To Embark and/or be Embarked ? Emotion As Element of Method Digressions Around the Sensitive VS Intelligible Connection

"To move someone around, he has to be emotionally moved." said Régis Debray. Sociology is above all a question of vision, perspective, lighting, angle, depth of field, focus and of course fine tuning.  Do we not recurrently talk about the "sociological eye"? This issue is of course also relevant to the sociology of art and it is in this context that the question of emotion will be examined here.

Thus, along with John Dewey, we will consider that aesthetic emotion is not a form of feeling that exists independently, but an emotion that is caused by an expressive material inducing a transformation of the initial feelings. What will interest us here is how emotions are then functioning as mediations between the different actors in the process of artistic production.

To this end, the semiotic narrative analysis of a scene of the Wim Wenders film Der Himmel über Berlin will be an excuse to draft a reflection on the idea of intellectual risk taking (gamble) drawing the pathic dimension into its path. We will speak here of sociological focus method characterizing the socio-anthropological posture. Emotion does not exclude reason and to that extent we therefore cannot afford not to take into account the issue of emotion in the sociological method.

At the heart of the creation process, emotion and the gambling concept will thus enable us to recall that thinking, also in science, is working from a fictional construction of reality (itself fictional construction of the "real ") as an intra-subjective, empathic and heuristic process, where emotion, omnipresent, must necessarily be taken into account.