2020. vol. 19. No. 4

Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a strong program in the sociology of liter-ature, which treats literary pieces rightly as relatively autonomous cultural entities and “independent var-iables”. To outline the epistemological foundations of the new research program, I compare how social knowledge comes into existence through the sociological text and the text of literary fiction. I discuss the representation of social reality in interpretive research, with Isaac Reed’s book Interpretation and Social Knowledge as a starting point. To claim literary autonomy, I outline some of the aspects which social the-ory shares with literary fiction. I am mainly interested in how social theory and literary fiction mediate social knowledge to their readers via the aesthetic experience. I identify two main categories of social knowledge mediated by literature: existential understanding and Zeitgeist. Discussing the sociological treatment of several novels, I look at how these two categories intertwine and support each other to create colorful, sensitive, but also robust and deep social knowledge, which condenses aesthetic, existential, and non-discursive aspects of social experience together with the “big picture” of whole societies. I argue that only by overcoming the often-assumed inferiority of literature in sociological research can sociology real-ize its full potential in understanding the meanings of social life.

Starting with George Orwell’s liberal problem of meaning, this article investigates liberalism as cultural structure and myth, drawing on the theory of civil sphere by Jeffrey C. Alexander and the science fiction novels of Ian M. Banks. Following Alexander, it is argued that liberal societies are built around a sacred core described by the cultural structures of the civil sphere, which are structures of meaning as well as feeling. Civil discourses and movements in liberal (and not so liberal) societies mobilize powerful sym-bols of the sacred and profane and are thus able to inspire an almost religious devotion. The article then continues to explore the meaning structure, cultural contradictions and possible future of the liberal order discussing Bank’s Culture series. These novels are set in the borderlands of “the Culture”, a galactic civili-zation and liberal utopia. It is precisely this utopian setting, which allows Banks to probe the internal dilemmas of liberalism, for example between pacifism and interventionism, while addressing issues of contemporary relevance, such as the liberal problem of meaning, the allure of authoritarianism or the social status of artificial intelligence. With their literary imagination, science fiction writers construct “a myth of the future” (Banks), which may often reflect the myths of their time, but which can also—as in the case of Banks—reflect on those myths, their implications and contradictions. Finally, the fictional possibilities of social order in science fiction can be a valuable source for our imagination as sociologists contemplat-ing the very possibility of social order.

The paper discusses science fiction literature in its relation to some aspects of the socio-anthropological problem, such as the representation of the Other. Given the diversity of sci-fi genres, a researcher always deals either with the direct representation of the Other (a creature different from an existing human being), or with its indirect, mediated form when the Other, in the original sense of this term, is revealed to the reader or viewer through the optics of some Other World. The article describes two modes of representing the Other by sci-fi literature, conventionally designated as scientist and anti-anthropic. The scientist rep-resentation constructs exclusively-rational premises for the relationship with the Other. Edmund Hus-serl’s concept of truth, which is the same for humans, non-humans, angels, and gods, can be considered as its historical and philosophical correlate. The anti-anthropic representation, which is more attractive to sci-fi authors, has its origins in the experience of the “disenchantment” of the world characteristic of mod-ern man, especially in the tragic feeling of incommensurability of a finite human existence and the infinity of the cosmic abysses. The historical and philosophical correlate of this anti-anthropic representation can be found in Kant’s teaching of a priori cognition forms, which may be different for other thinking beings. The model of an attitude to the Other therefore cannot be based on rational foundations. As a literary ex-ample where these two ways of representing the Other are found, we propose the analysis of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, which, on the one hand, offers the fictional extrapolation of the colonization of North America and the inevitable contacts with its indigenous population. On the other hand, The Martian Chronicles depicts a powerful and technologically advanced Martian civilization, which disap-pears for some unknown reason, or ceases to contact the settlers. The combination of these two ways of representing the Other allows Bradbury to effectively romanticize and mystify the unique historical experience of colonization, thus modifying the Frontier myth.

The article considers the potential of a strong program of cultural sociology in the research of the Soviet song policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Mass musical genres of the cultural industry era are usually consid-ered in the historicist optics of emancipation and diversification. With such optics, institutional contexts serve only as a background against which the evolution of the post-folklore unfolds. The disadvantage of this approach is the uncritical mixing of the tools of classicist criticism with modern tools of social theo-ry. The Soviet song Estrada formed its own type of song statements by simultaneously rebuilding the in-stitutions of social performance, musical political economy, and aesthesis that served these institutions. Non-reductionist optics, which, from Alexander’s point of view lie at the intersection of structuralist and hermeneutical tools, have a pronounced specificity when applied to mass musical genres. The system of intonation combined with the poetic word brought to a state of pure mechanical self-reproduction, ac-cording to Adorno, somehow pushes us to describe and decipher the system of meanings of such a product. In order that the search for thickness in the description of musical phenomena does not lead to new reduc-tions, it is necessary to abandon what, at first glance, connects sound with culture, and replace the con-cepts of “song” and “music” with “song statement” and “musical statement”. Using the concepts of “nobil-ity”, “authenticity”, and “depth” that occupied post-war song discourses, we demonstrate the mechanisms of their circulation within the institute of Estrada in connection with the topoi of song statement that in-duce social imagination. To do this, we add the attitude for a thick description, in which the cultural meanings supplied by song statements appear in close connection with the Soviet social imagination, to the usual pattern of analysis of the Adornian sociology of smash hits and chamber music forms.

In the 1940s–1960s, the USSR made an ideological turn from leftist sports politics to the struggle for Olympic achievements. How has this U-turn affected the social order in Soviet sport and its artistic repre-sentation? The article offers a systematic review of Soviet sport fiction films. The study of sport and fit-ness imagination is conducted through a correlation between artistic performance and social context. Fo-cusing on the 1950s–1980s, we found three different types of representation: № 1 is the creating of a hero (for an elite athlete). This is the lion’s share of all sport movies where the “Myth of a Hero” in Olympic sport was constructed. In praising elite sport, modern Russian movies continue the well-known Soviet tradition; № 2 is the laughing at clowns (for mass sportsmen). These are mostly episodes in feature films on themes, where mass sport (i.e., non-elite, grassroots, recreational, fitness, and ordinary) is mentioned. Surprisingly, this sport is presented in a comic sense (except hiking and mountaineering); №3 is sport reality. This type comprises the tiniest selection of movies where art reflects the real situation inside the Soviet sport industry. Elite athletes are presented here as antiheroes with social adaptation problems; ad-ditionally, such issues as shamateurism are severely criticized. The conclusions are following: since the 1970s, sport films ceased to function as propaganda of fitness and recreational sport. On the contrary, elite sport (as an art branch), its representations in official arts and media jointly constructed the great “evan-gelical myth” about itself, which became the part of public consciousness. However, this myth had little to do with a new reality. Elite sport’s positive representation acted only as a propagandist tool that created a fictional social world. The existing social order’s irrationality was critically reflected only by the comedy genre.

Walter Benjamin’s posthumous reception was significantly broader than the one during his lifetime, par-ticularly in the one country he had never succeeded to visit (although he had intended to), the United States of America. In the current article, we suggest, that while beginning to widen in American intellectual circles, the acknowledgment of the philosopher’s legacy happened later in a narrower academic context, rehabilitating the philosopher who had never had the chance to work in a university due to a failed 1925 habilitation. The majority of Benjamin’s works were disseminated in various non-academic journals and magazines, making the process of translation and publication of his texts more difficult than it usually is for scientists. We suggest that, firstly, Benjamin’s reception in the USA established his image as a provoc-ative essayist stepping far beyond Marxist frameworks (as opposed to how his first publisher and friend Theodor Adorno presented him through a thoroughly-selected collection of writings that had been trans-lated into English for the first time), exploring such topics as Messianism, mass culture, and everyday practices. Our second suggestion is that Benjamin’s legacy appeared to be fruitful for American cultural studies whose representatives rejected ideas of the teleology of culture embedded in the original British program, and turned to “practice theories” which presented everyday practices significant in themselves, not as privileged sites of ideology.

Throughout the 20th century, cinema has played, and, to some extent, continues to play a key role in shaping the social imagination and anthropology of modern human. Nevertheless, as a review of English scholarly literature shows, cinema, unlike art and music, remains a marginal subject of analysis for sociologists. The article attempts to consider the state of sociological reflection on cinema in the context of the cultural turn in sociology in both the international and national contexts. By reconstructing the history of the interaction between sociology, film studies, and cultural studies, the author not only proves the scar-city of interest among sociologists in the analysis of cinema, but also discusses the ways by which socio-logical perspectives were involved in film research at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, and the potential of the latter for the study of social imagination. A survey of communities of Soviet sci-fi cinema fans demonstrates one possible way of developing of the sociologically oriented program of cinema studies.

Review: Alfred Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019).