Helping Sociology to Reinvent Itself: Another Gins/Arakawa Possibility

Spending any time in the world of Gins and Arakawa calls to mind a line of Rilke: “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.” We live so as to explore farther each time, and Gins/Arakawa (G/A) invite us to go still farther. While they would move us closer than ever to the edge, the reach is exhilarating.

One gleans a sense of what G/A’s work is about from a tale in the New York Times edition of May 7, 2003. The story concerns a hapless five million dollar New York City construction, the new Irish Hunger Memorial, and the headline reads: “Memorial to Irish Fortitude Comes Undone in America.” Shoddy materials, poor planning, and other weaknesses led to the embarrassing shutdown of what had been hailed on its opening — only six months earlier — as possibly the New York equivalent of Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. When asked about the situation, one that would require over $250,000 in repairs, the top public official in the situation mused — “This was not built as a building, but as a piece of living art” (Dwyer B7) — a line so evocative as to suggest G/A them¬ selves wrote it. 1

A similar thought was featured in the May, 2003 issue of Catalyst, an aptly titled magazine for educational reformers. Called on to explain the role of mixed-use facilities, a new educational reform, a leading proponent carefully explained: “People are often mistaken in the notion that community learning centers are buildings. They’re not. They are the set of relationships and partnerships that have been created to support student achieve¬ ment and family development” (Reed 14).

If these two word-pictures hint at what I think G/A are about, I can now borrow a humbling yet healthy construction from a fellow contributor to this issue of Interfaces, philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Like him, but from the point of view of my own profession, I ask: What can a sociologist possibly have to say about the work of Gins and Arakawa ?

For openers, bravo! Seldom before in my 40-plus years of trying to leam from G/A types — from mind¬ stretching giants like Jacques Attali, Manuel Castells, Joe Coates, R. Buckminster Fuller, Hazel Henderson, Jane Jacobs, Gerald K. O’Neill, Richard Sennett, Paolo Solari, William Irwin Thompson, Alvin Toffler, and Allan Watts — have I found so much intellect and spirit with which to wrestle and hopefully to grow (or, in their special language, to “reverse destiny”). To be sure, like these other giants, our friends G/A feel the need to invent an eso¬ teric vocabulary of words and motives, some of which vexes me and often weakens my conviction that I have possibly “gotten it.” This notwithstanding, a read of one of their works is well-worth a second read, and then a third, and even a fourth — the better to further translate and savor a bit more.