Imaginative sociology: Serendipitous associations and sideways glances

Abstract

Combining the personal and academic ‘voice’, this article reflects on the value of serendipitous associations and unplanned images in doing sociological work. One of the central research artefacts discussed is an image generated during an evening of sociability of an urban stairway made from a regionally specific rock known as Sydney sandstone. The accidental nature of the image is used to reflect on a series of issues: to what extent is research planned and unplanned? Why do images serve to illuminate social life? The article proposes that alongside Mills' famed sociological imagination, we need an imaginative sociology, and considers whether Mills may have meant as much when he referred to sociology as a craft. The latter might embrace playfulness and reverie, and employ ‘visual hapticity’ and ‘peripheral perception’ to broaden the sociological ‘gaze’. I conclude by observing that developing a feel for one's craft, like life itself, is an ongoing process.

My favourite part of C. Wright Mills’ (1959) The Sociological Imagination has always been the Appendix ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’. In some respects, it is a strange admission for a theoretically inclined cultural sociologist like myself. Why identify with the part of this iconic text apparently concerned with method? Except that this part of the Sociological Imagination is not so much about method as it is about the poetics and praxis of thinking and writing. Here, Mills (1959: 195) insists that ‘social science is the practice of a craft’; and suggests one can possibly learn more from ‘one account’ of a social scientist ‘going about [their] work than a dozen ‘codifications of procedure’ by specialists. Recently, Richard Swedberg (2014: 195) has made the point that, while Mills’ famous ‘book is often and ritualistically praised, it has led to very little research on its main topic, which is the role of imagination in social science and how it can be strengthened’. And, at the top of the list of questions such research might ask, is: what is it that the imagination strengthens or allows to happen? I am persuaded by visual sociologist John Grady's (2004: 26) formulation that sociology requires a ‘quality of mind’ which, ‘at its simplest, [is] an alert consciousness poised for insight’.

In this article, I respond to the need for further exploration of what imagination implies for sociological work, as well as reflect on what it means to be ‘poised for insight’. While drawing on personal experience is often shunned in academic work, I will draw on a research project of mine, one in which serendipity and even daydreaming have played a vital role. My narrative revolves around the generation of an incidental image and how it has featured in my research. But I will also highlight experiences of the same urban materialities that both pre-date and came after the start of the project. In drawing on ‘holiday snapshots’, anecdote, and accounts of reverie, you could say that my research objects sit in some liminal zone between personal and professional artefacts. As images and image-like associations are central to my argument, I examine accounts of visuality centred on its parallels to touch, as well as a visuality capable of incorporating peripheral sensations. My argument will be that, alongside the sociological analytical gaze, sociologists need the ability to register the importance of literal and metaphoric glances.

Sociology as craft: Combining playfulness and care

Lest my emphasis on the ‘Appendix’ be seen as an exercise in celebrating the sociologist-as-hero (i.e., the ‘Appendix’ as figurative ‘masterclass’ regarding ‘tips’ on ‘how to be a good sociologist’), I should explain the associations the text holds for me. Due to professional background and personal proclivity, the ‘Appendix’ has always made me think of figures such as philosopher-cum-pedagogist John Dewey, composer-cum-mushroom collector John Cage, and motorcyclist-cum-novelist Robert Pirsig. Thus, when the text says the sociological imagination is concerned with ‘learning how to keep your inner world awake’ (Mills, 1959: 197), my mind gravitates towards Dewey's (1958: 5) idea that aesthetic experience involves the ‘living creature’ not ‘remain[ing] a cold spectator’. Instead, they engage in ‘active and alert commerce with the world’ (Dewey, 1958: 7). Similarly, when Mills (1959: 212) proposes ‘one way to invite imagination’ is to ‘simply dump out heretofore disconnected folders, mixing up their contents’, I can’t help but think of Cage's use of the I Ching and chance procedures to compose and perform music (de la Fuente, 2011: 126–137). Biographical and other information about C. Wright Mills has also contributed to how I read him. The publication of Mills’ Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Mills and Mills, 2000), in which we find out that the sociologist completed ‘a two-week BMW motorcycle repair course in Munich’ (Wakefield, 2000: 10), links him to Pirsig's (2004) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The latter combines travelogue with reflections on the existential, spiritual and aesthetic value of mundane, but at times very technical, aspects of motorcycle maintenance. Mills alongside Dewey, Cage and Pirsig? My lateral jumps are less idiosyncratic when seen from the vantage point of a joint interest in the role of creative imagination in practical activity.

The notion of craft is central to Mills’ thinking in the ‘Appendix’. He suggests the latter is an ethos or way of life as much as a set of skills and practices:

Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the sociological imagination. Avoid any fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself… let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft… stand opposed to the ascendency of research teams of technicians. (Mills, 1959: 224)

The author of The Sociological Imagination has a well-earned reputation for his ‘macho’ swagger (Kerr, 2009: 27), and his penchant for motorcycles is unlikely to allay such concerns (on Mills and feminism, see Jackson, 2017). Indeed, the sleeve to my copy of the Oxford University Press 1959 hardcover version of The Sociological Imagination has a photo of Mills standing in a door frame (presumably his house?) which evokes the virile postures of a Marlon Brando in the 1953 film, The Wild One. Notions of craft are not gender-neutral; they were gendered at the time Mills was writing and continue to be so in our post-industrial era of craft revivals (Luckman, 2022; Ocejo, 2017). Yet the ‘Appendix’ also sees Mills being uncharacteristically modest, if not somewhat androgynous. There are references, for example, to organising one's scholarly materials in a way that tries ‘to be passively receptive to unforeseen and unplanned linkages’ (Mills, 1959: 212). The ‘passively receptive’ formulation echoes a sociological text much less famous than The Sociological Imagination: namely, Kurt H. Wolff's (1976) Surrender and Catch. The latter proposes a wholesale rethinking of sociological frameworks via the concept of ‘surrender’; where the latter involves a ‘total experience’ or type of ‘cognitive love’ stemming from being open to what the world has to offer (Wolff, 1976: 22–23). Wolff (1976: 21) piquantly suggests his concept of the ‘surrender experience’ has an inherent ‘bisexual flavour’; and, echoing Mills, adds that the combination of passivity/receptivity and activity/control required aligns the sociologist with ‘homo faber’, the maker of things (Arendt, 1958). In the case of the sociologist, the things made were traditionally journal articles, books and reports. Now, there are increasing calls for the craft of sociology to include the ‘curation of public performances and exhibitions’ and for the discipline to develop new ‘[t]ools’ for the ‘sharing, adapting and absorption’ of sociological ideas (Back and Puwar, 2012: 10)

For Mills (1959: 196), central to seeing sociology as a craft is the ability to combine ‘what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person’. He suggests the best way to do this is to ‘set up a file, which is… a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal’ (Mills, 1959: 196). As with the new forms of curating and disseminating ideas, the traditional research file now coexists with sociologists recording and storing their experiences in a range of digital and non-digital contexts. However, what has arguably remained constant across these different research contexts is how the way you work impacts your capacity for sociological insight. Mills (1959: 196) favoured processes that allow ‘controlled experience’ to combine with playfulness. Thus, he says of recording notes in journals and research files: ‘[try] to capture “fringe-thoughts”… various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams’ (Mills, 1959: 196). He wasn’t alone in advocating for playfulness or suggesting we use dreams in social science. Chicago sociologist Everett C. Hughes (1971) suggests, in The Sociological Eye, the ‘essence’ of insight is ‘free association, guided but not hampered by a frame of reference’ (cited in Grady, 2004: 26). Like Mills, he also posits the sociologist draw ‘even [on] one's dreams’; with the caveat that it is preferable to use experiences which ‘can be called up at will’ (cited in Grady, 2004: 26). Hughes also suggests he consults scholarly texts through free association and by consulting the ‘Index’ first. For him, consulting theoretical references begins with: ‘Didn’t Simmel, Mead, Marshall, or someone say something on that point?’ (Hughes cited in Swedberg, 2014: 198). I have to confess to similar reading practices, and discuss such foibles in the section of this article entitled ‘Sociology as Revelatory Tool’.

However, despite his valuing of playfulness, Mills (1959: 212) insists that, even if something starts as ‘loose and even sloppy’, it is worth crafting something you are satisfied with, as in the end it is ‘your’ research and writing. More recently, in their manifesto for live methods, Back and Puwar (2012: 9, 13) propose that sociologists be ‘more artful in [their] practice’; and that they ‘rethink the relationship between time and scholarship’. There is a virtue in doing things slowly and with care – a hallmark of ‘craftwork’ more generally (Pallasmaa, 2009: 50). Back and Puwar (2012: 9) also suggest that the sociological craftsperson needs to practice a ‘proactive idiocy’ that allows things to happen. But how to combine playfulness, and a posture of willed idiocy with the need to ‘take time’ and ‘think carefully’ (Back and Puwar, 2012: 13)? This article attempts to grapple with these competing aims and emphases.

Visualization and illumination as sociological tropes

While most of Mills’ examples pertain to the realms of the verbal and the literary, arguably his arguments also apply to the visual domain. As Elizabeth Chaplin (2004: 35) notes in ‘My Visual Diary’, an essay similar in tone to Mills’ reflections in the ‘Appendix’, ‘in the short term, a photographic diary may record a series of “heightened” moments. But viewed over a longer period… some of these heightened moments’ begin to suggest ‘patterns of continuity’. In short, the heightened or frozen moment takes on unexpected connections and, over time, invisible patterns may become visible. While we often fret about whether technology enlarges our capacity for distraction, I wonder whether technology can also lead to new ways of being alert to the world? In this respect, it is interesting that one of the claims made on behalf of visual sociology as a research tool is precisely that it requires the kind of alertness to the world demanded by the sociological imagination more generally. There is a type of visuality or innate sense-making at the very heart of sociological activity: ‘Social scientists commonly “see”, “observe”, “illuminate”, “view”, “display”, “uncover”… Sight, more than any of the other senses, puts the thing perceived in the context of its environment’ (Grady, 2004: 26). Furthermore, engaging with the visual promotes the kind of playful attitude to social reality, this article is exploring:

It is… possible to explicitly create, or search for, images with social and cultural concepts in mind… One approach would be to take photographs of specific public places at significant time intervals. Public streets, parks or coffee shops are all places where people… do things with other people… Another approach would be pictures of various kinds of throughfares and access points… like sidewalks, yards, doorways, windows and so on. Are they inviting, or do they warn the stranger off?… Something in the picture, or something glanced at in passing that could be pictured, will suggest an idea or hint at a link to theory. It is from such moments that insight is born. (Grady, 2004: 26–27)

Grady's description of the potential value of a visual sociology in documenting urban space is underpinned by a long set of associations between the modern city and photography. Urban historian Frederic Stout (2000: 144) suggests that, from the 19th century onwards, in the ‘hands of’ journalists, activists, the ‘popular masses’, and artists, ‘it was urban subjects more than any others… that captured photography's unique potential as an expressive medium’. To be sure, photography democratises both representations and ways of knowing the city – mobile media technologies further decentring who is able to document, archive and curate images of urban space (McQuire, 2008). Yet as Walter Benjamin (1999: 599) states in ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ – based on a ‘Sunday-afternoon… excursion’ through his home city with a companion who was a ‘photographer’ – the city is not uniformly ‘receptive to photography’. Indeed, despite all the existing formulations linking modernity, the metropolis and a visual culture centred on photography, Benjamin (1999: 599) makes the counter-intuitive argument that ‘photography, even the snapshot’ is, in a sense, ‘archaic’. In Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss (1990: 219) interprets this to mean that, rather than simply seeing photography as the medium par excellence of capitalist phantasmagoria, Benjamin was also interested in the capacity of images to draw attention to the ‘ur-phenomena’ or primordial antecedents of urban modernity. Thus, Benjamin saw old postcards and photographs of urban forms that either had disappeared or were in the process of disappearing, as totemic reminders of enchanted and mythological ‘precursors to the present, no matter how distant or estranged they now appear’ (Buck-Morss, 1990: 219). Given the multiple historicities present in urban material forms (including those I am researching), Benjamin's idea of photography as a portal to archaic-cum-mythical forms, or materialities out of sync with the present, is a good way to couch the significance and power of images.

Case study in paying attention: The story of a photograph

The notion that insight can be born out of ‘something in the picture’ or ‘something glanced at in passing’ (Grady) is, however, more complex than it first appears. Sure, insight entails the invisible becoming visible. But how much of this making visible is conscious or unconscious, the product of our will? William James (1950: 403, emphasis in the original) famously noted, perception is the product of ‘what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind’. But paying attention is mediated by all kinds of factors, including who I am with, how many distractions surround me, whether I am feeling alert or not alert on any given day, etc. Attending to the world is conditioned by the situation we find ourselves in, and the stance we adopt towards such situations. In short, perception involves the interweaving of subjectivities, human bodies, technological devices, and various contextual factors, including the materialities of the places we traverse or dwell in.

Let me turn to a concrete example of an image that was the result of unplanned and – to the extent it involved prompting by somebody else – attentiveness mobilised by an ‘other’. In keeping with the ethos of the ‘Appendix’, my example involves a lengthy note from my research files and an accompanying image. As will be seen, my file notes err on the side of including details and the drawing of significances as they unfold. I like my descriptions relatively ‘thick’ and believe it is better not to prematurely discard details as irrelevant (on the question of the ‘pertinence’ of details, see Wolff, 1976: 23). I also consider files a type of proto-sociologising where you ‘build up the habit of writing’ and refine your thoughts on the topic (Mills, 1959: 197); and occasionally theoretical or other ideas seep into the document. Overall, I see a research note as the telling of a ‘story’. And sometimes, I polish or refine my research notes. Beyond any inherent tendency towards pedantry, I see such tweaking – which is noted via the date the file was created and last edited – as preserving the ‘now-ness’ of narrated experience.

Here is the research note I want to discuss:

I am visiting Sydney to attend a family Christmas lunch with my son rather than to undertake archival research or fieldwork. In the previous twelve months I have started researching Sydney sandstone; and how the stone's materialities and meanings shape place character. Sandstone is not only a highly visible part of the city's geology and topography evident; it was also used extensively in colonial architecture and infrastructure – one estimate suggesting that, during the first 100 years of colonial settlement, ‘4.5 million tons’ of the local stone was quarried ‘for walls, gutters, homes, buildings, churches, gateposts and cathedrals’ (Pocket Guide to Sydney, nd: np). While my son is visiting with his ‘Sydney cousins’, I take the opportunity to socialize with friends, an academic couple. He a sociologist; she an anthropologist. Because they know I have started researching the local lithic form, they suggest dinner at a pub/brewery in one of Sydney's oldest colonial suburbs, The Rocks. The Rocks has this name for a reason – the colonists noticed the number of sandstone cliffs and boulders in the area. The Rocks is also the Sydney neighbourhood with the greatest number of preserved colonial buildings and infrastructure made from sandstone. ¹ My friends made reservations at one of Australia's oldest pubs/breweries and, as it was built 1814–1815, it is lined with exposed sandstone on both its internal and external walls. We discuss the stone and my research at various points throughout the evening – their interest in my research buoying me. After dinner, we start walking to the closest railway station. It is slightly drizzly; and the night is misty. Then something unexpected happens. My female companion, the anthropologist, says look left and we all freeze. She and I take out our digital phones and snap the urban setting in question – a set of urban stairs made from sandstone (Figure 1). They are called the Argyle Stairs. We compare photographs and decide hers (which was taken on a newer phone) is of better quality. She immediately text messages her photo of the scene and, in a fraction of a second, I receive it on my phone. After my friends and I part company, I admire her photo while on the train home to where I am staying. I conclude it is a marvellous example of the many sandstone urban stairs that dot the Sydney urban morphology – many, as in this case, in the CBD and its immediate environs. But there is something very special and revelatory about this image. The misty night, the wrought iron urban lighting, the fact that there is a natural cliff on one side and a ‘man-made’ sandstone retaining wall on the other, plants growing and water seeping on the cliff face, and a photographic angle that emphasizes the topography and the sense of ascent/descent that characterizes such urban or public stairs in Sydney. Through serendipity my friend and I (her photo with greater clarity) had managed to capture many of the things I was hoping to say in my scholarly writings about the local stone and its urban-cum-regional affordances. (File created 28.12.2023; edited 14.8.2025; stored in Sandstone Research File on author's home computer)

Figure 1.

Argyle Stairs, The Rocks, NSW, Australia; Photo credit: Dr Daniela Heil.

This then is my account of the generation of what has become a prized research artefact. The image in Figure 1 wasn’t the result of ‘my being in the field’ to gather data, nor the outcome of a deliberate research strategy as outlined in a research proposal. It was the product of a unique set of temporal and spatial circumstances – dinner with friends while on holiday and urban atmospheric conditions that would be hard to duplicate. None of it was planned. Does the contingent nature of the taking of the photo or the fact that I wasn’t there to gather data lessen the sociological value of the image? I think not.

Two observations about the nature of academic sociological work seem relevant. Firstly, there is Candace West's (1999: 3–4) claim that, in the case of sociology and its study of everyday life, ‘professional commitments don’t disappear at specified hours on the clock or on designated days of the week’. The same applies to being on holiday. Secondly, there is C. Wright Mills’ (1959: 201) proposal that the ‘full social conditions [for] the best intellectual workmanship’ are probably no more than ‘surrounding oneself by a circle of people who will listen and talk’. Not the kind of argument that will necessarily clinch a research grant. But for the author of the ‘Appendix’, it aligns with his overarching faith in ‘the fusion of personal and intellectual life’ (Mills, 1959: 201).

When I have shared my prized research artefact with friends and colleagues via social media, it has generated comments such as ‘the stairs of my youth!’ and, because of the sandstone, the scene ‘feels unmistakably Sydney(ish)’. By contrast, another person said, ‘feels French somehow’. Upon returning to the Argyle Stairs to take daytime photos from other angles (see Figures 2 and 3), I overheard someone descending the stairs say to a companion: ‘these steps remind me of some narrow stairs in Edinburgh, near the castle’. These anecdotes/snippets of commentary point to forms of urban sense-making that rely variously on both place uniqueness and spatial archetypes; recognition of what is familiar and linked to biography alongside what is distant and to some extent free-floating (e.g., the ‘Frenchness’ or Europeanness of stairs featuring old wrought iron urban lighting). Sydney's sandstone urban stairs are often described as mini-sandstone canyons because of the way natural sandstone cliffs/drops, sandstone walls, and surrounding sandstone buildings or infrastructure often enclose the person using such stairs. Figure 3 highlights the canyon sensation and the intertwining of urban and natural form.

Figure 2.

Argyle Stairs archway; Photo credit: author.

Figure 3.

Argyle Stairs from above; Photo credit: author.

Multiple ‘upstreams’ and ‘downstreams’: The evolving research artefact

With respect to the fact a friend had suggested looking at the urban feature photographed, and had taken the superior photo and shared it with me, Bruno Latour (2005: 237) makes the interesting observation that, despite all their statements of faith about the power of the social, sociologists actually have an inherent distaste for things or beings becoming ‘attached, moved, affected’ by and to various others. While the example he discusses pertains to two friends looking at a painting together in a gallery, it might also be said to apply to the present case study:

You watch a painting; a friend of yours points out a feature you had not noticed; you are thus made to see something. Who is seeing it? You, of course. And yet, wouldn’t you freely acknowledge that you would not have seen it without your friend. So who has seen the delicate feature? Is it you or your friend? The question is absurd. Who would be silly enough to deduct from the total sum of action the influence of pointing something out?

When discussing the need to incorporate as many ‘influences’ – or what he calls the ‘long retinue of mediators’ – as possible, Latour (2005: 237) recommends: ‘everything interesting happens upstream and downstream. Just follow the flow’. Going with the flow involves ‘follow[ing] the actors themselves’ and tracing what ‘makes them act’ (Latour, 2005: 237). In the context of research processes, where both research objects and research subjects (i.e., researchers) are ‘actors’ made to act by various ‘mediators’, sociological work has many ‘upstreams’ and ‘downstreams’ to explore.

Interestingly, the photo of the Argyle Stairs that my friend and I took didn’t immediately become either data or a totemic research image. In the immediate aftermath or ‘upstream’ of the photo being taken, nothing happened with it. I didn’t return to it until months later, and, since I am somewhat lazy and careless with digital photos, it is a miracle it survived at all. As my iPhone often reminds me: ‘Your storage is full. The last several thousand or so photos have not been synced’. My carelessness with images is changing, and the idea that any image is potential data is helping to produce greater care.

Perhaps, sociology as a craft entails developing a feel for one's personal, as well as technical, strengths and weaknesses. In one of the various introspective comments in the ‘Appendix’, Mills (1959: 206) admits: ‘I do not like to do empirical work if I can possibly avoid it’. So much for the sociologist-as-hero! Similar introspection about reaching existential, epistemological or psychic limits while conducting empirical work pervades such social science ‘classics’ as Claude Levi-Strauss’ (1974) Tristes Tropiques; and Wolff's (1976) aforementioned Surrender and Catch. In the latter, the author documents his failure to execute a community study of Loma, New Mexico, during the 1940s as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Yet not completing the community study came with a silver lining: the experience in the field provided him with the concept that would dominate his scholarship for the next six decades:

I can give no excerpts from my field notes that would exemplify or analyse the meanings of surrender. The reason is… what was going on in myself had not yet begun to announce itself as relevant to my enterprise… The catch is unforeseeable: I had thought it a community study. (Wolff, 1976: 74)

In short, the full benefits of a research experience may only come to fruition much later. And it may have little to do with what we had planned to achieve.

Sometimes, ‘upstream’ factors can come in the way of unexpected opportunities. This happened with the Argyle Stairs photo. A few months after it had been taken, I was invited to join a fledgling research network. The network in question was the Urban Surfaces Research Network. ² The organisers ran a series of workshops and asked each participant to provide a photo that encapsulated their research. The photo was to be included in workshop proceedings (Andron et al., 2024). It was at this point that I remembered the image my friend had taken, and frantically scrolled through my phone. This is how the image began its journey towards becoming data; it prompted me to ask my friend for permission to use the photo in my research and also to place the image in the Sandstone Research folder on my computer.

When the Urban Surfaces Research Network publishes the workshop proceedings, there is yet another ‘upstream’ twist to the tale: the image of the Argyle Stairs is re-coloured, and the sepia tones give the Argyle Stairs a more explicitly nostalgic feel (see Figure 4). I am struck by how images are capable of morphing, proliferating and embedding themselves within diverse representational, institutional, and practical ‘ecologies’ (Morgan, 2014). More recently, the unplanned image of the Argyle Stairs has prompted deliberate photographing of urban steps. This, in turn, has encouraged a writing collaboration with another cultural sociologist. The topic is urban stairs and windows that interface with public spaces (her field of specialisation), and the key conceptual question is how such urban interstices shape material and aesthetic experiences of city life.

Figure 4.

Photo of Argyle Stairs in USRN Vol 1; Photo credit: Daniela Heil with design and layout by Konstantinos Avramidis and Frixous Petrou.

Messy or nonlinear explanatory flows: Imagining what is hard to imagine

The tributaries in which the unplanned image swam were multiplying. An image with strong aesthetic and emotional resonances is taken on a smart phone and shared; I receive a request to self-brand my research for a professional network; the photo becomes data and I start treating it as such (i.e., storing it more carefully and seeking the necessary permissions); I post the photo on social media and also planning/using it in talks and articles; I start photographing other sandstone urban stairs whenever I visit Sydney either alone or with others (e.g., my son appears descending such stairs in Figure 5); and then I find myself collaborating with a colleague on the other side of the world comparing stairs and windows as urban ‘portals’ or interfaces.

Figure 5.

The author's son descending the Butler Steps in Potts Point, NSW, with Sydney CBD in the background; Photo credit: author.

Yet the account in the preceding paragraph is a little too neat, a little too linear. This happened and then that happened, etc. That was not my intention. As such, let me suggest additional contingencies and entanglements that complicate the life of the research object in question. In the photo, we have a depiction of infrastructure from the late-Victorian period, which can only be experienced by walking, and that references the local geology in ways that urban forms often don’t (on cities and the varying attention they pay to geology see Graham, 2016: 282). The stone in question is over 200 million years old (Jones, 2013); and the presence of ferns and water dripping from the cliff face suggests an urban form that combines human and nonhuman processes – a recurring theme amongst those who write about sandstone's aesthetics and urban affordances (Falconer, 2010; Flannery, 1999). Additionally, much like the Paris of the 19^th century, which so fascinated Benjamin, the Sydney Rocks area almost underwent a process of devastating urban renewal during the 1970s. Only a coalition of resident groups, urban activists and the so-called ‘Green Bans’ of construction unions saved the colonial architecture and infrastructure (Spearritt, 1978: 251). Had the plan been enacted, it would have entailed the replacement of modest colonial sandstone terrace houses with imposing modernist high-rise apartment towers, and the labyrinth maze of cobbled streets and the multiple sandstone steps connecting the areas’ topographical levels would have been razed as part of a move towards functional landscaping and street design with motor vehicles in mind. Although it is in a different neighbourhood, the Butler Stairs depicted in Figure 5 were also to be demolished due to a massive 1970s property development (Preston, 2018).

The photos of Sydney sandstone urban stairs I am collecting, then, connect present urban forms to the various temporalities of pre-colonial (including the ‘deep time’ of geology), colonial and post-colonial place histories of Sydney (Falconer, 2010); these photos are also a window on to various past-futures – like that some of these steps were almost demolished during a 1970s Sydney building boom. Yet some sandstone structures were demolished in the post-war era. As such, we have old photos of Sydney which record sandstone buildings and infrastructure now ‘lost’; and photographs of sandstone urban forms – like my/our photo of the Argyle Stairs – that attest to the miraculous survival of some urban forms. Yet photos taken now are also liable to capture elements of the city that jar temporally and aesthetically (e.g., colonial sandstone houses, pubs, retaining walls and urban stairs, cheek-by-jowl with enormous, gleaming glass skyscrapers). The image can’t capture everything, but it can evoke the complex material continuities and discontinuities present in the city. As Peta Carlin (2018: 154) – borrowing heavily from Benjamin – suggests, photography makes urban forms ‘recognisable’ and ‘legible’ by creating a visual ‘now-time’; but, in the image, the past and future of cities ‘interpellat[e] the present’. In the final analysis, a photo is ‘an instant prolonged where a sense of place prevails’ (Carlin, 2018: 154).

Imagining the research object: A role for reverie, guessing and introspection?

At the cost of alienating the reader by delving into non-rational or pre-reflective ‘downstream’ processes, let me also note that in addition to photos of Sydney sandstone and sandstone urban stairs, there have also been imaginings unrelated to actual photos. In these instances, the research object made itself felt through varying degrees of conscious and unconscious association. What role might imaginative association play in either the sociological imagination or what I am calling the imaginative dimensions of sociological work?

Swedberg (2014: 200) suggests one ‘way of accessing and exercising your imagination is that of reverie, sometimes referred to as daydreaming and mind-walking’. Another way to tap into pre-logical processes is what the author, following, Charles Sanders Peirce, calls ‘guessing’. Swedberg (2014: 7) writes that Peirce saw an important role for guessing in both everyday problem-solving and in scientific work: ‘Somehow scientists have succeeded in guessing right many times… The reason for this… is that people pick up cues subconsciously’. A third way to access the imagination is ‘introspection’. Much derided in social science because of its links to subjectivism and opinion rather than facts, Swedberg (2014: 47–48) argues ‘introspection should be an option’ for the sociologist: ‘to carefully observe yourself… represents one way to get some ideas about the phenomenon you are interested in’. ³ Introspection is particularly helpful in documenting ‘what meanings and moods actors invest’ in objects, situations or behaviour; which is important as ‘[m]eanings and moods… tend to change and disappear’. Arguably, introspection can be partnered with concepts we have already discussed as possible tools, such as the ‘free association’ advocated by Hughes in The Sociological Eye; or Wolff's ‘surrender experience', which is based on events or situations that happen to us rather than those we will into existence. Additionally, reverie, guessing and introspection might help address the problem, identified by Latour (2005: 236), of sociologists relegating people being ‘deeply attached, moved, affected’ to the realm of the ‘Impossible!’, the ‘Forbidden!’. If one is engaging in introspection, via say, reverie or guessing, why is anything impossible or forbidden?

Below are two attempts, on my part, to formulate narratives regarding the role of guessing and reverie in my sociological work. They are conducted through introspection, and although I have thought about these experiences repeatedly over the years, they are closer to free association than the identification of patterns through logical connection. An additional piece of background information is that since about 2016, I have been developing a theoretical project around a framework I label ‘textural sociology’ (de la Fuente, 2019, 2020). I also pre-empt my introspections by suggesting that initially, my theoretical interest in ‘textures’ and my growing empirical interest in sandstone were like two streams running parallel to each other. But as they surged, and the flooding eroded the land between them, the streams began intersecting more and more.

Free associational introspection 1: I wrote and undertook all the revisions for the original journal article proposing a textural sociology at a desk facing an actual sandstone retaining wall, as depicted in Figure 6. In the photo, you can see the window where my writing desk was located. Furthermore, during the writing and rewriting of this article on the sociological importance of textures, I would often go for walks around the neighbourhood. Some 150 metres from the apartment where I lived was the sandstone stairs, depicted in Figure 7 – the Marathon Steps connecting the affluent suburbs of Darling Point and Double Bay. On one of these afternoon walks, I remember distractedly running my hand along the sandstone wall on the left-hand side of the stairs and thinking: ‘I wonder how old these stairs are? And why have they survived when many other sandstone structures, including sandstone mansions, have not? I also wonder if sandstone stairs were built by convicts?’ The latter is highly unlikely as most of Sydney's sandstone urban stairs date from the late-Victorian or Federation era (1870–1910) rather than the colonial or Georgian period (1788–1840) when convicts were used to quarry sandstone and to undertake construction work. But I record my reverie, including the associated historical speculation, as it occurred to document the kinds of associations the act of touching the side of the Marathon Steps had unleashed for me.

Figure 6.

Sandstone retaining wall outside author's apartment during 2017–2018; Photo credit: author.

Figure 7.

Marathon Steps linking Darling Point and Double Bay, NSW; Photo credit: author.

Free associational introspection 2: Some 12 months after publishing my journal article calling for a ‘textural sociology’, the editors of the online magazine produced by the same journal made ‘texture’ their monthly theme (The Sociological Review, 2020). The online special issue sees essays and creative works commissioned on themes as varied as Batik wearable art, Syrian refugee women, Second Life, queer experiences during COVID and a lead essay by me entitled: ‘Living in a Textured World: Sociology and Contextual Intelligence’ (de la Fuente, 2020). In that essay, I include photos of Sydney sandstone and one of a set of Sydney sandstone stairs, despite the stone not being mentioned once in the article: one of the harbour littoral zone featuring both ‘natural’ sandstone cliffs and ‘man-made’ retaining walls (Figure 8); and a second showing some urban sandstone stairs close by (Figure 9). The latter depicts the topographical unevenness of the sandstone urban landscape and also how sandstone discolours due to the weather. Yet for all the aesthetic and geographical information the photos convey, they have nothing to do with the subject of the actual essay. So why include these images? Did it reflect an unconscious desire on my part, as a sociological theorist writing for a largely international audience, to locate myself through geography and the materialities of place? Or was the inclusion of these two photos an indicator that my photographic eye and sensory unconscious were already working towards making Sydney sandstone an actual empirical research project, unbeknownst to me?

Figure 8.

Harbour foreshore Balmain East, NSW; Photo credit: author.

Figure 9.

Sandstone stairs Peacock Point Reserve, Balmain East, NSW; Photo credit: author.

Sociology as a revelatory tool: Haptic visuality and peripheral perception

The journey towards exploring the revelatory potential of images and personal recollections has coincided with my becoming absorbed in new sociological and urbanological literatures. There was a degree of serendipity involved in that, rather than my new reading resulting from systematic searches on library catalogues/databases it involved following footnotes/references in other people's work, and sometimes was the result of completely circumstantial or roundabout factors. In the case of the latter, an artist had had the work of a German-Jewish-American sociologist recommended to him by his psychiatrist. When there was a retrospective of this artist's work, in the city I presently live in (Adelaide, Australia), the exhibition bore the name of the sociologist's magnum opus (https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/surrender-catch-the-art-of-brent-harris/).

In other words, at the very moment I was starting to dabble in visual sociology and also contemplate using personal experiences/felt sensations as tools in my sociological work, texts such as Henri Lefebvre's (2020) Rhythmanalysis and Wolff's Surrender and Catch arrived on the scene. Lefebvre's path to rhythmanalysis included ‘develop[ing] what he called the “theory of moments”’; an approach based on the idea that the ‘rhythmanalyst… use the[ir] body as the first point of analysis’ (Elden, 2022: 4, 6). Lefebvre-exegete Rob Shields (1999: 61) writes that Lefebvre's moments refer to ‘those times when one recognises or has a sudden insight into a situation… a flash of the wider significance of something or event’. Wolff meant something similar when he wrote that what is required is an act of surrender to a time or place (and the radical alterity they imply). It is the type of openness to the world required ‘when we see a street for the first time, when we meet a new person, see a new part of the city, enter a house not entered before’ (Wolff, 1976: 13).

Yet for all the timely stimulation provided by Lefebvre and Wolff neither Rhythmanalysis nor Surrender and Catch had much to say about visuality per se. For discussions of the latter, I had to turn to visual culture studies and architectural/spatial theory. More specifically: the writings of film scholar Laura Marks (2002: 4–6) on ‘haptic visuality’; and those of architect and phenomenologist of space Juhani Pallasmaa (2015: 146–148) on ‘peripheral perception’. Both texts are good resources for thinking about sideways glances. Although it should be noted that the first author to use the term ‘glance’ in the context of cities was actually a so-called ‘classical sociologist’. In ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, Georg Simmel (1950: 41) refers to city life as needing to be ‘grasped’ via a ‘single glance’ because it involves ‘the unexpectedness of rushing impressions’. However, after Simmel, discussions of the ‘glance’, and how it differs from the ‘gaze’, have tended to occur in art history, urban design and related fields such as visual culture theory (Bryson, 1983).

Thus, in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks (2002) proposes that the glance-gaze distinction relates to the degree of distance and control sought and achieved through images. In contradistinction to the gaze, the ‘notion of the glance suggests a way of inhabiting the image without identifying a position of mastery’ (Marks, 2002: 6). She adds that the glance is embedded within multisensory experience and something she terms ‘haptic visuality’ plays a key role:

Haptic perception is… [a] combination of tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch on the surface of and inside our bodies. In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch… Because haptic visuality draws on other senses, the viewer's body is more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optical visuality. (Marks, 2002: 4, emphasis in the original)

Seeing visuality as a type of haptic activity then involves conceptualising it as a thoroughly embodied experience, one that may involve both movement (kinesthetics) and movement's reverberation within the observer (proprioception). Another characteristic Marks (2002: 20) highlights is the adoption of a posture which ‘may be described as respect for otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other’. A scenario that, unlike the masterful gaze, allows for seeing ‘continuities we had not foreseen'; and, through framing looking as the creation of ‘connective tissue’, tissue that serves to ‘increase the surface area of experience’ (Marks, 2002: 20). Like Hughes and Mills, Marks (2002: xi) mentions her ‘own dreams’, and positions such dreams as things that are as ‘real’ and as ‘intertwined’ with her thinking, body and history, as everything else she uses in her writing (e.g., other scholarly texts or images, films and videos she may interpret). Since the present author doesn’t remember his dreams, he is limited to daydreams, reverie and personal recollections. This may not be a disadvantage with respect to sociological work on spatial issues. As Bachelard (1969: 6) suggests in Poetics of Space: ‘it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time’.

There were additional resonances between my forays into visual sociology and Marks’ concept of haptic visuality. Before Sydney sandstone, my material culture/built environment interests had been piqued by ‘raw’ or exposed concrete. The study of concrete saw my first use of images in published work. Additionally, as one of the threads in my concrete research was the Australian post-war Brutalist campus – where I had completed my PhD and had various lecturing positions – the act of photographing these spaces served to re-awaken memories and associations. Another impulse associated with haptic visuality, which occurred with my fieldwork on concrete (but has also recurred in the sandstone research), is that it has encouraged me to adopt what Marks (2002: 4) calls ‘a close-up and tactile way of looking’. There is something very satisfying and immediate about getting close to surface textures and seeing/feeling some of the details that evade you from afar.

In addition to haptic visuality, the other concept sociologists interested in the sideways glance should consider is ‘peripheral perception’. Pallasmaa's contributions to architectural theory and practice have sought to enlarge discussions of architectural space to include all of the senses (Pallasmaa, 1995); and in the context of the present article about sociology as craft, it is noteworthy that Pallasmaa (2009) has also published a book with the title: The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. With its emphasis on craft as a path to existential knowledge, which requires skilled use of tools and body-mind fusions, Pallasmaa's book could profitably be read alongside Mills’ ‘Appendix’.

So, what is peripheral perception, and what makes it a desirable ability when grasping the hard-to-get-at aspects of spaces? Pallasmaa (2015: 146) proposes that if we are aiming for modes of looking that are simultaneously ‘all-encompassing’ and capable of ‘instantaneous perception’, the best solution is ‘unconscious and unfocused peripheral perception’. All-encompassing and instantaneous forms of grasping are necessary to avoid the usual dualisms associated with understanding space (body and mind, subject and object, immersive experience and detached analysis, etc). In any case, it could well be that peripheral perception is our ‘normal’ or routine way of attending to reality: ‘Our image of the world, arising from perceptual fragments, is held together by active and constant scanning by the senses, movement, and a creative fusion and interpretation of inherently disassociated precepts through comparison and memory’ (Pallasmaa, 2015: 146–147). But the modern, rationalistic mind finds it hard to attribute any value to things we see out of the corner of our eye, and is liable to brand any insights derived from such modes of perception as impressionistic or unfocused. Yet when we think of walking (long considered important for understanding urban space), the pedestrian is perpetually employing peripheral and other forms of unfocused attention ‘in getting around without falling over or bumping into other people… through a process that Goffman calls “scanning”’ (Ingold, 2011: 43). Scanning, by definition, is not fixed upon a single object. As someone interested in the meanings and moods of architectural spaces, Pallasmaa (2015: 148) also attributes peripheral perception an especially important role in the grasping of atmospheres: ‘Focused vision makes us mere outside observers; whereas peripheral perception transforms retinal images into a spatial and bodily involvement… Peripheral perception is the perceptual mode through which we also grasp atmospheres'.

Anyone familiar with fields like urban studies, cultural geography, and spatial theory more generally will know that atmosphere has been an important recent concern. Two important ideas in the literature have been: Gernot Böhme's (1993: 114) notion that atmospheres have an ‘indeterminate ontological status’ that is not anchored in either subject or object and that they ‘fill space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze’; and Kathleen Stewart's (2011: 448) proposal atmospheres require bodies and psyches that are attuned or capable of ‘attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences’. With atmospheres, we require glances rather than focused gazes. Pallasmaa (2015: 133) suggests with respect to one of the prototypical instances of atmospheres – namely, the weather and how it sets the tone for place ambience – that ‘the multifarious and diffuse components of weather create distinct emotive states and moods’ and reiterates these are most graspable ‘at a glance’. Similarly, with urban lighting, it is counterproductive to rely on focused attention alone. As cultural geographer Tim Edensor (2018: 143) notes: ‘The light in any setting refracts, reflects, and is absorbed by the materialities that it shines on and media such as cloud, mist, and water’. Of course, in addition to material ‘refractions’ of something like light, there are also the multiple mediations of immaterial and intangible factors (e.g., the many associations mobilised by night and day, darkness and illumination). As such, ‘light has a powerful propensity to tincture surroundings and thereby provokes affective and emotional resonances… instigating sensual pleasures and discomforts, and adding to the tone of place’ (Edensor, 2018: 143).

From the perspective of the peripheral perception argument, the value of an image like the photo of the Argyle Stairs lies in that it was the product of unintentional and unfocused activity, and certain spatial atmospheres were recorded that would be hard to replicate, including weather, lighting, and the absence of people. As such, Figure 1 captures place-based ambiences that are normally hard to get at. Stewart (2011: 452) tells us that spatial atmospheres require ‘forms of writing and theorising that try to stick with something becoming atmospheric… chronicling how incommensurate elements hang together in a scene that bodies labour to be in or get through’. A good picture I might say, is able to capture situational aura; how an object, place or situation is suffused with a certain atmospheric tone.

Arguably, these considerations apply well beyond the study of spaces and place atmospheres. While I am unable to develop the theme further here, one can imagine the value of grasping things out of the corner of one's eye in any field that is tasked with understanding emergent, ephemeral, diffuse, or situational phenomena. In other words, it would benefit any sociologist wanting to emphasise time, place and process (Abbott, 2016); as well as what I have started calling the ‘textures’ present in social, cultural and material life (de la Fuente, 2019). As phenomena that are pulsating with life (Ingold, 2011), textures are simply too rich and too dynamic to be captured by the singular analytical gaze.

Concluding remarks

In this article, I have focused on an unplanned image as well as photos that were planned, and countenanced recollections or daydream images for which there is no accompanying photograph. I also outlined moments where the taking of a photo preceded and pre-empted future research directions. No doubt some will say: aren’t these notions of serendipitous pattern recognition and sideways glances altogether too impressionistic? Too inchoate and not sufficiently open to reproduction or verification by other researchers? And, with intellectual reference points ranging from visual sociology to urban studies, reflections by sociologists on the craft of doing sociological work alongside insights from film theorists and architects-cum-phenomenologists of space, isn’t there simply too much going on? For some, images taken on an evening of sociability, let alone the use of daydreams and introspection, will be a step too far.

To return to the ‘Appendix’: its author recognises that sociology entails a ‘great deal of often routine work’ (Mills, 1959: 211). In short, not all sociological work necessarily needs to feel creative. But Mills (1959: 211) quickly adds that the best sociology possesses an ‘unexpected quality… its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable’. And, as we saw earlier, in its ideal form, the sociological imagination combines a playful attitude alongside the exercise of care and the deployment of skill. Mills’ evocation of craftsmanship included, as we have seen, reflections on hesitancies, and what seems to work and doesn’t. This is knowledge wrought from trial and error, and being attentive to what experiences we are having and can learn from. As we have suggested, via a discussion of haptic and peripheral perception, it also helps if we are receptive to things at the margins of our focus.

If we are to cultivate the sociological imagination, I think Mills is right in asserting that how we work must be part of the equation. And, if playfulness and free association work for you, then they are a practical solution rather than a self-indulgence. Bachelard (1969: 67), who placed great faith in daydreams, talked about finding ways to make any activity feel creative, including housework: ‘The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty’. He added that paying attention to the world and attending to its objects, ‘rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions’ (Bachelard, 1969: 67).

In this article, I have explored what insights might emerge – even if completely unplanned – from ‘everyday actions’ such as: distracted walking; socialising with friends; paying attention to urban forms and ambience; and recognising that, despite the very modern urban setting, there was a very ancient rock present. Crucial to incorporating the experience into my work was taking and sharing a holiday snapshot. In making sense of it all, it helped that the right texts were consulted at the right time, and that I had been thinking about some of these issues – either consciously or unconsciously – for some time. The process entailed the accumulation of many experiences rather than a singular epiphany. And, because those experiences are interwoven with my biography and lived experiences, they are, in a sense, non-replicable. I don’t see that as a problem. Indeed, I read Mills’ ‘Appendix’ to be suggesting the sociologist needs to develop their own feel for how best to connect everyday life and sociological work. There is no standard formula; no mechanical set of rules to follow. This is precisely why the sociological imagination requires the resources of what I have been calling an imaginative sociology.