We walked, a couple dozen of us, along Bedford Avenue on a sunny September afternoon for the first re-animated sociological art project by Fred Forest. The walk was full of surprises: touching moments, acquired knowledge, frustrating exchanges, and unanticipated encounters that I am still thinking about. Its success, if that’s even something worth trying to measure, depends, I think, on one’s point of view. As an organizer or producer, I found the improvisation challenging and wished the walk had unfolded exactly as the perfect event I had in mind—effortless communication across languages, perfect sound and image quality on the video, and generous and unhindered conversation—but when I told Fred that the event did not match the idea I had in mind he said what I imagined would not have been a sociological walk. It was the mix, the unknowingness that is the action. It was a success because it happened, because we walked together sharing that time and space and discovering honestly what we came across.

Personally, I have not stopped thinking about the experience. I wonder if others that participated have also thought about it since the walk and what they have thought. Here are three of my most burning reflections that deserve some space on this blog.

“Camera-aware culture”: When Fred walked in 1973 with a Sony Port-a-pack camera, the media culture was completely different from “our own” hyper camera-aware culture today, and a video camera did not mean the same thing. Drawing on Vilem Flusser and others, Fred has written about the camera as activating an event, as directly affecting and changing an event as an active agent. When I look at the 1973 footage, I notice how the camera attracts attention, imparting an importance and presence to the walk. This partly has to do with how relatively few cameras were present in everyday culture. Even with the explosion of home videos and portable and affordable cameras such as the Super 8 beginning in the 1970s, a 1972 Minister of Culture study on cultural practices of the French put the percentage of people owning a video recording device in the teens. Needless to say, the situation today is totally different; mobile devices with recording capabilities are omnipresent, probably within arm’s reach right now. With this massive increase in the presence of such devices and related phenomena like You Tube or Reality TV, reactions to roving cameras on the street have also evolved. People are just as likely to flee from or to shut down in front of a camera as to open up toward it, and the walk illustrated this camera-aware culture.

“Questions”: In thinking about the questions posed during the walk—they ranged widely from how someone got started in their job, to observations about customers’ behavior, to why a person agreed to participate, to the most expensive cheese and widely prescribed medicine—I have considered how people (sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, artists, etc.) adapt (or don’t) their questions according to context, to the sought-after results, to predetermined structures, to answers, etc. In Pierre Bourdieu’s talk and then essay “L’opinion publique n’existe pas,” (published in 1973), he criticizes three basic assumptions underlying public opinion polls: that all people are equally capable of producing an opinion, that all opinions are of equal value, and that there exists a prior consensus of the questions worth posing. The idea that the construction of questions is a political process and that no question is universally applicable are central to his argument that “public opinion” as such does not exist. I have been thinking about the specificity versus generality of questions posed during the walk. On the one hand, the very specific ones led to the most interesting exchanges, such as when we asked Ray, a real estate agent, about his methodological approach to writing history books, which he does at the front desk, and learned that he relies entirely on primary document and rejects interviews “since people only remember what they want.” On the other hand, the more general questions led to comparative thinking, such as when we learned that both the pharmacist and cheese seller had started by selling lipstick and stocking food before focusing in on their passions within these contexts. In some ways, it’s the quantitative and qualitative divide in sociology, between those questions that provoke comparable responses versus those that provoke individualized ones. There are, of course, other factors, socio-economic, cultural, etc., that shape questions. The first question posed to Fred after visiting the Bedford Cheese Shop was about gentrification in Williamsburg. I couldn’t help ask myself how the very presence of an artisanal cheese shop is an indicator/motor/effect of the neighborhood’s increasing rents?

“Historical distance”: In writing my dissertation, I re-create events from history using the few remaining traces available and lots of historical and theoretical reading, attempting to be as objective as possible in understanding what transpired. Having written about the 1973 walk as history and re-animating the project in the present, I have a newly found understanding of the walk’s transformation from ungainly present to historical form. What appears monumental in history is nothing less than the accumulation and consolidation of a million intimate details and exchanges that exhibit a confusing dimensionality in the present. History focuses and sharpens the lens to write its story of turning points and ruptures. In the march through graduate school and the dissertation, we learn to be experts, and this re-enactment reminded me to acknowledge what we cannot know.

A film of the event will come out sometime this fall…so that more people can see the Sociological Walk in Brooklyn, NY, or how it’s been reconstructed through history. Thanks to all who participated and helped. It was and is amazing!

Thanks to Ben Lenzner for the above photos. His blog and website.