Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork

Abstract

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.

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown

“…Mass-Observation was an attempt to combine science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, rationalism and irrationalisman experiment in 'surrealist ethnography' (Highmore, 2002) that presumably seemed possible at this experimental moment before academic professionalisation and the solidifying of intellectual boundaries during the post-war decades, and was likely made possible by a second characteristic of Mass-Observation's human science: empiricism. Different theoretical and methodological backgrounds did not matter so much in a project of radical empiricism where the collected materialobservations, overheards, survey responses, directive responseswas meant largely to speak for itself (Jardine, 2018;Pocock, 1987). A third characteristic was Mass-Observation's accommodation of complexity, diversity, and ambiguity in public opinion (Kushner, 2004), at least compared to quantitative public opinion research of the timethe 'skimpy statistics' of 'administrative sociology' (Mass Observation, 1943)and not least because of its experimentation with literary and aesthetic techniques of representation.…”

“…The original Mass-Observation – an independent research organisation that existed from 1937 to 1949 (not to be confused with Mass-Observation Ltd, a private market research company born out of the original Mass-Observation in 1949, or ‘M-O (UK) Ltd’, a private market research company born out of Mass-Observation Ltd in 1970) – took influences from across the Atlantic in the form of the original Middletown studies, focused on the everyday life of America's new middle class ( Hubble, 2010 ), and the Chicago School of Sociology, focused on the bottom-up sociological study of ordinary people ( Campsie, 2016 ). It can also be situated in broad intellectual developments of the time from across Europe: the avant-garde sociology and everyday life theory of Simmel, Benjamin, and others, who described the boredom, but also the mystery of industrial, bureaucratic modernity using aesthetic techniques learned from surrealism ( Highmore, 2002 ); and the scientific humanism of Tarde, Freud, and others, who aimed to cultivate a scientific attitude among the general public and then to give voice to the masses without speaking for them – so without aggregating, classifying, or analysing, but instead by way of literary, aesthetic means: composition, depiction, and especially the juxtaposition of ‘luminous moments’ ( Jardine, 2018 ). Many of the influences on Mass-Observation, however, were domestic or closer to home ( Hubble, 2010 ; Jeffrey, 1978 ; MacClancy, 1995 ): developments in British social investigation and survey research (Booth, Rowntree, the New Fabian Research Bureau, the Pilgrim Trust, Political and Economic Planning), developments in market research (Gallup's British Institute of Public Opinion was also founded in 1937), people's fronts and popular alliances against the rise of fascism in Europe (expressed in the Left Book Club, Penguin Books, Picture Post , and the General Post Office or GPO Film Unit), and especially the disciplinary interests of its main founders.…”

‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections

“…Although photographs were not used consistently and written accounts were foregrounded, first-phase MO writing had a particular aesthetic informed by surrealism, modernism, and montage ( Highmore, 2002 ; Jardine, 2018 ). It was also infused with the visual.…”

Predictions Without Futures*

“…The tales of computational projects for totalizing control are many, and they range from Cold War projects such as the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which continued the theme of prediction in aerial warfare, 74 to sociological efforts to capture human behavior into databases and filing cabinets, such as the British Mass-Observation project on everyday life 75 or the American Microcard database that sought to archive the dreams of humanity. 76 Many of today's signature tasks for data-driven prediction were inherited directly from these older projects and their embedded orientations about who or what should be predicted against which standards.…”