Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork
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Authors
Publication Date
2018-12Journal Title
History of the Human Sciences
ISSN
0952-6951
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Volume
31
Issue
5
Pages
52-79
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
AM
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Jardine, B. (2018). Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork. History of the Human Sciences, 31 (5), 52-79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695118818990
Abstract
<jats:p> British social survey movement ‘Mass-Observation’ (M-O) was founded in 1937 by a poet, a film-maker and an ornithologist. It purported to offer a new kind of sociology – one informed by surrealism and working with a ‘mass’ of Observers recording day-to-day interactions. Various commentators have debated the importance and precise identity of M-O in its first phase, especially in light of its combination of social science and surrealism. This article draws on new archival research, in particular into the ‘paperwork’ practices of Charles Madge, arguing that M-O is best understood as an attempt to define a new relationship between the survey subject and information organiser. The latter – as sociologist, planner or artist – was a distinctive interwar persona, central to ‘scientific humanism’. Bathos, as a formal strategy in modernist aesthetics, is introduced as an explanation of the failure of this particular part of the M-O project. Questions of subjectivity and data link M-O to a longer history of heterodox sociological inquiry. This analysis resolves some of the apparent paradoxes that have been prominent in studies of M-O, and draws attention to the unfulfilled promise of a vast archive of social data. </jats:p>
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695118818990
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/287986
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