chapter 6: Mass Observation
mass observation offers attention to the daily, it sought out the ordinariness of extraordinary times. How can experiences and activities be attended to and represented. it is on the fault line between science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, rationalism and irrationalism, there is something necessaryly unstable about the project. “my interest was to describe as exactly as possibly how people behave.” Mass observation works to intensify class differences while simultaneously dumbing the working classes. it can be characterized as a practice of understanding society as a totality of fragments: the montage of incidents seen as sumptomatics od repressed forces.
the use of psychoanalysis is aimed at revealing more than the repressed prehistory of the individual. making connections between the personal and the social suggests that material in the everyday public world can be invested with unconscious meanings.
collage and montage are the materials of mass observations practice. collage can be seen as a theory of shock. it is capable of revealing explosive links where they are least expected. it also allows the simultineity of difference within the everyday to be represented. it offeres a bombardment of materials that resist narrative resolution. rather than places events in a seemingly natural order. the potential of montage is the production of a representation where the fragments of everyday life arent welded together.
the image that most often accompanies mention of Mass obserations is the image of the educated english southerner observing the impoverished working class northerner.
politics are understood as being practiced from ABOVE and as being deployed on everyday life. mass observations politics can be seen to emerge FROM everday life. it makes things important when they have to be remebered and recorded.
