being the main object pursued. Both insights help explain the position of Tate Galleries vis-à-vis Liberate Tate’s artistically informed activism. As an organisation at the core of an artistic field, Tate is one of the collective actors which lends legitimacy and public recognition to the work of artists in its collection, and in its public displays and exhibitions. But perhaps, more importantly, is the pursual of an anti-­ economic logic where reputation and recognition are at the forefront rather than the pursual of economic, financial benefit. The acceptance of corporate sponsorship, from any sponsor, is ironically an immediate disruption to the anti-economic character of the artistic field described by Bourdieu; it is after all the pursual of financial income that drives the acceptance of sponsorship. The application of Bourdieu’s insights to the example of Tate Galleries/Liberate Tate is particularly important because it helps understand specifically what type of institutional arrangement Liberate Tate’s protest seeks to disrupt, to contest. We are dealing with a realm that, if opposed, it needs to operate at a similar level, that of debunking beliefs, values, institutionalised ways of doing things that are unquestioned. More importantly, Liberate Tate’s recourse to APP shows how this is an attempt to dismantle Tate’s sponsorship arrangements in its own terms: by means of enacting artistic performances, but with the purpose of destabilising and problematising the very foundations of BP’s sponsorship. This is where the sociology of arts, I argue, continues to have a key role in unfolding how Liberate Tate’s performances do, in practice, pursue their critique. A body of work on social movements and art has helped draw the argument that artistic productions do operate at the level of cognition, attempting to debunk well-established ways of thinking, as well as, importantly, convey emotional messages. But it is Collins’ theory of IR as emotional energy producers that has helped made observable the micro sociological details of how emotions work in action, when emerging from within the performance of APPs. Our analysis has demonstrated that initial feelings of anger, which underpin Liberate Tate’s members’ opposition to BP’s sponsorship, are transformed into emotional energy: collective feelings of membership and standards of morality that are upheld by the group. The specific ingredients of these IRs are as follows: the performance of choreographed movements, the wearing of black clothing and veils, the use of oil-like substances and the drawing of attention to BP’s logo—when acted out in the context of the museum they make possible the emergence of emotional, group energy. Even though the style of more

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recent Liberate Tate’s performances has changed slightly—on occasions participants do not cover their faces with veils, and there is less prominence to BP’s logo and the use of oil-like substances—their goal remains the same: to project group emotions that can increase bonding (alliance to the cause) amongst group members, and to perform in a public arena new forms of understanding, in this case, what constitutes value in art. At one level, Liberate Tate’s protests are an attempt at debunking the very sanctity of the art museum. This is because their protests are messy, they are dirty, they sully the museum which visitors can only inhabit if they follow the rules (do not touch the art objects, do not take photographs and so on). In short, they oppose the very ‘sacredness’ of the art museum. But, in particular, it is the emotional message that APPs are able to convey that mostly comes to the fore in the analysis. The anger of protesters against BPs sponsorship, even when not individually articulated, is sometimes beautifully performed and enacted. To conclude, a pressing issue in this chapter is to emphasise that it is only through a combination of sociological approaches to the study of arts, protests and emotions that we can start to grasp the extent to which APPs are particularly well suited to the critique of art museums and their finances. Perhaps in the future arts sociologists with an interest in finance and non-profit arts organisations can expand this framework into the sociology of finance and emotions (Pixley, 2005). This agenda can help shift the analysis into the specific sets of emotions that underpin the world of non-profits arts finance beyond the study of protest and disruption. This means attending, in the first place, to the very emotions that help cement and consolidate mechanisms for financing the arts—philanthropy, government funding and the very institutions at the core of such processes.

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Index1

A Actor-network theory (ANT), 22, 23, 26, 194, 208, 215, 290 Aesthetic experience, 280 Affordances, 32, 146, 213, 214, 218, 224, 292 Architectural practice, 23, 48, 51, 56 Architectural surfaces, 26, 27, 213–234 Architecture, 22 Artistic activism, 320, 321, 324, 325, 330n13, 335 Artistic-militant practices, 24, 118 Artistic quality, 296 Artistic skills, 143–162 Artistic work, 2, 16, 22, 25, 27, 30, 85, 117–141, 167, 203, 296, 298, 300, 312 Artwork, 5, 6, 8–10, 9n2, 13, 15, 22, 25–27, 61, 168–172, 176–186, 192, 194, 194n5, 206, 303, 304, 306–308, 310–316, 314n15, 323

Art world and politics, 118 Attachment, 29, 271–277, 285–287, 290, 291 B Barcelona, 22, 23, 70, 87, 102 The Beatles, 22, 25, 26, 191–210 C Classics, 16, 27, 104n18, 122, 122n7, 148, 214, 239–265, 280 Cognition, 102, 147, 154, 158, 161, 264, 335 Collaboration, 25, 50, 123, 151, 165–168, 171, 174n4, 177, 182–184, 194, 196, 205, 226 Competitions, 23, 47–66, 74, 81, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 288

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Rodríguez Morató, A. Santana-Acuña (eds.), Sociology of the Arts in Action, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5

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INDEX

Concrete, 26, 53, 61, 66, 139, 158, 161, 168, 210, 213–234, 299 Contemporary art evaluation, 30, 295–317 Corporate sponsorship, 319–336 Creativity, 2, 4, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 31, 32, 34, 69–89, 95–97, 102, 103, 106, 107, 144, 154, 168, 194, 208, 209, 331 Cuisine, 3, 22, 23, 96, 97, 99–101, 100n9, 100n10, 104–107, 105n20 Cultural fields, 7, 12, 94–97, 94n1, 103, 240, 263, 323 Cultural production, 15, 17, 18, 24, 33, 49, 72, 87, 89, 93, 96, 99, 104–106, 104n17, 193, 195, 195n8, 197, 209, 210 Cultural sociology, 8, 10, 10n3, 15, 16, 26, 29, 31, 193, 213–234, 265, 273–274, 292 D Dance, 22, 25 Dark Matter, 25, 165–186 E Emotions, 71, 153, 271–292, 307, 319–336 Ethnography, 24, 120, 143, 144, 147, 150, 151, 160 Evaluation process, 295, 298 I Indexicals, 28, 225, 239–265 Innovation, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18–21, 19n6, 23, 24, 26, 32–34, 47, 70, 95–97, 100, 100n11, 102–107, 191, 194, 296, 308, 317

Institutional disruption, 30 Interactions rituals, 31 L Lash-up, 279, 286, 290 Listening, 144–146, 151, 154, 155, 161, 280 Literature, 5, 22, 50, 102, 119n4, 241, 242, 244n3, 246, 250, 253, 255, 258, 261, 262, 264, 272n1, 299n4, 320 M Meaning, 2, 4, 9, 13, 14, 16, 26–31, 51, 119n3, 139, 155, 157, 168, 171, 214–216, 219, 220, 233, 240–247, 246n5, 251–253, 256, 262, 264, 265, 272n1, 273, 275n3, 278, 283, 287–292, 296, 301, 306, 313, 317, 322, 326, 330 Meaningfulness, 240–265 Modernity, 205n31, 213–234 Musicality, 144, 145, 155, 156, 160, 161 N Nostalgia, 230–233 P Performances, 30, 49, 56, 76, 117n1, 118, 119, 123, 128, 133, 139, 146, 199n20, 200, 202, 274, 276, 277, 280, 291, 300, 320, 321, 323–326, 330–336 Place, 1–3, 5, 12, 23, 26, 59, 69–89, 94, 97, 118, 122n6, 128, 134–138, 148, 154, 159, 168, 169, 171, 177, 179, 182–184,

 INDEX 

193, 197, 198, 199n17, 200, 210, 216, 218, 220–224, 226, 243, 248–250, 259, 280, 283, 300, 300n5, 304–305, 313, 314, 319n2, 324, 326, 332, 333 Political theater, 117–141 Protests, 22, 30, 319–336 Q Quebec visual arts, 296, 297 R Recordings, 192, 193, 196–210, 208n35, 276, 278, 280, 289 Reputation, 93–95, 97, 103, 105, 106, 227, 253, 301, 313, 314, 323, 332n17, 335 S Sociology of culture, 7, 8, 15, 107n22 Sociology of music, 5, 7n1

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Sociology of science, 7, 9, 11, 13, 25, 167, 197 Sociology of the arts, 1–34 T Tate Galleries, 30, 319–336 Theatre, 22 U Uncertainty, 2, 25, 58, 109, 133, 166, 184, 185 V Visual art, 22, 30, 74, 78, 79, 144, 296, 299, 299n4, 304–311 W Work of art, 10, 119n3, 297, 315