Literary Writing and Design of Experience As a Research Device in Social Science

Firstly, an avant-garde novel is used as a source of knowledge about social reality. Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1937) is presented as an instruction book about the disruption or breach of the order of common sense or social norms (Garfinkel, 1968). The adventures of the protagonist are narrated examples that unravel the techniques of deconstructing of the meaning of social frameworks (Goffman, 2006). It provides a different perspective on sociological theories about the actor (Latour, 2008) that causes the disorientation of what we consider normal and common.

Ferdydurke's protagonist, a man in his thirties, begins to be treated like a teenager. He goes to school, stops living alone and moves out. He is unable to overcome the absurd social label given to him by others. Then he begins to plot devices to disrupt what others consider "normal". Literary writing, thanks to its fictional and non-literal character, is able to construct coherent worlds on imaginary premises in order to reach perspectives that real reality does not provide (García Blanco, 2012).

Secondly, it is a social laboratory work where art and sociology are introduced into everyday life, in the framework of an event related to literary writing. The aim is to confuse the participants and to observe how they make sense of a situation that does not make sense. Literary writing is used to capture the experience of human actors.

The experiment is based on the semiotic-material design of the installation and the dramaturgical-performative design of the situation, both inspired on Ferdydurke. Special attention is paid to the emotional dimension of the situational or Situationist design (Guy Debord, 1977) and of the subsequent writing of the experience of disruption. The starting point of both are emotions. The bizarre, the confusing and the inexplicable emotions are the key to the breaching experiment's design.