Seeing it Whole: Staging Totality in Social Theory and Art

Abstract

Can, or should, social theory try to ‘see it whole'? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the ‘sociological imagination’ and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’. Mills and Jameson converge on the need to mediate personal experience with systemic constraints, knowledge with action, while underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty of such a demand. The article contrasts these perspectives with the repudiation of a sociology of totality in the actor‐network theory of Bruno Latour. It explores this contrast through the ‘panorama’ as a visual practice and a metaphor for theory itself. Against Latour's proposal to reduce and relativize totality, it argues that sociology can learn from contemporary artistic efforts to map social and economic power as a whole. ‘Panoramic’ projects in the arts, such as Allan Sekula's and Mark Lombardi's, can allow us to reflect on sociology's own deficit of imagination, and on the persistence of the desire to ‘see it whole’ – especially when that whole is opaque, fragmented, contradictory. A live sociology can only gain from greater attention to the critical experiments with forms and methods of representation that are being carried out by artists preoccupied with the staging of social totality.

Social Theory and the Politics of Big Data and Method

“…However, in the BD debate capitalism is essentially taken as a given, as if this were the consequence of taking too literally Latour's (2005: 179) injunction 'don't focus on capitalism'. Contrary to the view that capitalism is too general, abstract and totalizing a term, the study of BD would gain much needed depth by relying on what Alberto Toscano (2012) has called 'seeing it whole', thus simultaneously pointing to perhaps the most salient flaw of actor-network theory -a flaw seemingly seen as a strength by the many participants in the debate who refuse depth and instead advocate description and assemblages. This emphasis on surface, the horizontal and the smooth fits and reflects pretty well contemporary capitalism's self-image, its semblance, which is certainly part of its real but cannot be mistaken for it.…”

CCTV oddity: archaeology and aesthetics of video surveillance

“…Further, it has showed the importance of following actants and traces through their multiple networks. However, assemblage thinking falls short of recognising that social actors always carry power with them (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003;Swyngedouw 2006;Madden 2010;Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011;Toscano 2012). Instead, the politico-ecological approach works within a historicalmaterialist framework, asking where 'things' come from (materialism and critical geography), who benefits from whom (social justice), and who is allowed or not to follow traces in the field (situated ethics).…”

Lukács Today: Totality, Labor, and Fantasies of Revenge

“…While the totalizing horizon of Marxist writing is still maintained in the work of Fredric Jameson (1988Jameson ( , 2009, Alberto Toscano (2012;Toscano and Kinkle 2014), and Kojin Karatani (2014), many others argue explicitly or implicitly against its usefulness. 1 More specifically, it is Georg Lukács's notion of totality and its association with the proletariat as a revolutionary agent that often comes under criticism.…”