Special Section Introduction: Mass Observation as Method

2017

Mass-Observation was created in the 1930s; this was an era that began with an economic slump and concluded with a world war. The founders of Mass-Observation, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, journalist and poet Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, aimed to record everyday life in Britain. This ‘anthropology of ourselves’ culminated in the union of two disparate projects: Harrisson’s Worktown in the north of England and Madge and Jennings’s National Panel based in London. Their methods of research were innovative and mostly relied on a system of observers. Harrisson’s anthropological research in Worktown included photography as a form of data collection. The principal photographer was the photojournalist Humphrey Spender who took around 900 photographs for Harrisson’s Worktown project. At the time of taking the photographs were largely ignored and remained in obscurity until the 1970s when Harrisson began exploiting the Mass-Observation archive. Although the W...

Archives and Disobedience: Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe

A Companion to British Art 1600 to the Present, 2013

The intention here is not to provide a survey of British surrealism (that has been undertaken elsewhere), nor to appraise it for its aesthetic merit, but to connect various elements of surrealism to their social and historical moments, and to see surrealism as responsive to these moments. My concern is not genealogical (I am not tracing the emergence of an aesthetic, or its antecedents); rather I am interested in the moments when British surrealism becomes vividly social, when it interconnects with interests and issues from the world in general. My starting point is 1936. While this is not the first moment when surrealism is taken up in Britain, it is the moment when surrealism takes to the social stage in a concentrated way. Focusing on 1936, in the initial pages of this essay, allows me to posit, right from the word go, a number of surrealisms. From 1936 I will move to the Second World War and on into the present, treating surrealism not as an exclusive club, but as a set of proclivities and as a set of cultural resources that have been utilized to various ends.

Visual Anthropology Review, 1999

UPDATE JUNE 2017. I have subsequently expanded this lecture into a short book titled MAKING TROUBLE: SURREALISM AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press/Chicago UP, 2017). Details here: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo26613964.html In the spirit of Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and against the background of the apparatus of disciplinary regulation that was REF2014 (Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF, 2014), I ask: What might an undisciplined sociology look like? A lifetime's engagement with social theory (Marx's Method, 1978; The Violence of Abstraction, 1987; Capitalism and Modernity, 1990) and historical exploration (The Great Arch, 1985; The Coasts of Bohemia, 1998; Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 2013) suggests to an aging sociologist who is increasingly disrespectful of the orders of the academy that an important part of the answer lies in surrealism.

Visual Culture in Britain, 2011

in Lavoro! Storia, organizzazione e narrazione del lavoro nel XX Secolo, a cura di N. di Nunzio, M.Troilo, Aracne, Roma 2016, pp. 259-269., 2016

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This essay looks at the way in which I have drawn similarities between the works of painter George Shaw, photographer Jem Southam, and filmmaker William Raban, which I have attempted to do by utilising the term ‘psychogeography’ to bind their work. However, I have come to understand that the term is continuously a matter of debate, far beyond my capacity to reckon with in this essay. With this in mind, it appeared unfeasible to tie the works together with a term that itself is so entangled. Therefore, I have used Tina Richardson’s texts and Christopher Collier’s chapter within Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015) to outline its contentious qualities that Collier himself concludes at an impasse. As a result of this, I have deemed it necessary to implement a text which challenges definitive understandings of stimuli so as not to ‘ground’ them indefinitely: Reading The Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense (2016) outlines the necessity to reflect life’s erratic and unpredictable nature within one’s way of making sense of a text or thing. Daniel Coffeen posits that by grounding texts with their lineage, or using the words of ‘the expert’ to engage with it, will only cement the text further and not vivify it. By implementing Coffeen’s proposition, it will not only demonstrate the possibility to draw similarities of works made from varied media, but also allow psychogeography to progress as a term itself. “The best way to approach the film is by watching it and forming your own conclusions” (Raban, W., 2019. Email to myself. 4 December)