The imaginary as method. “Lyrical sociology” as a heuristic of sociological description

First and foremost, Castoriadis (2005 [1987]) and Taylor (2002). Probably the most influential study across various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1998 [1983]). Furthermore, just notice recent elaborations of a so-called “emergency imaginary” at the intersection of security studies and economic sociology in Calhoun (2004), Collier (2008), Folkers (2017), de Goede (2008), Lakoff (2007), Opitz and Tellmann (2015), and, finally, the practice-theoretical approach to the concept of social imaginary in Langenohl (2016).

In this spirit, Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) introduce a Manifesto for Live Methods, encompassing eleven propositions which should allow empirical sociology to keep pace with dynamic and ever-changing social relations. What is at stake is nothing short of a vivid “empirical sociological imagination” that is immune to the threat of a “dead sociology”. According to Back, dead sociology designates four basic syndromes: It is objectifying, comfortable as it draws on “zombie concepts” of a priori sociology, disengaged insofar as it refuses to engage with digitization, and parochial in its lack of appreciation of the transnational scale (cf. Back 2012, pp. 20 ff.; Lash 2009).

In his book Methods of Discovery, Abbott (2004) basically distinguishes three types of explanation: a pragmatic, a semantic and a syntactic view of explanation (cf. ibid, pp. 8 ff.). A pragmatic view “allows us to intervene in whatever it is we are explaining” (ibid., p. 8); a syntactic view values an explanation as beautiful and satisfying for the “way its parts are put together” (ibid., p. 12); it is appreciated simply for its logical build-up. Finally, a semantic view defines explanation as translation, it is appreciated for “its ability to translate a phenomenon into a realm we think we understand intuitively” (ibid.). It is the latter one, as will be shown in the further course of the discussion, that comes closest to “lyrical sociology”.

Alongside ethnomethodologists, and also the ethnographic tradition, prominent advocates of descriptive sociology are considered to be Erving Goffman, Bruno Latour, John Goldthorpe, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (cf. the discussions in Dosse 1999; Love 2010; Savage 2009).

The phrase “descriptive turn” originally derives from French sociologist Louis Quéré, who developed the concept in his article Le tournant descriptif en sociologie (1992), starting from the observation that scholars in sociology alleviate their truth claims to explain social phenomena causally.

This effort to distinguish between description and interpretation is worth mentioning in light of recent debates in cultural sociology worrying about the explanatory truth claims made by interpretive sociology, most notably the work of Isaac Reed, who came from the “strong program” agenda of Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith. Like descriptive sociology, Reed’s cultural-sociological theorizing, too, draws heavily on ethnographic methodology in order to reconceive the epistemological value of “thick descriptions” by challenging the truth claims of the more standard explanatory approaches of social science, and, finally by making use of explanations from an interpretive perspective. According to Reed, the key to interweave the domains of explanation and interpretation is a concept he calls “maximal interpretation”. Maximal interpretation does not only aim to know what actually matters but, in fact, why this or that happened. Therefore, maximal interpretation must be valued as explanation: “Explanations, no matter how nomothetical or abstract, insofar as they claim to know the context of explanation, are proposing to interpret the facts of the case, because what they are proposing about them cannot be derived with certainty from those facts […]” (Reed 2008, p. 194). While interpretivists like Reed call for explanation, traditionally connected to the positivist and realist camps within the discipline, the descriptivist not only breaks “with the nomological approach of a sociology considered as a social physics, beginning with ideal types to approach field studies”, s/he also questions the “overarching posture of the sociologist, who gives meaning to behavior thanks to interpretive work” (Dosse 1999, p. 154).

Cf. also Hirschauer (2015) and Amann and Hirschauer (1997) for the extension of a methodological situationism to a methodological concept of intersituativity which significantly draws upon the notion of decentring the human perspective in favor of the social situation.

This attitude resembles the work of Georg Simmel whose flâneur-like “sociological impressionism” (Frisby 1992) is wedded to an aesthetic appreciation of singular scenes and fleeting moments. Both sociological impressionism and lyrical sociology emphasize the moment of confrontation and encounter with social phenomena; they both foreground the capacity to arouse the interest of the reader in this or that object of study; but unlike Simmel’s aesthetic account, lyrical sociology is not aesthetic from a distance, but engaged, emotionally involved and possibly biased towards its object of study.

This referential problem in ethnographic description holds true particularly for the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social (cf. Hirschauer 2006).

In this respect, “evocative ethnography” as elaborated by Carolyn Ellis and others is a case in point for Bruno Latour’s harsh criticism of interpretive approaches in sociology: “But an ‘interpretive sociology’ is just as much a sociology of the social than any of the ‘objectivist’ or ‘positivist’ versions it wishes to replace. It believes that certain types of agencies—persons, intention, feeling, work, face-to-face interaction—will automatically bring life, richness, and ‘humanity’” (Latour 2005, p. 61).

I am well aware, but do not elaborate further at this point, that there is a more systematic reason why Abbott is not primarily interested in developing unassailable concepts, but rather engages more openly in the exploration of heuristics in order to equip the methodological toolbox of sociological enquiry with, say, lyricism. This reason leads straightforwardly to his sociology of scientific knowledge, namely his theory of fractalization (cf. Abbott 2001; see also Adloff and Büttner 2013; Bortolini 2014; Santoro and Solaroli 2015).

It is worth mentioning that “lyrical sociology” has proved its value not only in (auto)ethnographic accounts but also in general sociological theory and sociological film studies. Cf. for applications in sociological theory Farzin (2008, 2017), for sociological film studies Lim (2017) and Penfold-Mounce et al. (2011).

Interestingly enough, Abbott too refers to these debates, certainly heading to the opposite direction compared to Bourdieu: “Of course, subjectivity is explicitly invoked in much contemporary writing about social life; for a time in the 1990s we wondered whether our colleagues’ books were about their purported topics or about themselves. But while we may differ about whether this shift was desirable or lamentable, seeing it as right or wrong, scientific or unscientific, is a mistake. The proper question is whether it is aesthetically successful. The problem with the new subjectivity may be less that it is bad social science than that it is bad poetry” (2007a, p. 74, fn. 13).