I N T E R NAT I O NA L

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2008.00548.x J O U R NA L O F
Int J Soc Welfare 2008: 17: 182193 SOCIAL WELFARE
ISSN 1369-6866

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compilation Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

Social work as art revisited

Gray M, Webb SA. Social work as art revisited Mel Gray, Stephen A. Webb
Int J Soc Welfare 2008: 17: 182193 2008 The Author(s), Institute for the Advanced Study for Humanity (IASH), University
Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the of Newcastle, Australia
International Journal of Social Welfare.

In this article we revisit social work as art, noting that it is

just over 20 years since Englands book on the subject
provided a direction for the professions early defence against
empiricism. Those who picked up the ball handed to them by
England tended to focus discussions of social works art on
its soft side, embedding it in notions of creativity, meaning,
self-expression, intuition and quality, all of which were
said to characterise the aesthetic dimensions of social work
practice as a counterpoint to the rising tide of hard empiricism,
proceduralism and managerialism. Within these aesthetic
dimensions, proponents of social work as art sought to
resolve tensions through advocating a value-based artistic
approach to care. Against this we argue that art is struggle and
resolution, soft and hard, joy and grief. Further, we posit that
social works art lies not in the social worker as artist but
rather in social work as the work of art, which is implicitly
a non-productivist endeavour. In a fundamental sense we
argue that it is the art of social work and not the social worker
that assembles what is practice, that provides bounds and lets
everything stand in relation to everything else. This enables Key words: radical agonistics, phenomenology, Martin Heidegger,
us to construct a speculative radical agonistics for social Alain Badiou, attunement; non-productionist, subtractive ontology
work that draws attention to the relation between art, truth and of truth
event. In so doing, we substitute a subjectivist reading of Prof. Mel Gray, Institute for the Advanced Study for Humanity
social work as art with an ontological analysis drawing on (IASH), The University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan,
Heideggers phenomenology, supplemented by the work of New South Wales 2308, Australia
Alain Badiou, to cast social work as art first, as artistic E-mail: mel.gray@newcastle.edu.au
attunement, and second, as an art in the service of a politics
of liberation. Accepted for publication August 15, 2007

I am convinced that art represents the highest task subjectivist phenomenology of art. In so doing, our
and the truly metaphysical activity of this life intention is not to provide a comprehensive review of
(Friedrich Nietzsche). social work as art. Instead, we view it through the
lens of Hugh England in tandem with advances in
Most of those who write about the art of social work phenomenological research. Englands pioneering book
write about that art as inhering in the individual social (England, 1986), published just over 20 years ago,
worker. We take a radically different approach in this remains a pivotal analysis of the concept of social work
article. As a general strategy, this article avoids trying as art and debate about the fundamental nature of
to reduce everything to subjectness, i.e. to social work and, as such, is worth revisiting given
subjectness in its various guises in the practice of developments that have emerged since he wrote this
social work where the social work practitioner or book. England portentously saw the rise of the
individual client or worker are seen as subjects, that is evidence-based practice movement and his book
to say as the fulcrum on which everything turns. Rather expresses his ambivalence about it. On the one hand, he
than an attempt merely to construct theory or to achieve wanted to embrace it, yet on the other, he anticipated
a unity of theory and practice, the article intends to the way in which instrumentalism and reductivism
provide an ensemble of ideas that integrates theory, a would stifle social works art.
speculative orientation to practice, and experience and A parallel to what we are attempting to do can be
sensibility through the particular formulation of a non- found in Nel Noddings (2003) much misunderstood

2008 The Author(s)

Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare.
182 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

ethic of care. She is at great pains to show that care is
not primarily an individual virtue, something that
inheres in the subject. It is not enough for the social
worker to claim that s/he cares. If the client feels that
nobody cares, then an ethic of care does not pertain.
Hers is a relational ethics, and not a virtue ethics. An
individuals virtuous character or good intentions is not
sufficient in an ethic of care. An ethic of care depends
on a potentiality within the boundaries of possible
experience and the reciprocity between the one-caring
and the cared-for. It inheres, or better still, is immanent
in the mutuality of the caring relationship and not
merely in the qualities of the individuals doing the
caring or being cared for. In other words, Noddings
ethics of care is ontological. It is based on the view that
humans are relational beings and for caring to eventuate,
a context must be created where the one caring and the
one cared for both derive benefit from the caring
relationship. I cannot care for you if you do not want
to be cared for by me and I am not caring for you if
you do not feel cared for by me. By the same token,
the mother filled with good intentions who smothers her
child is not a caring mother in Noddings terms. Nor is
the father who over-protects his daughter, not allowing
her to develop her own sense of independence (see
Semetsky, 2006).
Like the ethic of care, our concept of social work as
art does not rest only on the virtuous social worker
doing all the right things, but on the myriad factors
which create the art of what social workers do: the
clientworker relationship, professional requirements,
agency environment, social policy and so on. We will
argue that the art inheres in the work of the social.
There is a relationship between what the individual
social worker does and the broader context in which her
or his work is situated. The choice is not the individual
social workers, but the work, which conveys what must
be done.
Generally, there is at least tacit agreement in social
work that the work, that is to say the processes of
helping, embodies what is variously called an inductive,
creative or intuitive dimension, and that it expresses
humanistic concerns with values and beliefs. Largely,
the workers talents are typically lumped together into
something called the art of practice, but without clear
definition about the meaning of the term. All too few
scholars have approached the question about social
work as art (England, 1986; Goldstein, 1990; Gray,
2002; Gray & Askeland, 2002; Siporin, 1988), and
however art is considered, it remains elusive and for
some, chimerical. The essence of the art of practice,
when valued for its own sake, is, according to Goldstein
(1999a: 5), expressed in many humanistic genres
within the text and dialogue of the relationship, [and]
is the foundation for a narrative approach to working
with people and their ordeals of living. He saw this
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Social work as art revisited
narrative as ones inner connection with the outer
world a means of explanation and preservation of
integrity and worth. When it comes to understanding,
the narrative can say albeit often cryptically much
about how the teller wants to be known and treated, and
where the teller stands in the larger world (Goldstein,
1999a: 7). Goldstein believed that the social worker
could learn how to be a creative practitioner, that her
talents could be exploited and augmented by an
appreciation of what the arts and humanities can teach
(Goldstein, 1999a: 5).
Goldstein, then, drew attention to the stories clients
tell and to the social workers skills in attuning these
with the life-world of the client. But, on another level,
if that work be art, then art too has its own rules; art is
not always about resolution or harmony or beauty.
There is a conception of art that wholly reflects this
aesthetic view and it is the one most commonly put
forth in social work. But the creativity and playfulness
of artists positioned within a risk-averse environment
are stifled by instrumental rationality that simply
calculates. In such situations, artists have no choice but
to rebel. Real artists play, and certainly this is one of
the most immediate forms of direct experience. Pathos,
joy, humour and fear combine in an endless flow of
intense moments. Bela Bartoks modernist music
beautifully captures this ambivalence in the way he
exploits tone and dissonance to reflect the pungency
of his Eastern European roots (Forte, 1960). Modern
art survives its assimilation to the functional totality
its relegation to mere entertainment by becoming
difficult, introverted, dissonant and shocking. With an
imaginative reverie, artists must possess their own
irreverent rules. Bey (1994) insists that artists must
often sacrifice the social to a tyrannical muse. Art dies
when treated fairly. It must enjoy a cavemans wildness
or else have its mouth filled with gold by some exotic
Princess. Artists struggle for their art. Bureaucrats and
managers eschew it and spit it out. Art resists the
mundane and the normative dimensions. We shall
contend that social work in the service of art is
incommensurate with what Heidegger calls the dominant
productionist metaphysics of calculative reason and
technical rationality. Moreover, the agonistic relation of
art to the social world brings centre-stage the formative
aspects of art in a way that conveys the possibilities for
understanding the very sense of the work of the social
as art and the authentic truth such work can bring forth.
How then does this extreme characterisation of art
bode for a social work audience? We are cognizant that
such a perspective may be rubbished as quirky. It may
also be regarded as incommensurate with the realities
of frontline practice and out of step with the austere
governmentality of policymakers. So be it. It is exactly
these kinds of so-called realities that we are pitching
ourselves against. The idea raised above about the
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evacuation of the social by art is especially telling if
social work is to ground its endeavours in a terrain of
political change and move beyond paying lip-service to
a transformative social work. If we are to avoid the tame
and lame constructions of social work that are cut
from the cloth of the artistic genre, this type of
reckoning must push the boundaries further than have
hitherto been expressed. It must penetrate to reveal
some vitality commensurate with the angst of art, or
what we refer to as radical agonistics. It is our contention
that like all other human beings, social workers need
the peak experience of art. This necessity rests not
only in the free space of the imagination, as Rimbaud
(in Robb, 2000) contends, but also in the work of art
itself in giving value and meaning to social work. And
it points to a different kind of transformative social
work, starting with a phenomenology for practice that
interpolates the flow of peak moments as a tense
relation in the work of art. To develop this perspective
we draw on the recent writing of the French social
theorist, Alain Badiou, to supplement our pheno-
menological analysis. Thus, we consider the relevance
of art for social work not only in terms of so-called
metaphysical qualities of the sublime and the charming,
but also with the tragic and grotesque, both dimensions
of which are experienced as intense and fragile, perhaps
transformative, moments. From such a perspective social
work is cast as, first, an artistic attunement, and second,
an art in the service of a politics of liberation. Put
another way, the work of art requires an attunement
with or direct experience of the truth that reveals itself
and, in so doing, creates its own ethic that puts us in
the service of those whom we seek to free from
oppression.
Typically, the social work as art mantra has invoked
creativity, intuition and self-expression as a counterpoint
to a stale set of normative and prescriptive practices.
The mantra is also indicative of sentimentality for a lost
social world where people connected in some deep and
meaningful way. This mantra was partly set in place
by the classical text by Hugh England written in 1986.
Today this small book, Social Work as Art, resonates
with certain affirmative sensibilities among practitioners
and researchers alike. Put in plain terms, there is
something that feels right about a work such as this,
which explores the importance of the intuitive use of
self for social work practice. As epigones working in
this tradition, for us this is suggestive of much more
than an aesthetic appeal towards the creative aspects of
social work. Rather, it is also indicative of a reactionary
sentiment that partly relates to a sense of mourning, or
a loss progressively engendered by the deskilling of
the task, the degradation of work, the reduction of
professional autonomy, the break-up of professional
identities and the consumerist marketisation of clients
as service-users.
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The work of the social as art
So what does it mean to practice the work of the social
in an artful way? Better still, what is the arts work in
social work? Is it simply to find oneself imbued with
some artistic temperament or disposition? Or perhaps it
is about practicing direct work in a creative and
expressive manner? Maybe it is about recognising the
value of art as a form that has special significance to
the aesthetics of working with clients? But what is this
value of art implicit in each of these characterisations?
As we shall see, Hugh England certainly did not
address these aspects directly in his much-cited book.
Art, when usually experienced as creativity, inspiration,
representation and poesis, can take on an enigmatic
or chimerical, to use Goldsteins (1999a) term aspect
when the usual questions are asked. Is it an affective
disclosure of a special kind of subjectivity? A
caricature? A more elementary relation with creativity?
Yet, despite these current and quite reassuring
metaphors, the value of art for social work cannot be
reduced to the simple aspect of expression through a
form of symbiosis between practice and art. That is, it
cannot be configured as something that has value in
itself simply because it is artistic, or because it conveys
some positive aesthetic aura of experiential practice.
For us there is a deeper reading that shifts the horizon
of interpretation beyond a narrow psychological schema
that joins personal experience to creativity. We suggest
that the problem associated with this kind of treatment
is that it relies heavily on an ontological-aesthetic
account of subjectivity. Here is the criticism. This
treatment reduces to what is ultimately a solipsistic
account of the value of art relating the practitioner as
artist to the object of art sculpting, canvas, musical
score, artful practice using a flawed correspondence
model of truth. This perspective regards truth as
consisting in a relation to reality, such that it involves
a relational property involving a characteristic relation
(to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be
specified) (online entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy).
We take a different route in considering the value of
art for social work by drawing on the luminous
phenomenological writings of Heidegger and more
recent works of Badiou. In so doing, we bracket terms
that normally dominate considerations of this kind, such
as individual creativity, aesthetic experience, artistic
intention, subjective taste and artistic judgement.
These aesthetic terms have dominated our thinking
about the value of art in modern times and were
encapsulated in the Art for Arts Sake movement of
the late 19th century. Thus, we wish to resist the kind
of sentiment expressed by Oscar Wilde in his 1891
essay The Soul of Man under Socialism where he tells
us that A work of art is the unique result of a unique
2008 The Author(s)

temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the
author is what he is. As we shall show, this subjectivist
aesthetic with its vicious self-referential autonomy is
quite plainly wrong. As Noddings shows, good
intentions can harm. It is worth reminding the reader
that while we wish to avoid the gushing sentimentality
often associated with discussions of art and social work,
we want to attenuate the radical agonistics of art by
viewing the imaginary realm as (in)tensely configured
in events via reference to depth phenomenology. But we
are moving ahead of ourselves here because it is
necessary to retrace and critically evaluate the steps
taken by England in his defence of social work as art
before developing an alternative line of thinking. It is
from this vantage point that we can better assess not
only the distinctive contribution he made to the social
work literature, but also provide some constructive
correctives to a perspective he developed some 20 years
ago. While others have toyed with variations on this
theme, most acknowledge the seminal nature of Englands
work and have tried to augment his arguments about the
value of social works art (Goldstein, 1990; Siporin,
1988).
Englands Social Work as Art revisited
In Social Work as Art (1986), Hugh England conceptualised
social work as a process by which practitioners, through
the intuitive use of self, give meaning to the clients
problem as interpreted through the practitioners own
experiences. An interactive model between social
worker and client is developed on the basis of a strong
notion of intersubjectivity. The book takes a defensive
stance in the sense that England uses the claim that the
intuitive use of self should be recognised as the basis
for social work as a rebuttal against the burgeoning
proceduralisation, formality and objectivity that were
regarded as most important to social work organisations.
His main concern was the encroachment of the increas-
ingly dominant scientific, empirical and evaluative
models of intervention that were emerging at the time.
Looking back over 20 years, let us examine more
closely how England made sense of social work as art.
It is not always easy to discern the sense in which
England views social works relationship with art. It is
thus not clear whether England sees social work as an
art as opposed to say a science or as art. At times
he appears to use the concept metaphorically social
work is like art and at other times metonymically art
represents those elements of social work that are art-
like or are usually found in the arts. As an art, England
seeks to locate social work within the broad field of the
arts and humanities (see also Goldstein, 1997) drawing
on the work of Rickman (1967). Thus, he uses the idea
of social work as an art in order to distinguish that
which it is not, rather than just that which it is. He
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Social work as art revisited
wants to group social work as a form of art with
other categories of art to show how it differs from
science (see also Goldstein, 1992).
Social work as art, on the other hand, is not about
the play of creative difference but about discerning
what it is at its core. In this sense, England sees social
work primarily as art, as having the qualities of art,
particularly when referring to components of good
practice. But he wants to show that even as art social
work can be evaluated. Here he draws parallels with art
criticism as an evaluative method. The fact that social
work is an art rather than a science does not put it
beyond the realms of science but rather demands that
we find different means of evaluating it than we might
do if it were only a science.
Thus, to justify his depiction of social work as an art
he has to discern the essential elements that make it so.
But this presents him with a dilemma because it leads
him into normative definitions and having to articulate
what social work as an art is and what it comprises. He
sees the fact that social workers have extreme difficulty
in describing and explaining what they do and why as
being evidence in support of this claim, because he
wants to show that social work is more than its
constituent parts; he is adamant that definitions, no
matter how comprehensive, cannot sufficiently capture
what social workers do in practice. In this way, social
work defies scientific precision, which requires that
phenomena can be broken down into measurable
constituent parts. There is, he says, an implicitness in
social work such that Good social workers know
through their experience the value of their helping work
with clients (England, 1986: 4). They work with the
whole cloth or a populated, busy canvas and see the
whole of experience and, in practice, make
judgements about unique circumstances (England,
1986: 15). Social work is not just about bureaucratic
procedure; for social workers, the helping role is never
a matter of uniform provision but always involves
deliberation and heuristic judgement. This does not
mean, however, that social work as an activity cannot
be subjected to critical scrutiny; it is not beyond
evaluation. Essentially, then, England establishes,
following Timms and Timms (1977), that the boundaries
of social work are loosely drawn and permeable and
that social workers are always concerned with the
delivery of personal services and with change and
problem solving.
What then are the core features of social work as art?
To establish these we have to know what its central
concerns are and these England sees as revolving around
coping or peoples social functioning and meaning
the way people see or perceive things (see Camilleri,
1999). Social workers help to improve clients coping
capacity and their attempts to make sense of their
experience. Much rests on the social workers interpretation
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of the clients world and this is always about judgement
and meaning. England sees it as a necessary condition
of life that we try to impose order and coherence, to
create some sense of certainty in an uncertain world. It
is not just about reporting facts but also about
understanding the meaning people give them. In short,
social workers are concerned, not with problems per se,
but with peoples abilities to cope with them. In so
doing, it focuses on the understanding and communication
of meaning (Goldstein, 1999a). But herein lies the rub,
for the social workers understanding is an elusive
creation (England, 1986: 27; see also Goldstein,
1999b). However, it is not necessarily mysterious, for
social workers draw implicitly from their personal
understanding and experience, and the meaning they
give intuitively to the clients experience even though
they might be guided by formal learning.
England is more concerned with knowledge built
from direct experience than abstract knowledge, for he
sees this as evolving into an intuitive understanding that
guides judgement; phenomenologically he talks about
an attunement with the client. Thus, he sees creativity
as central to social workers ability to understand their
clients world and to their use of expressive, persuasive
and evocative language to communicate this understanding
to the client. England aestheticises what the social
worker does, creating the impression that art inheres
in what social workers do in communicating meaning
and understanding a lived understanding (England,
1986: 31) conveyed with genuineness where there is
congruence between the words and behaviour of the
social worker. England depicts this as a play within a
play as the worker searches for meaning within the
search for meaning. Importantly, though, England is
building his pivotal notion of the workers intuitive use
of self. He sees this as a stubborn ambiguity in practice:
no matter how many procedures are put in place, social
workers make decisions based on their intuition and
emotions in the moment. This places the emphasis on
the workers themselves and their essential capacities
and competencies, such as an ability to relate to people,
to listen and respond empathically and so on.
Though leaning more towards an intuitive, pheno-
menological approach, England tries to cover all bases,
agreeing with those who see social work as a combination
of art and science wherein the disciplined use of self
and intuitive understanding do not negate a rational
approach. In trying to discern good practice, he says
we need a model that can grapple with the intuition and
subjectivity inherent in social work. Thus, he asks: Can
the arts . . . offer a paradigm for knowledge and practice
in social work? (England, 1986: 83). Yes, says England,
for social work is an artistic activity: there is a sense
in which the social worker can be seen as an artist
(p. 84). A theory of social work that incorporates a theory
of art could help deal with the problem of subjectivity
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in social work. But he does not want to use art as a
hold-all for subjectivity and intuition (p. 86), i.e. for
scientific imprecision wherein art is seen as some sort
of intuitive skill such that theory is scientific and
practice is artistic. He is against giving art a residual
role as anything that is not science or cannot be
explained, as a vehicle for disposing of the obvious and
imprecise subjectivity of social work (p. 87). Noting
the similarities between art and social work, he draws
on early definitions that described casework as an art,
which made use of the science of human relations (p.
89). Richmond talked of scientific mindedness and the
artists practised skills (p. 89), which merge in creative
people, implying that art is a practice skill. In moving
towards social work as art, he refers to Millards notion
of the therapeutic imagination (p. 97) and Rapoports
emphasis on creativity and style: it is possible to apply
some principles of aesthetics to a given piece of social
work practice (which we sometimes describe as) . . .
beautiful (p. 99) (see also Siporin, 1988). But thus far,
says England, these authors have not gone far enough
in grappling with subjectivity in social work (p. 100).
England attempts to take the exploration further by
examining art appreciation and art criticism as a
vehicle to help us learn to work with fluid reality and
aesthetic experience, which requires more than
intellectual effort. Social work, like art, demands the
realisation of experience (England, 1986: 104) through
the development of an aesthetic sensibility a particular
kind of perception, appreciation and understanding in
art and in social work and consider how perceptions
form themselves into a sensible structure (p. 105). Here
social works search for coherence within complexity leads
to a focus on the whole man (sic) person in context
and to an acceptance of the infinite complexity of
experience (p. 105). For England, like the poet, the
social worker brings together (and synthesises)
disparate elements of the ordinary world (p. 106). He
is not just a critic, but a creative thinker able to give
expression to his own understanding in a way which is
of value (p. 107). If social work is to be seen as art,
then such concepts may help social work to construct a
genuinely viable approach to the criticism and assessment
of practice (p. 108). Here, England is trying to develop
an argument for what we describe today as critically
reflexive practice. He sees the objective world as
subjectively created, anticipating social constructionism,
but his main focus is communication and meaning: Art
recognises and affirms social works emphasis not only
upon expression, but upon the necessarily intimate,
personal character of that expression (p. 114). The
artists role is to be skilled in helping others experience
meanings (p. 116). Like art, social work is involved in
clarifying the personal and moral meaning of social
issues and events (Goldstein, 1987, 1992, 1999a). It
belongs in the sphere of education, not health and
2008 The Author(s)

treatment, and it cannot be confined to clinical activity
(the latter being the area developed by Siporin, 1988).
England wants to locate social work in the tradition
of art and sees debates in art as relevant for social work;
to identify social work as art is to attribute essential
social values to the individual the whole person. This
lies at the root of art, especially in literature (England,
1986: 115). Thus, art criticism teaches us to realise
subjectivity, not to deny it; to embrace social work as
subjective and value-laden (p. 125). Anticipating a trend
that is to follow, England begins to outline a critical
approach, wherein the worker must evaluate his
effectiveness with his client (p. 126). He experiences,
analyses and evaluates his own behaviour. He believes
that through criticism [in other words a critical
approach in the philosophical rather than Marxist sense]
we may achieve certainty about the real, experienced
world . . . through criticism . . . there is the possibility
of arriving at something outside ourselves, which may
provisionally be called truth (Kermode, in England,
1986: 125, emphasis added). Rather than being
impediments to evaluation, values, intuition and the like
colour the way we evaluate what we do and or come to
know. The identification of social work as art makes
possible the identification of discernible stages in
critical practice (p. 126); the possible validity of art is
established by a process of experience, then analysis,
then through discussion and comparison of analysis, a
shared understanding (p. 124). In highlighting the
significance of creativity, imagination and art, England
leans heavily towards an existentialist lived experience
approach, but neither he, nor anyone else to date, has
attempted a comprehensive modelling applying
phenomenology to social work (Webb, 2006: 17). In
some key respects, Harry Ferguson is heir to Englands
notion of social work as art, and certainly has loose
affinities with the project. He brings some key issues
raised by England back onto the social work agenda:
Critical social work discourses tied to emancipatory
politics are . . . unable to deal theoretically, politically
or practically with defining features of how people
have to live in a post-traditional order. What gets left
aside are most of the questions posed by the
sequestration of experience and moral issues
concerned with death, sexuality and the new intimacy.
In emphasizing the negative impact on so many
social work users of their structurally limited life
chances, such critiques pull practitioners away from
the moral questions and existential dilemmas posed
by the new choices, decisions and the strategies to
shape meaningful lives and relationships that now
face people in their daily lives (Ferguson, 2001: 47,
emphasis added).
What concerns Ferguson (2001: 49) is that this has
hindered the development of a critical approach which
2008 The Author(s)
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Social work as art revisited
takes seriously the individual life and the contribution
of the active citizen to the reinvention of politics.
While it is beyond the scope of this article to review
Fergusons contribution, it is clear that his work on life
politics points us squarely in the direction of existential
phenomenology.
Phenomenology of art
There is a paucity of phenomenological thinking in
social work, particularly in relation to the application
of the phenomenological method to aspects of
professional education and practice. Given the neglect
that phenomenology has received at the hands of social
work, it may be helpful for readers if we sketched some
background contours highlighting several key features
of this important philosophical tradition. We shall pay
special attention to considerations involving the
phenomenology of art. It is our contention that such
considerations of the phenomenological rendering of
art are instructive in the way we conceptualise the
possibilities of the work of the social as art.
The etymology of phenomenology derives from the
Greek term phainomenon, which refers to the appearance
of things or phenomena (see Spinelli, 1989: 2). In its
simplest form, phenomenology is the description of
phenomena as a person experiences them. The most
general and essential characteristic of phenomena is that
they exist as the consciousness of or the appearance
of the specific thoughts, objects or things being
experienced. A fuller definition would be that
phenomenology studies the genesis of the phenomena,
i.e. the constitution of phenomena in their essential flow,
rhythm or sequence. Importantly, a phenomenologist
does not posit or construct, but describes whatever is
given to her or him.1
For phenomenology we intuit to describe particular
concrete experiences of temporal objects, i.e. objects
for which time is essential. We can also begin to detect
the way in which phenomenology unilaterally opposes
what was considered to be the main characteristic of the
new pattern of Western liberal society, i.e. the spirit of
rational calculation and mere utility, as personified in
1 One of the earliest definitions of phenomenology was
provided by Adolph Reinach in 1912 in developing his
concept of premeditation for legal scholarship: Pheno-
menological analysis means that we are not permitted to
inject the customary concepts of representation, thinking,
feeling, and will in order to build up premeditation from
them, a process which inevitably would involve the loss of
what is most essential to it. Rather we have to make an effort
to transpose ourselves into the phenomenon in order to be
able to render faithfully what we can intuit there (cited in
Spiegelberg, 1981: 193). Here we can see that it was the
first-hand intuiting of the essential core of the phenomena
that formed the main feature of Reinachs early phenomen-
ological method.
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the bourgeois with its boundless acquisitiveness, its
mechanical time and its indifference to quality in favour
of quantity. This is true for the long line of eminent
phenomenological thinkers from Brentano, Husserl,
Scheler and Hartmann to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
Ricoeur and Bachelard.
Contemporary theories of art have approached the
question What is art? from two dominant perspectives.
The first focuses on the creator of art (Nietzsches
approach), the second on the receiver of art (Kant and
Schopenhauers approach), and then from either
perspective the nature of art is extrapolated upon.
Phenomenology dismisses both approaches, focusing
instead on the work of art itself. In so doing, it avoids
the trap that both the spectator and creator approach
falls into by conceiving the essence of art as a
psychological state and thereby degenerating into
artistic aesthetics2 as we have shown England did in
relation to social work (and as many do with Noddings
ethic of care).
The Polish phenomenologist, Roman Ingarden, one
of the closest disciples of Husserl, also devoted his
work to formulating a phenomenology of the work of
art. Like Geiger, he wished to avoid the subjectivity
inherent in psychologism in constructing an ontology
of the work of art. The key to avoiding the dominant
form of Cartesian subjectivist psychology for Ingardens
phenomenology was in developing the centrality of
the concept of intentionality, the term most closely
associated with phenomenology (Sokolowski, 2000: 8).
For Ingarden, there is a duality of structuration, which
both objects and subjects fall within, that is derived
from the pre-cognitive intentional structure of the
life-world. For example, in Cderic Kahns LEnnui, the
structure of intentionality in the subjectobject relation
is deliberately blurred throughout the movie to dramatic
effect. It starts with a fast moving car scene in a
Parisian city nightscape, with Martin, the philosophy-
professor protagonist, telling the audience I always
knew Id die in a car crash, without knowing I had, or
meaning to, as if the road were make believe, and I was
oblivious to the death-bearing trees and houses that lay
in wait. The narrator does not intend to die in a car crash,
neither is it fate that deals an unfortunate hand; instead
the intentionality lies in the immanence of the material
architecture that relates car to road at the expense of
the driver. There is a sense, then, in which his death is
unavoidable it is engendered by material context.
The key point is that phenomenology moves us
beyond the egocentric predicament set in place by
2 Moritz Geiger was perhaps the first within the pheno-
menological tradition to focus on the work of art from a
philosophical standpoint. In his essay on the psychological
function of art as a phenomenon, art is contrasted starkly to
the ordinariness of everyday experience (see Spiegelberg,
1981: 201).
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Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes, Locke
and Hobbes. It suggests a new way of thinking about
subjectivity for social work. Sokolowski (2000: 15)
explains this well:
What phenomenology does through its doctrine of
the intentionality of consciousness is to overcome
the Cartesian and Lockean bias against the
publicness of mind, which is also a bias against the
reality of the appearance of things. For phenomenology,
there are no mere appearances, and nothing is just
an appearance. Appearances are real; they belong to
being . . . Things that had been declared to be merely
psychological are now found to be ontological, part
of the being of things.
They come to us as experience. Thus, for Ingarden,
works of art were neither real nor ideal beings, but had
a purely intentional existence (Spiegelberg, 1981: 229),
meaning that objects are created by and dependent on
acts of consciousness. For example, the capacity to
experience a musical melody, as opposed to a single
instantaneous note, requires intentionality, as the ability
to be conscious of the musical object as an entity that
endures through the flux of time. In the writings of
Husserl, this directedness of intentionality is explained
in terms of the fulfilment of an intended meaning:
An intention can be empty, or it can be fulfilled if
an objective correlate to the intention is given in
the experience (Tieszen, 2005: 25).
There are two elements important in experience.
The first is the sense that it is open in time, meaning
that it reaches beyond the now to both the retentional
past and a possible future. Thus, we anticipate that with
a musical melody, for instance, the sound will prevail
until it reaches its end point. The second is the
acknowledgement that art is always a cultural product;
it is not a mere physical entity and, as such, it is never
wholly determined, because it contains variables,
some of which the hearer or spectator will fill in or
replace by constants (Tieszen, 2005: 230) based on
past experience. The recommended method for
identifying these constants, or attributes that provoke
a tension between the cultural product of art and the
experience of art itself, is to focus on the way in which
the world opens up to us, to experience it directly free
from mental contaminations formed by instrumental
interests. Husserl claimed that phenomenology as a
science must focus on the invariant, inconstant
structures of what is out there: If we reflect on how the
world is given to us, and focus on the invariant
structures of our experience we glean the structure of
intentionality (Tieszen, 2005: 27). As we shall see, this
provides a key insight for Heideggers historicisation of
art as disclosure, his related critique of calculative
reason and the important thesis on the death of art in
modernity.
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Heideggers The Question Concerning Technology and
The Origin of the Work of Art
Alain Badiou (2005: 1) sees Heidegger as the last
universally recognizable philosopher. This is no small
compliment from an eminent thinker who was also a
friend and colleague of Jacques Derrida and Gilles
Deleuze. Heidegger maintained that philosophy can
only be salvaged in Western thought by a return to
Greek questions of ontology. Art was the vehicle by
which he attempted to recover this fundamental priority
and principle of ontology. It was during the 1930s that
Heidegger turned his attention to theorising art. In
The Essence of the Truth (1930), he suggests that
the elucidation of art works is a privileged way of
uncovering truth. He expanded this thesis in The Origin
of the Work of Art, a 1935 lecture series published in
1950. He approached his theorising of art, not from the
standpoint of the artist, but from the perspective of the
work of art. As Shawn Moi (2006: 17) explains, with
this approach:
we are given a highly original conception of the art
work as that into which truth sets itself. Truth
happens there. We are here of course referring to
truth as aletheia.3 That is, truth takes place and shape
(Gestalt) in the work of art as the interchange of
concealment and clearing from which the Open is won.
For Heidegger, art and truth are concomitant concepts
that imply each other. But just what kind of place or
event is the Open for Heidegger? It is the arena wherein
the world and earth strive against one another it
houses the Rift (Riss) that into which the strife of
world and earth has been fitted. Heidegger likens it
to a tension between two opponents striving against one
another This rift does not let the opponents break
apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary
into their common outline (in Moi, 2006: 23). This
notion of intrinsic tension fits very closely with what
we refer to as the agonistics of the work of the social
as art, which we develop further in our discussion about
Badiou below.
There is also an important critical dimension in the
work of Heidegger that contrasts the technological with
a creative worldview, which is decisive for our
construction of a transformative social work. Heideggers
interpretation of the technological worldview of late
modern times differs radically from the much more
familiar interpretation offered by anthropology and
3 In relation to artistic judgement and temperament, Heidegger
introduces the Ancient Greek term aletheia, truth as an
attunement of the work that depends on the necessity of the
freedom to be open and not bound by some rigid
directedness or purposive reason (see Rapaport, 1997).
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Social work as art revisited
history. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger
(1997) maintains that the instrumentalist or calculative
view of technology has limited validity. In social work
it has become a dominant worldview with the
development of new technologies of care that narrow
the possibilities for proximal face-to-face practice
(Webb, 2006: 141168). These constitute frontline
knowledge and practice at two levels. First, they provide
for what counts or works as pivotal, i.e. what counts
as an intervention or resource about which the
propositions of empiricalanalytic science give us
knowledge. In other words, what counts in relation to
the calculative worldview is that which can be detected,
measured, accounted for and manipulated in the
situation of evidence-informed environments. Second,
the instrumentalist worldview determines the general
character of standards, guidelines and codes of practice
employed in calculating or predicting the truth and
falsity of interventions or what works. Let us be
clear about this state-of-affairs. This all-encompassing
instrumental rationality is totally in thrall to the status
quo epistemically, politically and functionally (Finlayson,
2003). It is slavishly subservient to the dominant
worldview of advanced capitalism and its neoliberal
variant.
Heidegger fiercely contested modernist assumptions
about the progressive accumulation of scientific
knowledge and technical rationality. He argues that
their dominance arises because of a one-dimensional
mode of understanding what things are. For Heidegger,
for something to be meant it must be disclosed or
made manifest. By this, he means that for any
particular historical epoch, human culture is shaped by
the way in which things manifest or reveal themselves
in time. For example, if things manifest themselves as
aspects of profitability of capital, people treat things
one way; if things reveal themselves as shared or
collective property, people treat them in another
way. Heidegger came to view the one-dimensional,
technological mode of understanding of the history of
human subjectivity as calculative reason. He saw it
as one stage in history initiated in ancient Greece,
whereby a productionist metaphysics of being was
privileged: For the Greek founders of metaphysics, to
be meant to be produced. Plato inaugurated the
modern technological worldview in which to be as a
subject means to be compelled to produce more and
more just for the sake of producing. This is why
Heidegger was so vehemently opposed to the Art
for Arts Sake and Expressionist movements. For him
they simply replicated the bourgeois productionist
mentality through their aesthetic psychologism. With
this subjectivist aesthetics, the beautiful is not regarded
as a manifestation of being, but rather a product of
experiential reasoning. As Richard Owsley (2002: 3)
points out:
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Gray & Webb
Heideggers particular example of art in the Origin
lecture illustrates his critique of the Expressionistic
tendency. While [others] . . . assume that the agent
of expression is a particular human being, Heidegger
attributes this function to Being-Itself. Aesthetic
expression is less a psychological endeavor than an
ontological one. Art is not an instrument for an
ethical message or a political ideology. This trivializes
the instrument and the message. To Heidegger, an art
work unconceals a condition of Being. The incidental
properties may indicate psychological qualities,
stylistic points of view, or sociological conclusions;
however, these are, at best, pre-ontological antecedents
to Being-Itself. Merely to study art, i.e. to catalogue
and to classify a series of perspectives, is to fall short
of what art at its best has done, can do, and should
do: expose what it means To-Be. The latter qualities
are not ambiguous, deep-seated positions adopted by
human beings in context. They are the overwhelming
presence of what-is.
Heidegger maintains that in order to free ourselves from
the alienating influence of productionist technology and
to recover our rootedness in the world, we must
cultivate a mode of attunement,4 which he calls a
releasement toward things. To be released toward a
thing is to attend to it as the particular thing that it is,
rather than as a substitute for some other thing that
would serve the same function. Towards the end of The
Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger leaves us
with the tantalising suggestion that a saving power lies
concealed in this dangerous moment of Western
modernity in the de-aestheticisation of art. It is in the
nature of the work of art to illuminate and bring the
concealed into view through its relation to the earth:
In setting up a world, the (art) work sets forth
the earth. This setting forth must be thought here in
the strictest sense of the word. The artwork moves the
earth itself into an open region of a world and keeps
it there. The work lets the earth be earth (Heidegger,
1971: 171).
Thus, against the backdrop of a great Greek temple, a
mountain is set forth just as a mountain, and not simply
as a land mass that needs be crossed or overcome, i.e.
that exists for some instrumental purpose. The mountain
must be appreciated in itself. Modern technology no
longer permits nature to show itself. Instead the
dominance of calculative reason tends toward processing
and consuming and controlling nature rather than
4 The concern here is with possibilities of understanding
immanence in the work of art. Attunement as a mode of
enframing brought forth via speculative penetration into the
formlessness of the work, with the effect of becoming a
disclosive or uncovering event for the hermeneutic practitioner
(see Stambovsky, 2004).
190 Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
preserving and sheltering or merely appreciating and
experiencing it.
In contrast to Expressionist art, Heideggers treatment
of Van Goghs Peasant Shoes emphasises the simplistic
portrayal of an earthy everyday object.5 As Owsley (2002)
points out, the painting expresses inherent feelings of
frustration, pain and concern that come much closer to
a phenomenological conception of art. He notes, The
care with which Van Gogh has imbued his simple
subject matter is far from the grand visions of
patriotism, righteousness or arrogance. The shoes are
not beautiful but hard, heavy, bulky, and rough (p. 4).
Such painting is in line with Heideggers conclusions
that human Da-sein, existence or being-in-the-world,
tenuously participates in the more expansive project of
Being as the totality of history. Such participation is
doomed to frustration, disappointment and anxiety.
Heideggers entre into art occurs where Marc, Macke
and Klee leave off (see Young, 2001). Similarly, our
entre into the notion of the work of the social as art
occurs at the point where Englands text leaves off.
There is something very important at stake in this
historicisation of production for Heidegger in that it
provides the basis for an evaluative critique of the
technological worldview as inauthentic. A key task for
Heidegger was to contrast inauthentic with authentic
worldviews, and to privilege the latter as an authentic
mode of working and producing that would provide an
alternative to what he described as Greek productionist
metaphysics. As Zimmerman (1990) explains, In
Heideggers view, the attentive activity of letting things
be was not work as it is known under productionist
metaphysics; but instead the essence of art (p. xvi). A
new non-technological worldview would be possible only
if humanity were enabled to produce a work of art that
would restore meaning to the things that had been made
meaningless in the technological era (Zimmerman,
1990). Thus, for such a Heideggerian perspective it is
not so much that the artist is a special kind of person,
but rather that each person is a special kind of artist.
Art, truth and event as radical agonistics
In this final section we consider how the idea that each
person is a special kind of artist is relevant to social
5 In Heideggers (1971) description of the van Gogh painting
of the peasant womans shoes, he wishes to show how the
peasant woman toiling in the field reveals how the shoes
bring soil and world into a relation that establishes the
peasant woman within a historical place: From the dark
opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread
of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of
the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge
through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the
field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness
and richness of the soil. Under the sole slides the loneliness
of the field path as the evening falls (pp. 3334).
2008 The Author(s)

work. We will concentrate on how the work of the
social can be characterised in terms of art and, as a
matter of course, shift the sole emphasis away from the
intuitively plausible account of art as a subjective
composition for the worker. This means that our focus
is not so much on an interior aesthetic process of
individual creativity, but rather on the particular
consequences of certain concrete events within the
work of the social. Following Heidegger, this will
require us to seek out and isolate the precise
consequences of an encounter with art as an event in
social work. In short, we need to devise a sustainable
answer to the question: What is arts work in social
work? In order to sustain this move, we need to
supplement our earlier reading of phenomenology, with
Heidegger as its principle exponent, with the more
recent but largely sympathetic writings of the French
social theorist, Alain Badiou. This will permit us to not
only reconstruct prevailing conceptions of art in social
work but to also push forward in developing an
affirmative agonistics of social work in lieu of the arts
work. It will also allow us to set this aesthetic
conception of social work against the perverse and
inauthentic forms of calculative reason that have come
to dominate much of social work.
As a lover of truth, Badiou (2006) declares a return
to truth in politics and philosophy (p. 121). Unlike
many of his contemporary French postmodernists,
Badiou positively endorses and expounds a concept of
universal truth. He finds truth in events artistic,
scientific, political and amorous events. As Barker
(2002: 83) says, For Badiou, truth is the ultimate aim
of philosophy, whose conditions once met, liberate
philosophy from itself. But Badious is a very different
theory of truth from those we have grown accustomed
to in the writings of Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel. It is
an opposite position to the fashionable postmodernist
and historicist relativist theories of truth. The
originality and radicalism of Badiou rests on what is
called his subtractive ontology of truth thesis.
Badiou (2006) insists that truth is not an abstract,
sovereign or transcendent phenomenon, but part of the
givenness of experience, proceeding as it does from
within experience as a singular figure of immanence.
Truth is generic and infinite; it is not given as the secret
of depth or intimate essence, as Freud would have us
believe. Rather, drawing on his expertise in mathematical
set theory, Badiou (2006: 124125) explains:
There can be only truth of the situation wherein truth
insists, because nothing transcendent to the situation
is given to us. Truth is not a guarantor for the
apprehension of something transcendent to the
situation. Since a situation, grasped in its pure being,
is only ever a particular multiple, this means that a
truth is only ever a sub multiple of that multiple, a
2008 The Author(s)
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Social work as art revisited
subset of the set named situation. Such is the rigour of
the ontological requirement of immanence. We could
say that truth is included in that which it is the truth of.
In other words, truth is part of experience and not
something beyond it. In constructing this subtractive
ontology of truth, Badious goal is best described as the
attempt to reveal and make sense of the potential for
profound, transformative innovation in any situation.
Every such innovation can only begin with some sort
of exceptional though invariably ephemeral break
with the status quo; it begins with what Badiou refers
to as an event which reconfigures the present, i.e.
which takes something away from our existing
understanding of the situation. For example, in his
transformative theory of politics, Badiou argues that
politics must be subtracted from the State (Barker,
2002: 83). As they reveal themselves they will take
away something from the current knowledge we have
of the State. At another level, if your partner tells you
he is going to take the dog out for a walk, and then
later that day tells you I am having an affair and will
be leaving you, these two different events laid side-
by-side dramatically reveal the power of truth such that
things will never be the same again. The truth takes
something away from that which you thought you had
or possessed. It changes your view of love. Thus, in his
major work to date LEtre et lvnement, Badiou
(1988) explains in detail that:
truths are militant processes which, beginning from
a specific time and place within a situation, pursue
the step-by-step transformation of that situation in
line with new forms of broadly egalitarian principles.
Only a pure commitment, one detached from any
psychological, social or objective mediation, can
qualify as the adequate vehicle for a truth, but
reciprocally, only a properly universal truth qualifies
as worthy of such a commitment. Only a truth can
induce the subject of a genuine commitment (http://
www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html).
Badiou (1998) casts truth in terms of exceptional
events, intense moments, rare and fragile experiences
that lead to a form of commitment and attunement with
the world. He shows how truth can be a collective as
well as a singular experience. Ultimately, his concern is
to forge a political philosophy of sameness and equality
over and against current preoccupations with difference
and identity. A collective takes shape in response to a
radical break with the status quo and is defined as a
political event if the subject of this event is collective,
and if this is a singular collective practice estranged
from the state. A starving population or a people facing
genocide know the meaning of collective truth.
For Badiou, like truth, all artistic truth is initiated by
an event and is sustained by a subject. Following
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Foucault, Badiou thinks that subjectivity is an effect of
events. Art, as distinct from calculative worldviews, is
an engagement in which sensual experience audible,
visual, verbal, olfactory and tactile is put into form.
Hallward (2003: 195) explains:
The evental site in an artistic situation always lies on
the edge of what is perceived, in that situation, as the
void of form. Artistic events take place on the border
of what is formless, joyful or monstrous, the point
at which the formal resources of the existing arts are
overextended.
The arts work is a subtractive intense event or series
of events that is disruptive, incommensurable and
contingent. It is likely to be derived from an
improvisation, whereby all past experience, knowledge
of rules and procedural thinking do not suffice to
predict or produce an outcome. Art brings forth that
which is novel rather than the repetition of past or
habitual unproductive modes of calculative thinking. It
is transformative in the sense that it manifests itself
continually anew, and, in keeping with this, social work
as art can never be a closed system. In a fundamental
sense it is the art and not the social worker that
assembles what is practice, that provides bounds and
lets everything stand in relation to everything else.
The arts work in social work is not imbued within
the routine, mundane or the ordinary. Neither can it be
found within the prescribed, codified or regulated fields
of administrative practice. There is nothing task-centred
about it. You will not find it in policy guidelines,
manuals, computer databases, case notes, team meetings
or conference reviews. On the contrary, the social
worker will recognise that the arts work does not figure
among a variant range of potential outcomes. The truth
of art cannot be predicted, calculated or prescribed. It
is always surprising, disruptive and often the result of
an accidental event. It cannot be grasped through
purposive action alone. Such purposive reason traps and
blinds social work into a mode of thought that insists
on grasping reality through one-dimensional instrumental
rationality. The truth of art often begins with the
involuntary and resonates as something to be undergone
rather than something that is guided or imposed. And
it cannot be communicated explicitly; it is revealed in
the gaps, the rifts, the dislocations, inconsistencies and
incoherence of what is said or remembered as what was
said. To paraphrase Hallward (2003: 204), the composition
of art as work comprises the talents, actions and
qualities of the social worker, which are indistinguishable
from the process and the context the relationship
within which the work happens, the situation in which
it is imbedded, personal, professional and social
expectations or norms, and so on. This complex
composition whereby one arrives at the art is diametrically
opposed to technologies of care and decisionist forms
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of evidence-based practice (see Webb, 2006: 144168).
The arts work in social work extends beyond the formal
and normative aspects of existing regulatory practices.
Art is without mediation, and as will become clear,
either through lack or excess, it performs as a radical
mode of subtraction from these formal and normative
fields.
The formalisation of the arts work in social work
rests on the proximal relationship between social
worker and client as a process, duration or setting of a
performative scene. Badiou calls it a sustainable scene
of the staging of the Two. This staging of a relationship
between social worker and client is alwaysalready,
inherently pregnant with possibilities of truth. This
means that Truth is already included in that which
it is the truth of. Here is our strong claim for an
alternative conception of this staging of event between
social worker and client. The event is not a repetition,
description or characterisation of what exists, but
instead a momentary pause in which participants invent
or imagine what has not yet taken place. They invent
new possibilities. It is the leap of faith of the decision,
as Derrida (1995) refers to this process, whereby the
social worker and client show commitment to the
ongoing and durable salience of their relationship, but
make the immanence of truth stand forth as intense
moments that initially subtract but resolve as enduring
and preservative Truths. Clients and most of us can
recount in vivid detail a moment when some new
insight that had lasting impact was reached. The leap
does not aim at mediation since this merely confirms
the void of the situation rather than its pregnant
possibilities, or else it seeks to restore a normative
condition and the status quo of untruth, i.e. it leaves
things as they were. More radically, it is the in-potentia
of the opening, or potential take-off point for the arts
work, which connects positively to this revelation of the
void of the situation, the immanence of that within it.
The arts work must wrest and agonise in order to bring
forth the authentic, and that which is to be preserved.
This requires fidelity on the part of the social worker
client configuration to discern in a situation any
multiples of possibility and proactively regroup
connections and disconnections to the event, whether
real or anticipated. The fidelity procedures task is
to decide, in each case, whether and to what extent
in relation to the horizon of possibilities, the
intersubjective social workerclient is faithful to the
event or not. The fidelity procedure, as an element of
social work intervention, thus inevitably invokes truth
and draws up a repertoire of virtues and vices, whose
terms are included in a situation, and those that are
excluded. As Barker (2002: 85) explains, Fidelity
stands for degrees of relative autonomy. But crucially,
following Badiou, the main task of an exclusively
affirmative social work as art is the effort to render
2008 The Author(s)

visible all that which, from the perspective of the
establishment, the government, the State, is invisible or
non-existent. As we say in narrative therapy, together
the client and worker rewrite the story. The arts work
does not only open up in disclosing a radical alterity,
or making visible that which has been previously closed
down or excluded, but it also endures as a new narrative
(Goldstein, 1999a). As Heidegger argues, the arts work
preserves the authentic. It establishes itself in the open,
whereby the intense moment of truth as in-potentia
becomes a durable and lasting monument. For us,
however, the burning question remains as to whether
social work will ever experience a collective political
moment of truth, which endures and shines forth.
Perhaps, for now, we can at least hope for in the
Blochian sense a fuller engagement with the arts
work in the social.6
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