1Within the classic formulations of sociological theory, neither ‘quality’ nor ‘space’ received much systematic attention. Even more rare were attempts to treat these two notions in tandem. ‘Quality of space’ was hardly ever a significant sociological consideration. Within the modern division of scientific labor, such questions as ‘what constitutes space’, ‘how things appear or feel’, ‘where they are situated and how it matters’, and ‘what’s the human meaning of space’ were kept separated, deemed to reside outside social theory, and consequently relegated to separate disciplines such as aesthetics and geography, respectively. When they were approached jointly, notably in archaeology and art history, they tended to serve an understanding of time rather than space proper (Kubler, 1962; Schroer, 2006). Only relatively recently a series of attempts at convergence of these aspects have appeared in these disciplines (Belting, 2012; Hodder, 2012). Continental philosophers from Henri Bergson to Michel Foucault acknowledged the importance of qualitative take on space but have not offered directly applicable methodologies for qualitative social researchers. As far as theories of human sciences are concerned, the complexity of what Schütz (1970, 252) called “provinces of meaning” or Reed (2011, 162) calls “landscapes of meaning” necessitates more detailed theorizations of how meanings are formed. But these theoretical vocabularies have so far been under-represented in social sciences. In sociology, sophisticated theorizations such as for example Pierre Bourdieu’s, did thematize space but they made scant use of phenomenological tradition. The notable classic exception was Alfred Schütz whose ambitious effort is acknowledged within the discipline but has nonetheless been perceived as “provisional”, and as «an ‘amalgamation’ rather than a truly synthetic marriage of sociology and phenomenology» (Alexander, 1987, 250). As Mark Johnson (2007) shows, especially in the Anglophone sphere dominated by propositional linguistic theories, the lack of developed phenomenological paradigm in cultural theory limited the scope and depth of research on human meaning-making. This situation has caused the «frustration with disembodied rhetoric» and «the growing irritation towards social constructionist positions» (Meloni, 2014, 2). A series of new efforts to redress this problem and offer a more realist theory of social construction followed (Elder-Vass, 2013; Porpora, 2015). And yet, phenomenology remains under-represented. Although it is congenial to some of the new theories of meaning, it is a distinct theory too, featuring its own interpretive vocabularies which are yet to be fully integrated with mainstream social sciences.
2The present paper joins this move toward closing the aforementioned theoretical lacunae and inquires to what extent is a more synthetic ‘marriage’ of phenomenology and sociology feasible. It does so by introducing a new phenomenological notion of ‘emplaced qualities’ and discussing it in the context of expanded notion of experience, especially the spatial experiences associated with contemporary club culture. Why exactly should sociologists care about this set of notions, and what kind of specific sociological significance they represent? Providing answers to these questions is worthwhile for at least two reasons, one general and one more specific. The general worth consists in meta-theoretical and methodological benefits, and the latter has analytic value. The former helps clarify the still persisting confusion regarding what actually is (or can be) ‘quality’ in human life, and thus what counts as ‘qualitative’ in qualitative social research. The latter, more specific worth of this task consists in dispelling the durable misconceptions about the term ‘subjective’ and in clarifying the sociological uses of such terms as sensuous emplacement (Feld, 2005), subjective experience (Foucault, 2005, 2017), or ‘spatiality’ of meaning-making (Bartmanski, 2023). Both aspects face the same traditional challenge: how to avoid the Scylla of purely personal (‘subjectivist’) accounts of ‘quality’ and the Charybdis of reductive materialist (‘objectivist’) understanding of space. That is to say, how to relativize the received rigid positions of dualistic cast and their attendant binarisms such as subject/object, mind/body, or thought/experience. The present paper aims to offer a conceptual way out of this ongoing aporia by discussing useful but under-utilized theoretical distinctions.
3In their paper entitled What Is Qualitative in Qualitative Research, Aspers and Corte (2019, 152) have argued that ‘qualitative’ denotes (1) «getting closer to the phenomenon studied» which enables researchers to (2) «make significant new distinctions». One implication is to gain a more thorough, non-reductive ethnographic insight into human meaning-making. Another implication is to seek analytic differentiations that would enable qualitative researchers to make their thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) significantly thicker and capable of offering plausible interpretive explanations (Reed, 2011). Such thickening of social scientific plot has been deemed important for a long time because the “accounts of human life” that accord with experience seek to describe and explain what is necessarily “thick” (Berlin, 1978 [1960], 132). And yet, social scientific assumptions about what is ‘experience’, why exactly it is considered thick and how it matters have remained comparatively unexamined in social sciences, if they were taken seriously at all. The present paper makes two theoretical differentiations in the domains where there are usually none on offer, namely regarding the intertwined notions of ‘experience’ and ‘quality’, and it brings them together in the context of ‘space’.
4On the one hand, we work with the differentiation between what Alfred Schütz (1970, 64) calls “non-discrete” lived experience (the German term Erlebnis) and the reflective “discrete” experience to be had (the German term Erfahrung). Both German words translate into English simply as ‘experience’, whereby the distinction which is analytically vital gets lost. On the other hand, we propose the differentiation between the attributive (representational, propositional) and distributive (non-representational, sensuous) conception of quality. The attributive perspective, epitomized for instance by structuralism, maintains that relevant qualities are attributed (or ascribed), and it is therefore primarily interested in how signs are made to represent something else, for example how a form of collective representation stands for a collective feeling. The late Durkheim’s position is an emblematic classic version of this approach. For this reason this perspective does not recognize the actual lived experience (Erlebnis) as a source of its primary data, or it assumes that it does not need to. Structures of signs and their synchronic relations are the key data, not the lived experience in the environment whose affordances and associated sensory qualia partake as significant data. The attributive approaches tend to privilege semiotic mechanisms and discursive formations, rather than «structures of feeling» (Gilroy, 1993) and sensory formations (Howes, 2005). Consequently, it prioritizes signs in methodology and signification in epistemology, that is to say, the objects of analysis that are easier to handle by logocentric social sciences. The attention is directed largely to the linguistic representations of what Schütz calls “discrete” reflective experience, i.e. to coded representations of Erfahrung. Here, meaning and value are largely linguistically and semiotically ascribed from without. Insofar as this is the case, it mistakes a part of the process of signification for the whole complex process of meaning-making. It is a useful analytic elision, but an elision nonetheless. The classic of spatial research Henri Lefebvre (2014, 118) saw this predicament clearly when he problematized «the reduction of the symbol to the sign that goes hand in hand with the reduction of meaning to signification».
5By contrast, what we would like to call a ‘distributive’ perspective tries to re-inscribe the bracketed dimension of sensuous spatial experience and asks how social scientists can account for embodied existential qualities of Erlebnis in order to understand better the existential moorings of Erfahrung which is a typical cultural form of sense making. This way we reclaim a more fine-grained theory of human experience which aims to avoid reducing experiential qualities to mere referents of signs and treat them rather as participants in meaning-making. Put differently, we look at how the emplaced experiential qualities that form a lifeworld (for example in a club context as Lebenswelt) get entangled with the reflective experiential sense (narratives of collective effervescence and cultural mythology). As early as in Bergson’s work (1991 [1896]) that was indeed recognized as one of the challenges, later originally reworked by the phenomenological movement and then by late modern philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (2001 [1966]) and Jacques Rancière (2019). Crucially, the sociological phenomenologist Alfred Schütz (1970, 71) attempted to merge Husserl’s phenomenology and Weber’s Verstehen sociology to meet that challenge. According to him, the sensory Erlebnis is at the core of “irrevocable” real-time human “working” which quite literally passes through one’s body and takes place in the qualitatively present lifeworld (Lebenswelt), while the discrete Erfahrung emerges from the “revocable performing” of reflexivity which takes place in what’s called the cultural realm proper.
6Our basic argument develops that now half-forgotten distinction and can be stated simply as follows: culture and meaning are too important to be defined solely by logocentric frameworks of culture; reflective, linguistically mediated experience, or Erfahrung, is not just conventionally constructed ‘from without’ through standardized arbitrary attribution but also motivated ‘from within’ by patterns of subjective Erlebnis, and sociology can benefit from theorizing the connection between the two. Now, in order to do it, one must clarify the significance of the former for the latter, and operationalize the connection. In our view one finds a version of that approach in Jacques Rancière’s elaboration of the notion of aisthesis according to which we must research “the sensible fabric of experience” that conditions interpretation and classification of something as this rather than that (Rancière, 2019). Drawing on this recognition, the present ‘distributive’ perspective thematizes ‘emplaced qualities’ as part and parcel of that “sensible fabric”, as sensuous forms of affordances that enable, mediate and stabilize that crucial connection between Erlebnis and Erfahrung. To delineate how it works and varies across research contexts is of crucial importance for meaning centered sociology. The way these qualities are present in and appropriated by spatial settings matter. That is to say, one must ask how they are spatially “entangled” (Hodder, 2012) and on what specific “distribution of the sensible” their meaningfulness depends (Rancière, 2004). Thinking in terms of intricacies of this Erlebnis/Erfahrung nexus can significantly thicken qualitative analyses. In particular, a form of what Aspers and Corte call “getting closer” to phenomena and their distributively entangled qualities helps question both the materialistic instrumental reductionism (epitomized by various stripes of utilitarianism and empiricism), as well as the idealistic semiotic reduction (of which structuralism is a prime example).
7In the following section we situate the present argument in the context of the relational social scientific concept of space advanced by Martina Löw (2001), which is partly derived from the phenomenological tradition we refer to here. We will pay particular attention to ‘place’ as a special type of space, or a ‘spatial figure’, because the qualities of places are uniquely amenable to both the phenomenological perception and the holistic analysis we propose. To further contextualize and justify these theoretical choices, the third section revisits different classic ways of conceptualizing quality normatively in sociology. It distinguishes ideal-typically four ‘spheres’ of sociological ‘qualification’ along two constitutive axes. The first axis represents the origin or the ‘situatedness’ of qualifying human evaluation, and distinguishes between the ‘internal’ (i.e. actors’ own assessment from within their life) and the ‘external’ (i.e. a third person perspective, e.g. a researcher). The second axis refers to orientations of qualifying evaluation, and distinguishes between the ‘instrumental’ (e.g. goal-oriented) and the ‘holistic’ (e.g. value- and sense-oriented). The instrumental one asks how well a given quality ‘serves’ a given purpose. The holistic one is much wider in scope and looks into the broadly conceived world of human motivations and affects. The fourth section of the paper zeroes in on the intersection of the ‘external’ and the ‘holistic’, wherein the researching of meanings of ‘emplaced qualities’ is highlighted. A core idea of this approach is that the lived experiences (Erlebnisse) in place can undergird the reflected upon experience that can be had (Erfahrungen) and it is precisely this conjunction where qualitative evaluations emerge. In the fifth and final section, we provide a brief empirical vignette – the iconic music club Berghain in Berlin – in order to concretize the analytic purchase of this new qualitative conception. We argue that this place’s meanings emerge in a specific constellation of emplaced qualities, and that despite its semantic and pragmatic openness as a performative site, these meanings nevertheless do not drift or get arbitrarily formed in the “landscape of meaning”. Rather, they are motivated by concrete experiential processes, one of which is, for instance, a kind of ethnographically describable “translation” (Malinowski, 2018, 66) from the Erlebnis that is present into the Erfahrung that is afforded.
8In this section, we first outline a relational concept of space that can guide the qualitative reconstruction of the social. Then we identify ‘place’ as a special form of spatial constitution because its production is based on specific actions and cognitive operations that make them particularly interesting for quality determinations. Subsequently, an outline of the concept of quality is offered, one based on distinguishing descriptive and normative uses. To begin with, we understand spatial constitutions as social products (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]; Löw, 2001), which can themselves become socially consequential. This means that they can also be understood as social institutions produced in communicative processes, with the help of which we orient ourselves in the world (Knoblauch, Steets, 2022). Spaces are therefore not ‘containers’ in which the social resides and which exist independently of their content, but rather the spaces only emerge from the stock of goods and relations of the elements which form a space for us. As Merleau-Ponty (2012, 307) writes, «we have said that space is existential; we could have just as easily said that existence is spatial». How can we operationalize this insight in a sociological way?
9What all empirical spaces have in common is that they are a form of order of juxtaposition (Massey, 1999). But spaces can be produced in different ways, so that we can speak about different types of space. Let’s call them spatial figures. For example, four spatial figures (place, network, territory, trajectory) have been distinguished by Löw (2020), each of which is produced on the basis of four different actions – spacing, synthesis, differentiation, movement, respectively. Löw introduced ‘spacing’ and perceptual ‘synthesis’ as space-producing human actions. This conceptualization has been extended by Löw and Weidenhaus (2017) who incorporated a notion of ‘differentiation’ to better describe the production of territorial spaces. One needs to take it a step further by adding a notion of ‘movement’ in order to be able to describe the ‘trajectory spaces’ in terms of their social production. ‘Spacing’ means placement practice and refers to the positioning of social goods and/or living beings. Placements create places. Localization defines a place. There is always a certain localization of our life, which makes emplacement a fundamental fact of life, so fundamental – in fact – that, as Merleau-Ponty (2012, 298) writes, «there is a determination of ‘place’ that precedes ‘perception’». For example, ‘home’ is a place that is constituted in many cultures as a central space for one’s life. Thus, places as a special kind of space, as the first spatial figure, so to speak, are produced mainly by the action of placement and/or spacing that can be described in terms of particular distributions of the sensible.
10What is crucially important for the present argument is that places are experienced as perceptual wholes. They can be apprehended in their entirety. Put differently, they are more readily subject to perceptual experiential synthesis. Synthesis means the combining of certain necessary elements (e.g. social goods and living beings) into a spatial arrangement, or what could more precisely be called a spatial distribution of sensuous affordances. Thus, in order for certain spaces to come into being in the first place, certain elements must be brought together and linked experientially. This linkage is called synthesis, that is to say, the interpretive scope is partly phenomenologically restricted rather than purely arbitrary when it comes to emplaced qualities. Therefore, phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty (2012), and phenomenologically thinking sociologists like Edward Casey (1996) or Helmuth Berking (1998) deal much more often with places than with the other more abstract spatial figures.
11Taking these denotations and types of spaces into account, one can define the qualitative sociological concept of space as follows. Space as the possibility of experiential juxtaposition arises on the basis of (situational) relations and enables orientation in the world in the form of meaningful relation. Space is constituted on the basis of four communicative forms of action: synthesis, placement (spacing), differentiation and movement. Historically, different spatial figures are constituted on the basis of different combinations of these four principles of action. At present, territories, networks, trajectory spaces and places can be distinguished as socially relevant spatial figures. In each case, dominant actions for the constitution of different spatial figures can be determined. The territory is essentially socially produced via differentiation, the network via synthesis, the path via movement, and the place via placement (spacing).
12While the definitions of space and place seem comparatively intuitive and yield a finite number of typological specifications, the term ‘quality’ appears infinitely complex by comparison. To simplify the matter for the sake of the new conception of ‘emplaced qualities’, we provisionally distinguish between the descriptive and normative uses of the term ‘quality’. Qualitative character of descriptions seems practically ineradicable. To describe a building as a shopping mall is already a kind of statement about the qualitative characteristics of the building. It is a kind of interpretation itself. Such statements must be obtained within the framework of an interpretative paradigm and are therefore linked to a methodology of qualitative social research (Schütz, 1932; Berger, Luckmann, 2001 [1967]). We assume that qualities are not attributed but rather they emerge from dense relations between experiential facts of the world. Insofar as the intuitive designations such as subjects and objects are useful, they can only be determined at all on the basis of such relations. Thus, there are no significant entities that are prior to relations, but what one could call discrete entities (e.g. subjects and objects) can be determined from relations. Reframed in our terms, they can be seen as “distributed” in a specific way, forming an experiential continuum of “relations” or an experiential ecology. ‘Objects’ may be analytical tools of convenience but need not be privileged. On this level, qualities are non-normative, or pre-normative (alternatively, “pre-phenomenal” in Schütz’s wording). From this perspective the whole meaningful world can be described as distribution of qualities. Here, the meaning of ‘quality’ is close to terms such as ‘property’, but emphasizes more strongly the irreducible aspect of relationality. We aim to link this aspect of quality to theories of normative statements regarding the question of the quality of spaces. That is to say, we look into a relation, or set of relations that obtain between ‘descriptive’ level and ‘normative’ level, and – a fortiori – between sensuous bits of Erlebnis and cultural forms of Erfahrung.
13We offer two basic axes of differentiation that systemize the main ways of normative qualification of a space. These axes can be seen as intersecting, so that eventually a four-field heuristic scheme emerges, one which offers an ideal-typical explanation of how the qualification of spaces can be determined/understood. The first axis separates an ‘internal’ normative positionality from an ‘external’ interventionist normative positionality. The second axis separates the instrumental goal-oriented (utilitarian) level and value-oriented level regarding the quality of space.
14If quality is to be evaluated in a normative sense, there must be a framework of values that guide the evaluation. The differentiation of the first axis asks for the ‘origin’ or ‘situatedness’ of this framework. Is it situated empirically in the actors themselves (e.g. users of space) or is it introduced in the evaluating process by the third person observers of a social situation, e.g. researchers? Hence one can distinguish ideal-typically (see Weber, 1956 [1904]) two types of the increasingly normative content of ‘quality’: actor-centered (‘internal’ or ‘subjective’) and interventionist (‘external’). For Weber as interpreted by Schütz (1970, 274) actor’s evaluation is not ‘subjective’ in a sense of “private and unverifiable” or idiosyncratic judgment but rather simply as a given person’s perspective, the meaning it has for them. Phenomenologists have always insisted on this point: «for Weber, ‘subjective meaning’, refers to the interpretive understanding by the actor of the meaning, it has absolutely nothing to do with personal or psychological attitudes» (Natanson, 1968, 92).
15When it comes to instrumental judgments, the concept of ‘quality’ has a restricted meaning: it is about how well a social institution solves the problem that led to its emergence (Berger, Luckmann, 2001 [1967]). In relation to certain value systems, “quality” now refers to the fit of a social institution in terms of these systems and their goals. Methodologically, it is crucial that while quality on the non-normative level is nominally scaled (only different discrete qualities can be named), quality on the normative level is ordinally scaled. That is to say, here it is possible to speak of a spectrum of higher and lower (better or worse) qualities (always only in relation to a specific set of values and to one another). The quality determinations can be put into an order in the sense of decreasing or increasing quality that, in principle, feature infinite qualitative gradation. The differentiation between the ‘internal’ and the interventionist determination consists in the fact that, in the first case, the evaluation framework is taken from the users of the space, while in the second case, an external value frame of a third party is used to do the job of qualification. The latter one means, for example, that researchers or external evaluators themselves assume responsibility for the qualifying evaluation. That’s why it’s dubbed by us ‘interventionist’.
16The question behind the differentiation of the second axis is: what kind of value system is used to evaluate the quality of spaces? This axis helps to distinguish the instrumental/goal-oriented approaches from holistic/phenomenological ones which approximate more closely the non-utilitarian, value- and sense-oriented notions of quality. The determination of an end-means relation (instrumental rationality) always entails the evaluation whether the means fulfill the end. Here, again, the interpretive scope of evaluation is relatively restricted regarding what is or is not possible, instrumentally valid or not. For example, since all social institutions represent collective solutions to collective problems as Berger and Luckmann argued (2001 [1967]), it can be asked how well this or that problem is tackled. From this perspective, the quality criterion of an institution is relatively straightforward, i.e. how well it fulfills this purpose. The utilitarian means-ends relation is central here. Yet the instrumental approach has the problem of providing for an increasing rationality of means without being able to prevent a complete irrationality of purposes, as observed already by Max Horkheimer (1947) in the Eclipse of Reason. The instrumental approach to quality of space can attest to a high quality of a place like the Ausschwitz concentration camp, because of its being a means-end efficient killing machine. Taken alone, the rational-instrumental view simply brackets out other modes of sense-making and evaluation.
17The holistic/phenomenological perspectives, on the other hand, look not only at means-ends relation but also at other relations and distributions that surround and transcend the means-ends relation. Here, the question is not necessarily asked in a purposive way about the achievement of certain specified goals, or as a question of ‘solving a problem’, but it is about to what experiences can a given space lend itself, or what appropriations are likely and meaningful in a given context. It also includes questions about the process of value creation in and of itself, regardless of whether or not it stipulates a goal immediately comprehensible in instrumental or utilitarian sense. It can involve exploring a variety of sensory experiences correlated with them for their own sake – optical, acoustic, olfactory and haptic qualities in their interaction with the human sensorium. Art may be categorized in this way. Here meaningfulness is ‘motivated’ by the open-endedness of Erlebnis rather than fully determined by Erfahrung. It corresponds with what Weber (1956 [1904]) called “Wert-rational” aspect of human action (autotelic value-orientation), rather than “Zweck-rational” (instrumental goal-orientation).
18This approach approximates one meaning of what it takes to “get closer to the object of study” in a phenomenological way. It is precisely in this context that we can meaningfully talk about the role of emplaced qualities and affordances of settings (McDonnell, 2010) or about their atmospheres (Böhme, 2014) as well as identities and sensorium (Zubrzycki, 2016) or iconic meanings (Bartmanski, Woodward, 2015). We can demonstrate, for example, that certain exhibition spaces are more amenable to successful art shows or aesthetic experiences than others (Griswold et al., 2013). Likewise, while some architectural performances can be said to be conducive to revival of host cities based on how they fuse phenomenological and instrumental dimensions, others fail to attain such status or remain ambiguous (Alaily-Mattar et al., 2018). Examples could be multiplied. On the basis of all these considerations, the meanings of the term ‘quality’ can now be systematized as a table. This is a heuristic device that does not exhaust the empirical richness of life. Rather, it helps us to create a provisional interpretive mesh with which we can begin the evaluation of social evaluations.
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‘Internal’ level
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‘External’ level
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Instrumental/utilitarian e.g. “goal-oriented”
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‘SUBJECTIVE’ How well does a space fulfill the purpose for which it was constituted in the eyes of its users?
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‘INTER-SUBJECTIVE’ How well does a space fulfill a purpose attributed to it by third person observer?
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Holistic/ phenomenological e.g. “value-oriented”
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ERLEBNIS What experiences (Erlebnisse) does a space enable users to have and how do they feel/perceive it on that basis?
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ERFAHRUNG What experiences (Erlebnisse) should a given space afford users in order for them to have specific reflective experiences (Erfahrungen)?
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19Let us now zero in on the distinctions that would not only enable sociologists to produce thicker descriptions of emplaced qualities along the axis of value-creation but also transcend the traditional ideal-typical schemes and move toward a more multidimensional form of qualitative analysis. As we have mentioned, in order to do it one can add ‘thickness’ to sociological description by linking the notion of ‘distributive qualities’ to sensory experience occasioned by these qualities (Erlebnis), and then ask how or under what conditions this experiential fact tends to give rise to the process of reflective experience (Erfahrung) which can be understood in terms of ‘attributive’ qualities. It is precisely this that enables the addition of expanded notion of “aisthesis” (Rancière, 2019) to the extant notion of ‘aesthetic surface’ that has been imported in various guises from Walter Benjamin’s brand of cultural criticism to contemporary cultural sociology. In his analysis of the “distribution of the sensible” Jacques Rancière (2004) coined this term to distance himself from the extant uses of aesthetics and open up new avenues of investigation. He writes: «aesthetics can be understood as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience» (Rancière, 2004, 8). It is for this reason that he then states that such value orders as politics «revolve around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time» (ivi, 8).
20But these properties of spaces are not to be taken at face value only. One might paraphrase it and say they ought not to be taken at surface value alone, nor as a screen onto which meanings are simply projected via significatory processes, as the standard representational theory goes. Rancière (ivi, 10) observes that there is also another “model” of qualitative thinking, one that «disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible». This formulation represents an example of what the present paper proposes in general sociological terms. In Rancière’s perspective, «a ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible», as he explains, and adds that a corollary of this conceptual expansion is the juxtaposition of the «theatrical paradigm of presence» and the extant structuralist «paradigm of the surface of signs/forms» (ivi, 10, 12). In this way, Rancière restates in a useful language Schütz’s distinction of ‘lived irrevocable working’ in the present, and ‘reflective revocable significations of semiotic/discursive performance’. While the latter can be arbitrarily constructed (revocable) and is typically expressed in the present perfect tense, the former is existentially (phenomenologically) motivated by and emergent from distributive emplaced qualities, and it is expressible predominantly in the present continuous tense. The patterns of interaction between the two are a way of understanding the formation of “iconic power” (Bartmanski, Alexander, 2012), including the iconic power of qualities emplaced as an emblematic building/institution.
21Compared to ‘attributive quality’, ‘distributive qualities’ are not predicated on the principle of a posteriori arbitrary ascription. Rather, they imply a co-constitutive presence of a complex experiential context hic et nunc. Understood sociologically, such a setting (e.g. McDonnell, 2010) comprises affordances that are partly open-ended or under-determined at any given moment regarding its subjective evaluation but its plausible intersubjective evaluations are not amenable to arbitrary construction. The relations of a given set of qualitative affordances form a whole greater than their simple sum. That is to say, human evaluatory processes are not just about feeling/registering of specific properties, adding them to each other as elements of simple geometry (i.e., an ‘additive’ linear process), but rather about experiential synthesis of distributive qualities, out of which a complex affective topography emerges (i.e., a ‘creative’ non-linear process). Such an experiential “synthesis” was stipulated already by Henri Bergson in his seminal Matter and Memory (1991) who influenced subsequently transformative conceptions of Merleau-Ponty that we will discuss below.
22It is precisely this ‘synthetic’ approach that upholds contemporary research programs such as spatial sociology of Löw (2016), new sociology of life (Delitz et al., 2018) and productive strands of material culture studies (Miller, 2005). Regardless of differences between them, they observe that the experiential qualities are neither singularly active (it makes little sense for sociologists to debate what ‘redness’ is ‘in itself’), nor are they simply culturally active, (i.e. arbitrarily arrangeable as a group of salient discrete ‘variables’ that are represented as chains of signifiers). Rather, qualities are interactively co-present as affordances of a lifeworld, always in concrete spatial entanglements (Hodder, 2012) that matter for meaning-making as specific experiential conjunctions (Keane, 2005). Put differently, these elements do not add up to equal quality but rather they are co-present to qualify experience of something.
23One can think in this context about iconic architectural venues which are ‘sacred’ theaters of social action not just figuratively but in complex phenomenological ways as well. In other words, there’s a multiplicity of experiential values spatially distributed across such places. None in isolation explains the meaning of the place. This is what is meant by saying that the distributive qualities are productive of space. Importantly, «no perception is limited to pure actuality» which relies on memory and pattern recognition; a phenomenological notion of perception includes also prospective affect, not just on additive effect, i.e. it relies on protention, not just retention (Kolakowski, 1987, 63). ‘Sense’ or sense-making in this conception is not simply an over-determined noetic state mediated by sign systems; insofar as it is such a mediated state it is also an embodied under-determined affective process; that is to say, it is a pre-conditioned possibility or potentiality of experience that gets actualized and then relieved and shared and communicated. Various effects of ascription of value may and do play a role. However, according to the present argument, they are an accompanying level or a reflective dimension of sociological analysis of quality, not the template for a comprehensive qualitative model of meaning-making.
24The aforementioned conceptual scheme is not unprecedented. The basic arguments underlying it were already developed by classics of phenomenology, especially by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schütz, two important “revisionists” of Husserl’s foundational oeuvre, who «both produced strong and perceptive programmatic statements about the need to redefine the consciousness/society relationship» (Alexander, 1987, 250). It was only in new relational sociology of space that some of these arguments were expressly used to avoid both the reductions of structurally deterministic habitus and idealistic tendencies of culturalism (Löw 2001, 195). It emphasized Merleau-Ponty’s insight (2012, 253, emphasis added) that «space is not the milieu (real or logical) in which things are laid out, but rather the means by which the position of things becomes possible […] the universal power of their connections […] (that) are only sustained through a subject who traces them out», an existential «synthesis of an entirely different kind». Hence the phenomenological presupposition that human actors always act in an already basically familiar concrete Lebenswelt, inhabiting a specific situational context, never abstractly. It is a perceptual experiential process. As Löw (2001, 195) states, «in perception the sensory impressions thicken (verdichten sich) into a process, into a sensing of one’s surroundings».
25It is this conceptual formulation that reveals the sociological importance of Merleau-Ponty’s original conjunctive notion of sensing and space. As he observed: «the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their thickness to sensing» (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, 53). And it is precisely in this context that the present paper’s plea to make qualitative thick descriptions ‘thicker’ through new distinctions gains its surplus meaning. Of particular importance for cultural scientists is Merleau-Ponty’s (2012, 307) insight that «objectifying acts are not representations» and that «we must acknowledge ‘expressive experiences’ (Ausdruckserlebnisse) as prior to ‘acts of signification’, and ‘expressive sense’ (Ausdrucks-Sinn) as prior to ‘significative sense’ (Zeichen-Sinn)» (ivi, 304). These distinctions largely overlap with the ones introduced by Schütz, and it is this theoretical parallel that forms the backbone of our take on the Erlebnis/Erfahrung nexus. In other words, there are different but interconnected layers of holistically construed qualitative experience that constitute space and make it eminently meaningful for humans.
26On that basis we posit that sociologists can holistically understand meanings of a space as ‘rooted in’ or ‘emergent from’ emplaced qualities by which the occurrence of specific Erfahrung associated with a given Erlebnis is either amplified or obstructed, enabled or precluded, accelerated or retarded, intensified or dampened. A key research proposition here is: we are interested in situations in which what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘expressive experiences’ (Ausdruckserlebnisse) occasioned by certain distributions of the sensible get translated to certain kinds of attributions and significative sense (Zeichen-Sinn). Schütz (1970, 66) reminds us that already Husserl used the term “sinngebendene Bewusstseinserlebnisse” (meaning endowing conscious experiences) to define the constitution of value by feelings. So, one could surmise, for example, that the thicker and fuller such translations of Erlebnisse, the ‘fuller’ or ‘richer’ the cultural process of sense-making in a given situation. Likewise, the more legible such distributions, the higher the likelihood of experiential synthesis that lends itself to intense attachments and attributive interpretations (Erfahrungen). The more spatially fixed and temporally enduring, the greater the chance for what Husserl called the “sedimentation of meaning” (Schütz, 1970, 74). Hence Bergson’s (1991, 217) enigmatic remark that «space is the symbol of fixity». Consequently, distinguished place is an iconic anchor of cultural fixity, and that is why construction and/or destruction of such places is highly socially meaningful (Bartmanski, 2022).
27It is for all these reasons that we direct our empirical interest to spaces that get concretized through specific sites (e.g. built environments) and categorizable places (e.g. architectural entities). In those contexts the consolidation of Erfahrung related to Erlebnis is not only allowed to happen but takes more intense forms, some of which culminate in what researchers such as Roland Barthes would call cultural myths. Erlebnis expanded into Erfahrung – or, according to Schütz (1970, 70), the being of experience ‘modo presenti’ turned into having an experience ‘modo praeteritio’ – this is a key process through which the phenomenological (subjectively felt) ‘experience of here and now’ is amenable to the cultural (intersubjectively communicable) ‘experience of there and then’. According to Merleau-Ponty (2012, 298) the latter is the “notional sense” (e.g. run by linguistic referentiality), while the former thrives on the “directional sense”, or what he calls “a direction of our existence”. These phrases are useful in that they offer another layer of thickness to descriptions of how certain distributions of the sensible direct rather than determine qualitative meanings of space. Different kinds of spaces differently relate these aspects, i.e. the relations between them are variably arranged and it is this phenomenological variability that also accounts for variability of qualitative evaluations. But the necessity of connecting Erlebnis and Erfahrung, the ‘directional’ and the ‘notional’, remains a constant principle. Contemporary cultural critic Jeffrey Kipnis (2013, 5) offers a related view when in his book A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture he states: «neither concept nor effect is subordinate to the other; rather, they are conjugates. Nor does either pretend to timelessness or independence from spatial context, but they are wed through discourse to co-evolution under influences they in turn inflect». With all this in mind we now turn to briefly sketching out how such a holistic analytic scheme can be put to work in a concrete example.
28If one looked at iconic nightlife venues such as Berghain using primarily or exclusively instrumental accounts, it would be difficult to explain why the iconic cultural attributions coalesced around them, mobilizing enduringly strong metaphors and intensifying attachments to them which rendered them amazingly culturally resonant. One is invited to ask: why is Berghain in Berlin so venerated, despite controversies and changes of zeitgeist? Why is it popularly viewed as the “temple” of electronic dance music? What exactly makes it the epitome of hedonistic nightlife, the embodiment of Berlin’s party culture, the icon of techno music, etc.? Why is this place described by both party-goers and social scientists as a “body factory” (Robin, 2021)? Why do some social scientists even go so far as to claim that it is a space that can redirect (or disorient) one’s sexual orientation? (Anderson, 2022). What can explain this immense cathexis? To account for the emergence of such meanings and their wide social resonance we need to mobilize the full scope of the present holistic framework. That is to say, we need to approach places like Berghain as nodal points in the Lebenswelt that concentrate and afford a powerful synthesis of emplaced qualities whose ‘experiential sense’ (re)directs or (re)channels some of the most powerful ‘significative sense’ (notional meanings) of the relevant culture.
29In his unfinished last book, tellingly titled Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, the classic of spatial sociology Henri Lefebvre (2014, 83) wrote: «space is impregnated with affectivity, sexuality, desire, and repulsion. […] Affective colorations are not applied to space like a coat of paint, however […] Affective distances are not arbitrary projections endowing things with significations, here and there, as a result of accident or chance». Berghain might be treated as a paradigmatic case in point. Moreover, its being a veritable globally known ‘place of enjoyment’ helps to illuminate a key point, namely that the emplaced enjoyment of this kind can’t be captured with any instrumental or even classical ‘value-oriented’ framework; a phenomenological engagement is necessary, not optional. Lefebvre (ivi, 151) again: «architecture and production of space do not have enjoyment as their goal – realized mainly by signifying it through symbols – they allow it, lead to it, prepare it». We concur.
30The club’s reputation of a temple of hedonism and its aesthetic profile that goes well beyond techno music scene is by now well-known and treated in detail in manifold lay and professional descriptions, so they need not be rehearsed here. It is worth stating at the outset that its key emplaced qualities derive from a felicitous combination of site, scale, substance and style (Bartmanski, Fuller, 2018), which in this case has also been aligned with sex and sound (Anderson, 2022). The former power plant in East Berlin, located in a nowadays central part of the reunified Berlin and yet occupying a topologically “uncertain” site of the city at the time of its creation (Cupers, Miessen, 2002), Berghain could be sociologically described as a kind of “liminal place” upon its entry to the scene (Smith, 1999). The place of carnivalesque ritualization of play time that stands in opposition to the routinization of utilitarian work time. Crucially, it has also had a veritable interstitial quality to it, both as an urban site and an architectural place, a kind of cultivated air of semi-marginality with great potential of becoming indispensable to a given culture’s definition of itself. In his book Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and Politics of the In-Between, Andrea Brighenti (2013) showed that «interstitial quality corresponds to a form that resists ‘sanitization’ as an evocation of the metropolitan which hybridizes global and local values». Berghain epitomized this condition at the formative time of its cultural ascendancy in the first two decades of the twenty first century. Phenomenologically speaking, it provided a spatial concretization – or “concretion” in the parlance of Husserl’s disciple Roman Ingarden (1964) – of this entanglement between qualities of liminality and interstitially. But it was still more than that – it became a space of “aesthetic encounter” which Ingarden (ibidem) defined as a key condition for generating artistic values in his foundational work on phenomenology of aesthetics (Thomasson, 2020). It thus gave rise to a “province of meaning” that epitomized non-utilitarian, playful, ecstatic and transgressive ways of experiencing «the world’s ‘fringes’ of strangeness and futility» (Natanson, 1968, 176). As such, it could be interpretively positioned as a place whose experiential (directional) qualities helped consolidate the significative (notional) meanings of counter-cultural liminality at a time of increasing gentrification, gradual corporate co-optation of subcultural capital and rampant commercial sanitization of its surrounding areas.
31Morphologically speaking, the building itself is a massive 18-meter-high industrial structure made of concrete and steel, a rough around the edges architectural block with the façade reminiscent of the iconic ancient temple architecture, where the repurposed form unfollows old functions and engages new ones – a useful example of how phenomenological qualities outlive instrumental purposes and serve unintended cultural roles. Combined with their rules of liminality and sex positive attitude originally linked to Berlin gay party scene, these qualities and roles got fused in a powerfully metonymic way. Over time Berghain consolidated a broad faithful following, one made of various groups that tend to perceive it not only in a traditional capacity of a club space that breaks the typical flow of time and therefore liberates one’s mind but also as a “place that frees the body” (Robin, 2021). The massive cavernous architecture, heavy but spacious, metonymically corresponds with the hardness and enormous volume of techno music that’s typically played inside, overwhelming one’s senses and thus redirecting them in powerful ways. This is one of the key features of the distribution of Berghain’s sensible. But there’s also a ritualistic performance of what one might call a performative distribution of bodies that accompanies it. The highly selective infamous door policy constitutes the rite of passage, tacitly accepted by some of the invited, controversial and resented by others, including the rejected. Granting or withholding the right to pass the doors has an ambivalent character, at once experienced as notoriously arbitrary and enigmatically elevating, one that in time has generated an entire discourse of ‘how to get in’ and its attendant semiotic spiral. Combined with the strict ‘no photo’ rule, it contributed to endowing the place with its resonant mystic and notoriety, not only because it created an atmosphere of relative privacy and exclusivity, but also it helped intensify the experience of ‘here and now’ which is being increasingly seen as rare in the heavily mediated digital culture. It also initially contributed to Berghain’s being perceived as a comparatively safe(r) space and a valued sex-positive place. All this is conducive to endowing the visit with prospective affects of euphoria, increases probability of an Erlebnis of collective effervescence inside, and an Erfahrung of reflective ritualization of life thereafter.
32All these features made the club stand out in the larger lifeworld of nightlife. Consequently, and not accidentally, Berghain was the first techno club to have procured the official re-definition of its legal status as ‘cultural space’ (as opposed to ‘entertainment’), and while this had utilitarian tax-related effects which were instrumentally desirable by owners, the more important for our purposes is the very fact that this redefinition was considered, sought after and achieved, providing a formal attribution of status and ‘confirming’ the club’s informal social quality. What has greatly stabilized this cultural meaning is, inter alia, the quality of this space that Michel Foucault (1998, 178) might call ‘heterotopia’, i.e. «a place of otherness, a kind of actually realized utopia in which all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are represented, contested and reversed». To the extent that dance clubs of this kind aim to provide ecstatic and eccentric reversal of utilitarian productive attitudes and values, they are Foucauldian heterotopias par excellence. But this is not an automatic, institutionally conferred status; no legal top-down decree can achieve it. On the contrary, the defining impulses must come bottom up. In other words, a series of phenomenological conditions of heterotopic eccentricity must be fulfilled. In this capacity they can also be literal and figurative spaces of what Helmut Plessner calls the ex-centric positionality (exzentrische Positionalität) (Plessner, 1981 [1928]; Berking, 2006, 98) – the condition of de-centering one’s regular view and thus gaining added reflexivity, i.e. of stepping outside of yourself to have durable experience in modo preaterito (Erfahrung), not only to live through it momentarily (Erlebnis). These heterotopic qualities can direct one to personally cathartic and socially opening and transgressive Erfahrung, especially in case of repeated participation. As the world renowned artist and the club regular Wolfgang Tillmans (2015) put it in an interview published in the book devoted to Berghain
The atmosphere in the club is like art is supposed to be: it’s open and doesn’t tell you what to think. At the same time, it’s not arbitrary, but instead very special and specific […] I think that stimulating meetings between art and nightlife do not come from the fact that artworks hang in clubs, but rather from the open character of music, and nightlife more generally.
33Such semantic and pragmatic openness of Berghain resides at the core of its quality as a cultural space, as a place of enjoyment, and is related to its phenomenological character of a specific experiential place, not to any one aspect of its functionality or discursively formulated status. Its ostensible functionalities (e.g. as a dancefloor space, as a space with certain opportunities of intoxication, etc.) hardly exhaust the topic of its phenomenological and aesthetic appeal, and – by extension – how it makes sense to people as a quality space in which to have quality time and through which to gain discrete, often ritualistically repeatable experience (Erfahrung). As we have tried to show, to produce and unpack such a ‘thick’ description of its meanings one must proceed along several dimensions at the same time, seeing the phenomenal (distributive) in the conceptual (attributive) and viceversa.
34This paper proceeds from identifying a fateful lacuna in social theorizing that stems from the lack of joint theoretization of ‘space’ and ‘quality’, as well as joint understanding of the ‘qualitative’ and ‘meaningful’, sensory experience and sense-making, especially in the context of contemporary club culture. One of the guiding questions is what holistic vocabulary could help close this gap without falling into a trap of reductive materialism or reductive idealism, naïve objectivism or misplaced subjectivism. We address this problem by jointly thematizing two important pairs of concepts: distributive and attributive quality, and lived and reflective experience (as captured by the German phenomenological distinction of Erlebnis and Erfahrung). We argue that most culturalist frameworks have traditionally focused on only one element in each of the pairs (attribution and discourse), neglecting or misconstruing the others and thus leaving the relations between them untheorized. This is an epistemological problem because spatial emplacement of human action is existentially and culturally fundamental, it possesses what Merleau-Ponty calls a basic “directional” capacity for meaning making. And it has become a methodological problem because the frameworks that had been geared to theorize these pairs of concepts jointly have been relatively marginalized in modern social sciences due to the domination of theories predicated on the axioms of the linguistic turn or utilitarian, normative views. Drawing on overlooked classic phenomenological distinctions, notably the ones by Merleau-Ponty and Schütz, and congenial new conceptions in social theory, notably those of Löw and Rancière, the present paper outlines novel relational holistic definitions of space, place, quality and experience, and it situates them vis-à-vis typical spheres of qualitative sociological analysis. Subsequently, a basic statements of a phenomenological theory of ‘emplaced qualities’ are proposed. They conceptually anchor a new frame for non-reductive qualitative thick description capable of avoiding both the materialist/instrumental and the idealist/structuralist bias. The iconic music club Berghain in Berlin provides a provisional exemplification. Its status of a Barthesian mythology in contemporary culture is as clear as its enduring presence of a coveted space of sensual enjoyment, and it thus warrants exploration of the reciprocal conditionality of the two. The signifiers of the myth and the experiences of the space can be productively mapped onto the distinction of Erfahrung and Erlebnis that enables thicker description of this iconically charged place. Drawing on Lefebvre’s anti-idealist post-structuralist notion of “architecture of enjoyment” and Foucault’s spatio-cultural notion of “heterotopia”, we describe Berghain as a heterotopic ‘place of enjoyment’ that features a series of emplaced qualities that afford fulfillment of autotelic values of the electronic music scene.
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