Abstract
In the context of pervasive processes of commodification of art and of the long prevalence in sociology of a focus on the social worlds around artists rather than on their artistic projects and expressive means, this book feels like a breath of fresh air. Maria Rovisco’s aim is to approach the political agency of artists without either reducing them to strategic players and their position takings in an unequal field or resorting to more narrow notions of political art or artistic activism. Rather, she seeks to unearth ‘the processes of feeling, reflection, imagination, and evaluation through which artists make sense of their artistic activities as interventions in social and political conditions in historically specific contexts’ (p. 4). The book convincingly pushes for the need to address the relationship between the arts and socio-political life in cultural sociology, empirically investigating the views of British-based artists with migrant backgrounds in theatre and the visual arts, as well as through the interpretation of artworks and films. This review will focus on what this reader identifies as Rovisco’s three main contributions: first, her conceptualisation of the expressive public sphere; second, her approach to meaning; and third, the relation between cosmopolitanism and art.
Chapter three offers the key theoretical contribution of the book, which relies on a Habermasian framework to conceptualise the expressive public sphere. According to Rovisco, artists contribute to the civic imagination by ‘facilitating public discussion and legitimising certain issues as matters of public concern’ (p. 48). However, they do it in ways that are specifically the province of art, hence expressive. Whereas the sociology of the arts has typically silenced both aesthetic object and artistic subject, this book foregrounds especially the latter, showing how artists intervene politically through expressive, non-instrumental means that are not directly orientated towards political ends. Significantly, the aesthetic action of artists has political consequences not through its content but rather because it ignites the civic imagination. This approach has the advantage of showing how artistic action is related to everyday practices and conversations. However, it also relies on a framework that is not itself designed to theorise the social role of art and which privileges the cognitive and discursive over the affective and expressive. Rovisco is very aware of this problem and proposes a corrective through the work of Young, who conceives public life as ‘wild, playful and sexy’ (p. 54), and the agonistic accounts of authors like Rancière and Mouffe. To this reader, it seems that other thinkers from the Frankfurt school, and particularly Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse (the former is briefly discussed in the first, introductory chapter, the latter are not mentioned in this book), would have provided more satisfactory ways of addressing this. In fact, their various approaches to the politics of art point away from notions of political art in the narrow sense, from which the author of this book also seeks to escape. More importantly, Adorno and Marcuse’s consistent focus on the aesthetic dimension can provide a corrective to Bourdieu’s problematic depiction of Kantian disinterestedness, on which Rovisco, perhaps unwittingly, seems to rely. In other words, it seems to this reader that a more adequate consideration of both aesthetic object and artistic subject is to be achieved not only through the laudable effort ‘to encompass a more heteronomous and practical understanding of the aesthetic’ (p. 4), but also through a proper sociological engagement with artistic autonomy beyond the spurious dichotomy between form and function.
The book’s second contribution relates to the author’s awareness and cautious overcoming of various limitations that have marked how sociologists of art have typically considered meaning. Rovisco emphasises a variety of modes of communication whose meaning exceeds what can be communicated discursively. She maintains that it is necessary to go beyond the intended meaning that is contained in the artwork to focus on encounters and interaction, critical public dialogue, and how people make sense of meaning. Rovisco’s own sociological approach, which foregrounds her conversations with artists, how they explain the meanings of their works and how she interprets those meanings, is a result of these encounters. Influenced by pragmatic sociology, she does not seek to expose those meanings as the product of a misrecognition of the social world but rather to build on them, while also showing their limits. By foregrounding the moral intentions and motivations of artists rather than their strategic actions, she shows how they make sense of themselves not just as artists but also as political subjects, and how an aesthetic grammar of provocation can have political consequences without being instrumental.
The book’s third distinctive contribution refers to the centrality of the politics of world building in the aesthetic action of artists, to the relationship between cosmopolitanism and art. As Rovisco shows, artists’ freedom from predetermined structures and forms of communicating allows them to challenge their audiences to see the world in different ways and can be a catalyst for action. Artists can work to build commonality across difference and cosmopolitan openness to others, advancing new forms of democratic interaction. In this view, artists do not seek to determine meanings but rather want to move people to think in new ways about the world, whatever those might be. However, the extent to which artists with migrant backgrounds who focus on exile, refugees and destroyed homes work to destabilise provincial or even racist constructs and understandings is not sufficiently reflected upon. In societies where democratic politics have been eroded and the easy fixes contained in the discourses of populism and the extreme right are quickly becoming not only widespread but also increasingly acceptable and mainstream, these artists point to cosmopolitan connections that many people do not want to make. Perhaps the reason for downplaying this paradoxical dimension is Rovisco’s intention to avoid a more explicit consideration of political art.
