Public sociology for an emergent people: the affective gift in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present

In the face of increasing calls for sociology to demonstrate its public relevance, it is necessary to question cherished understandings of what so-called Public Sociology should look like. This paper advances an understanding of sociology that is ontologically oriented toward a world of rapidly emerging and often unfamiliar social realities, with an eye to producing new ways of understanding the discipline's authority vis a vis ‘the public.’ In experimenting with alternate conceptualisations of sociology, its public and their relation, I turn to a social, and specifically artistic, event for inspiration; namely, Marina Abramović’s performance of The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art. While the artist and the social scientist clearly work with differing possibilities and constraints, the performance indicates a novel way in which authority might be mobilised. Wheras the debate around public sociology normally centres on the figure of the expert, Abramović’s performance give rise to a new authority, intimately bound up with the age old sociological concepts of charisma and the gift. This highly experimental performance points the way toward a more affectively open and productive relationship between author and public.