Review: Rita Felski, ‘Hooked. Art and Attachment’
Review of Rita Felski’s Hooked. Art and Attachment (The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 200 pages.
Abstract
In Hooked. Art and Attachment, Rita Felski explores the ties between people and works of art. Why do people become attached to certain films or songs but not to others? “What do works of art do to people?” “What are encounters with works of art like?” Drawing on Actor Network Theory, Felski discusses three attachment devices, attunement, identification and interpretation. Using essays, memoirs, works of fiction, ethnographic research and a variety of examples from high to popular culture, Felski argues that works of art make a difference in the world and matter because the interaction with them co-produces lasting, albeit contingent bonds. Hooked raises important questions for sociologists and social theorists interested in cultural objects, art, emotion and aesthetic experience. One of them is about the theoretical purchase and empirical fruitfulness of Actor Nework Theory in cultural analysis. Hooked offers sociologists a plethora of hypotheses and a wealth of ideas to think with and to research empirically.
Reviewed by María Angélica Thumala Olave
Sociologists of culture share with scholars in the humanities questions about the precise nature of the relationship between cultural objects, subjectivities and social context. They debate whether the encounter between cultural object and consumer is determined or open. They weigh the relative importance of the social position of the fan or the amateur against the formal properties of the artwork. They try to disentangle the various factors influencing cultural consumption and appreciation. Attention to history, political economy or institutions is counterposed to the risk of neglecting the object itself or its subjective impact. The material and aesthetic turns in cultural sociology have tried to overcome the dichotomies underpinning these questions. Exemplars of these efforts are found in the work of cultural sociologists who have, from different perspectives and pursuing different goals, adopted a critical distance from the arguably most influential amongst them: Pierre Bourdieu (De Nora 2000, Born 2010, Alexander, Bartmański et al. 2012, Prior 2015). These cultural sociologists criticise Bourdieu’s neglect of the aesthetic, the sensorial and the material. Some have found in Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory, ANT, a way out of the causal conundrum of cultural analysis, notably Antoine Hennion and his collaborators (Gomart and Hennion 1999, Hennion and Muecke 2016). Literary scholar Rita Felski’s latest book, Hooked. Art and Attachment, follows a similar post-critical path.
Picking up where she left her 2015 book The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press), in Hooked Felski examines aesthetic experience in terms of co-creation and enduring ties. She does this by drawing on Latour and ANT’s flat ontology and on Hennion’s sociology of taste and attachment. From Latour she takes the directive to “follow the actor”, and from Hennion the call to recognise the uncertainty and contingency of the aesthetic experience brought about by the entanglements of works of art and their audiences. However, Felski describes her approach as “ANTish”, less a programmatic application of ANT than a perspective or sensibility. The core concern of the book is what draws people to works of art (novels, paintings, films and music), what causes them to feel and to be “hooked”, to be attached to some songs or films but not to others. She asks “What do works of art do to people?” “What are works of art tied or linked to?” “What are encounters with works of art like?” (viii)
Using essays, memoirs, works of fiction, ethnographic research and a variety of examples from high to popular culture, Felski argues that works of art make a difference in the world and matter - they act - because they “create, or co-create, enduring ties.” (1) Artworks also act in a second ANTish sense, that is, the outcome of the encounter with them is unpredictable. Felski theorises the ties between artworks and people through three attachment devices, each one occupying a chapter: attunement (chapter 2), identification (chapter 3) and interpretation (chapter 4). Attunement consists of those often pre-linguistic “affinities, inclinations, stirrings that often fall below the threshold of consciousness” (xii); a response that is “impossible to ignore yet often hard to categorize.” (41) Identification (discussed in chapter 3) is an “affinity based on some sense of similarity” (81), an experience that is shared by both professional critics and lay readers even when they “find different points of connection” (e.g. affective, political, philosophical). Interpretation (chapter 4) is less a matter of cool detachment than making explicit and owning up to the ties between artworks and their students. In all three cases the discussion is set against what Felski sees as detrimental or inadequate forms of understanding these terms amongst literary scholars (e.g. attunement and identification as naïve, or interpretation as detached dissection).
Hooked is written for and situated mostly within literary studies and art criticism. Sociologists, especially students of culture, will not be surprised by Felski’s countering of the “aesthetic experience as transcendent and timeless” or the remarks that “readers and viewers do not exist in a vacuum” and that “many things must have happened before I can gawp in admiration at a Manet at the Met” (15). They will not find difficulty in accepting that remediation is important, that many actors must be assembled in order for a work of art to exist or be appreciated (73) or that art is not “a tie-free zone” (27). If anything, sociologists may have moved the pendulum in the opposite direction to prevailing notions of reception in the humanities. Some sociologists demystify romantic notions of artistic genius (Heinich 1996, DeNora 1999), others show that art is the product of collective action (Becker 1982) and others still focus on how much care and maintenance is required to prevent the collapse of artworks (Domínguez Rubio 2020). Be that as it may, Hooked raises important questions for sociologists interested in cultural objects and art. One of them is about the theoretical purchase and empirical fruitfulness of ANT in cultural analysis. How much more insight is obtained by adopting the principle of “distributed agency”, for example, when researching the numerous elements that make up a cultural phenomenon? What is gained from examining the various actors, or actants, involved in the creation, circulation and reception of a work of art or cultural object? The studies of the creation and reception of Nixon’s historical novel Jarrettsville by Clayton Childress (2017) or the creation and consecration of García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by Santana Acuña (2020), both cover in detail the various dimensions of the production and consumption of a work of art without the scaffolding of ANT. From different perspectives they can be said to share a post-Bourdieuian stance with Felski. Felski herself writes that the study of how works of art come into existence can be done without even mentioning ANT. In particular, she refers to Ann Rigney’s (141) analysis of the national and international networks around Walter Scott’s work and the composites made up of the novels, other objects and actors which cemented Scott’s significance. The pertinence of the use of ANT and whether it is adopted fully or partially (in a mix and match way) is, of course, determined empirically. An ANTish position may be needed when the conventional research on a particular work of art or cultural object has taken its features, audiences or context as “already given” (140). In those cases, it would be appropriate to carefully pay attention to the “messiness of agency” (157) and to avoid both looking at the artwork to “let it speak for itself” and researching the work simply “as a product of its context”. Another contribution of an ANTish approach that Hooked brings to the fore is that its emphasis on contingency helps explore those moments when attachment doesn’t happen, when “things fail to connect or fall apart” (36).
Although Felski claims to find in ANT a way of capturing the agency of all the actors involved in producing an aesthetic experience, at times it appears she believes that agency is not equally distributed. Felski writes for example, that a painting is “doing something, it makes a difference”, yet “art objects, after all, do not act in the same way (…) rather they depend on the consent and participation of humans” (64), or “the object does not contain its own effects”. Furthermore, whether a viewer is moved or indifferent “cannot be predicted by analysing the painting, even though these responses define its impact for that viewer” (64). At other times, her position regarding the mutual influence of text and reader, artwork and audience comes closer to that of, for example, Childress (2017). Felski writes “while the formal features of a work invite audiences to respond in certain ways, they cannot impel them to do so” (95). Similarly, Childress argues that readers are guided by the text’s “general interpretive directions” but they are “free to make their own meanings” (Childress 2017: 191). Perhaps ANTish means in the end that while they all need to be included in the picture, some actors are more equal than others. The task for the cultural sociologist would then be to disentangle those influences and identify the agency of each for particular cultural objects and moments.
Felski has referred on this journal’s website to her “sociology envy” (Felski 2019). Hooked offers a plethora of hypotheses and a wealth of ideas to think with and to research empirically. The book will be of interest to sociologists and social theorists interested in cultural objects, emotion and aesthetic experience. It is also written in a style that is appropriately close to its object, a poetic reflection that is perhaps “less exhaustive than suggestive” (94) but one that is erudite and compelling.
References
Alexander, J., et al. (2012). Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. NewYork, Palgrave Macmillan.
Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Born, G. (2010). "The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production." Cultural Sociology 4(2): 1-38.
Childress, C. (2017). Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel, Princeton University Press.
De Nora, T. (2000). Music and Everyday Life. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
DeNora, T. (1999). "Music as a technology of the self." Poetics 27: 31-56.
Domínguez Rubio, F. (2020). Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum, University of Chicago Press.
Felski, R. (2019) Rita Felski: My Sociology Envy. Theory, Culture & Society website.
Gomart, E. and A. Hennion (1999). "A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users." The Sociological Review 47: 220–247.
Heinich, N. (1996). The Glory of van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration. Ewing, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.
Hennion, A. and S. Muecke (2016). "From ANT to Pragmatism: A Journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI." New Literary History 47(2-3): 289-308.
Prior, N. (2015). Bourdieu and beyond. The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music. J. Shepherd and K. Devine. New York and Abingdon, Routledge.
Santana Acuña, Á. (2020). Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. New York, Columbia University Press.
María Angélica Thumala Olave is Lecturer in Global Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Her work in cultural sociology examines practices of self-understanding and justification in secular and religious contexts. The empirical areas of this work include the ethos of Chile's Catholic elite, the cultural meanings of consumption in the UK and Chile’s civil sphere. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Religion, Social Compass, British Journal of Sociology and Sociological Review. Her current research is about the personal and political meanings of reading and books in the UK and Latin America. She is writing a monograph entitled ‘The Love of Books. Attachment to a changing cultural object’.
