Visualising Worlds World-Making and Social Theory
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Visual Modernities VISUALISING WORLDS WORLD-MAKING AND SOCIAL THEORY Martyn Hudson Visualising Worlds This book examines the social production of our world, of the worlds of the past and of the worlds of the future, considering the ways in which worlds are created in both actuality and imagination. Bringing together central concepts of classical sociology, including social change, transformation, individuation, collectivisation and human imagination and practice, it draws lessons from the collapse of Graeco-Roman antiquity for our own world of virus and ecological disasters, considers the genesis of capitalism and intimates its ending. Rooted in classical sociology yet challenging its traditions and objects of study, Visualising Worlds: World-Making and Social Theory adopts new ways of thinking about visuality, aesthetics and how we ‘see’ social worlds, and how we then begin to build them. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, historical sociology, cultural studies, critical theory, archaeology and the emergence, change and collapse of civilisations. Martyn Hudson is lecturer in art and design history at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. He is the author of Visualising the Empire of Capital, Critical Theory and the Classical World, Species and Machines, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory and The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origins of Modernity. Visual Modernities Edited by Martyn Hudson Northumbria University The sociological imagination of modernity is entangled with our senses and, primarily, with vision, yet the process of being able to see something is often extraordinarily complex. Marx’s attempt to visualise commodities, Durkheim on totems of religious life, Simmel on money and the metropolis and Elias on social taste are all projects which attempt to see beyond the empirical and into levels of abstraction and immateriality that lie beyond the senses. Visualisation is part of the making of modernity and a response to it. This series explores and elaborates upon our experiences of modernity. It offersways of seeing from the margins of our world and from its exemplary sites of industry and urbanisation. Grand narratives of human history mix with micro-histories that are embedded across our globe. Using multi-disciplinary methods, it seeks to expand upon our knowledge of global and local visual cultures, whether in architecture, painting, photography, theatre, film and other cultural forms. Examining the material and the tangible as well as the immaterial and the imaginary it aims to offer the best of so- ciological thinking and thought: literally re-visioning our social world. Visual Modernities welcomes new studies that have visualisation at their heart and embeds new ways of perceiving our shared world and our multiple and complex experience of modernity. It seeks to publish works that are innovative, multi- disciplinary in scope and which challenge and rupture the classical social sciences with new ways of looking at method, theory and our social futures. Titles: Art, Critical Pedagogy and Capitalism Paul Alexander Stewart Pandemics, Authoritarian Populism, and Science Fiction Medicine, Military, and Morality in American Film Jeremiah Morelock Visualising Worlds World-Making and Social Theory Martyn Hudson Visualising Worlds World-Making and Social Theory Martyn Hudson First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Martyn Hudson The right of Martyn Hudson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identificationand explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hudson, Martyn, author. Title: Visualising worlds : world-making and social theory / Martyn Hudson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Visual modernities | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021008572 (print) | LCCN 2021008573 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367681654 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367681647 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003134503 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology--Philosophy. | Civilization. | Culture. | Critical theory. | Visual sociology. Classification: LCC HM585 .H83 2021 (print) | LCC HM585 (ebook) | DDC 301.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008572 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008573 ISBN: 978-0-367-68165-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68164-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13450-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003134503 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun Contents Acknowledgements vi Preface: World-making viii 1 Groundwork: Origins of worlds, space and time 1 2 Imagining Neverlands 26 3 The dark centuries 39 4 Beowulf and the Beo-Monde 59 5 Building monsters 72 6 Endwork: Second to the right, and straight on till morning 81 References 92 Index 101 Acknowledgements I have discussed these ideas with friends and colleagues over a long period of time including Emily Hesse, Baz Nichols, Gavin Parry, Liv Carder, Ted Foster, Paul Christon, Kay Hepplewhite, Tanya Wyatt, Vic Wood, Ben Reche, Mick Garratt, Gill Hale, Sam Garratt, Matt Kelly, Siobhan Kattago, Elinor Morgan, George Vasey, Gwilym Williams, Rachel Hann, Gavin Butt, David Petts, John Bowers, Yael Reicher, Emmanuel Tzwern, Julie Crawshaw, Susan Ashley, Lesley Twomey, Andrea Phillips, Justin O’Shaugnessy and Ysanne Holt. It was Eileen Joy who really cracked open the abyss of the early medieval to me and taught me about the time of monsters in the Dark Ages in a period when I was focused on Greek antiquity. Almost the entirety of my thought-process has been shared through the years with Neil Jenkings: we have read together, thought together. Thanks to Sean Breadin for all of his insights into the Green Man and foliate heads. Baz Nichols opened up the imaginative space of the dark world to me and helped me work there. Emily Hesse was a profound source of love, support and thought in her own studies of ceramic and aceramic worlds of the anthropocene and in our life. Liv Carder’s love and creative practice always inspires us. I would like to thank the AnMor collective and the Echtrai project for offeringan existential home to develop these ideas and specificallyBaz Nichols and Kerri Ní Dochartaigh. Thank you to Victoria Horne and the members of the Visual and Material Cultures research group at Northumbria University. A huge debt of thanks to my co-thinkers and co-producers in the Visual Modernities series at Routledge and specifically Neil Jordan, Alice Salt, Paul Stewart, Jeremiah Morelock and the many reviewers who have supported us. This work has been embedded in conversations with three separate but linked projects: Invisible Works, Fhithich and The Smell of Water. I thank Nick Stone, Mick Garratt and Gavin Parry for their help in those respective projects and their friendship. Some of the ideas rehearsed here have their origin in the ERiS (Experimental Research in Spaces) series at Baltic 39, Newcastle and thanks go to Andrea Phillips, Alan Lynn and Rob Tickell specifically around world- Acknowledgements vii building and speculative futures. Thanks go to my friends and colleagues in Castoriadis studies and specifically David Ames Curtis. Early conversations around comparative historical methodologies with Keith Macdonald, Nigel Gilbert, Nigel Fielding and Colin Tipton were important for thinking about the chronologies and planetary formulations of grand theory and for microscopic understandings of social formations. In that same spirit I thank colleagues and students at the universities of Surrey, Brunel, Roehampton, Kingston, Durham, Teesside, Newcastle and Northumbria and specifically Eric Cross, Roger Burrows and Joseph Bailey. A huge thanks to our MA students in cultural management who always share our journeys with us. I would like to note the support of the Environmental Humanities Reading Group at Northumbria and specifically Elsa Devienne, Matthew Kelly, Nick Pepper and Brycchan Carey and also note the shared love of ghosts and monsters with Michael Cawood Green. The Call Centre project at Allenheads Contemporary Arts provided a kind of theatre-space for this project. I would like to thank Alan Smith, Helen Ratcliffe,Ben Ponton, Tracey Warr, Andrew Wilson, Kerry Morrison, Helmut Lemke and Annie Carpenter for an amazing set of conversations throughout the Covidian summer of 2020. This book is dedicated to Rosa Betty Hudson-Carder, our own little Grendel. Preface: World-making Our world was made, at least in large part, out of an understanding of enlightenment. The scientific and philosophical illumination of a world of darkness in the eighteenth century was part of a series of projects that contributed to the building of modernity and the modern world. These included the democratic