Article

Chinese Journal of Sociology

2015, Vol. 1(1) 136–161

Refashioning sociological ! The Author(s) 2015

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imagination: Linguality, DOI: 10.1177/2057150X15570536
chs.sagepub.com
visuality and the iconic
turn in cultural sociology

Dominik Bartmanski1,2

Abstract
One of the key challenges of meaning-centred cultural sociology is facing the findings of
contemporary anthropology, archaeology, art history and material culture studies.
Specifically, the increasingly pressing task is to recognize the sociological limitations
of the semiotic framework laid bare by those disciplines. The traditional structuralist
focus on discursive codes and the assumption of arbitrariness of cultural sign is of
limited service in understanding the power of complex representational economies
and especially in the task of explaining its variability. The language- and
communication-centred framework downplays the fact that many signifiers credited
with causal social power are inescapably embedded in open-ended but not arbitrary
patterns of material signification. There is ample evidence delivered by the recent
studies within the aforementioned fields that such signifiers are ‘not just the garb of
meaning’, to use the insightful phrase of Webb Keane. Rather, the significatory patterns
and their material and sensuous entanglements co-constitute meanings that inform
social action. Therefore, more integrative and multidimensional models of culture in
action are needed. Some specific explanatory models have been explicitly formulated by
a series of intertwined conceptual ‘turns’ in human sciences: material, performative,
spatial and iconic, among others. By showing that meanings are always embedded in and
enacted by the concrete assemblages of materiality and corporeality, they enable soci-
ologists to transcend the linguistic bias of classical structuralist hermeneutics. This
paper discusses the importance of iconicity for developing such an integrative perspec-
tive without abandoning some constitutive insights of the linguistic turn. I focus on the

1
Bard College, Berlin, Germany
2
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Corresponding author:
Dominik Bartmanski, Platanenstraße 24, 13156 Berlin, Germany.
Email: [email protected]
Bartmanski 137

transformative works of contemporary scholars like Daniel Miller, Webb Keane, Ian
Hodder, and Jeffrey Alexander, as well as on my own research, to illustrate the implica-
tions of the aforementioned paradigmatic ‘turns’. In particular, I aim at elaborating a key
principle of material culture studies: different orders of semiosis are differently subject
to determination and/or autonomous logic of the cultural text. As a result, differently
structured signifiers are responsive to distinct modes of ‘social construction’ and his-
torical transformation. We need to keep paying attention to the Austinian question of
how to do things with words, but we cannot keep doing it as if things social were at the
same time not done with images, objects, places, and bodies and all that their specific
character and use imply. Fleshing out the so-expanded sociological imagination helps us
to activate the full potential of understanding and explanation that the concept of
culture possesses, and thus, to decisively turn culture on.

Keywords
Visuality, language, materiality, structuralism, iconicity, culture

Introduction
The intellectual life of western modernity has been organized around a series of
binary codings. They have been understood as rigid and naturalized oppositions:
spirit and matter, mind and body, ideal and concrete, universal and particular, etc.
As a powerful expression of the anthropocentric, rationalistic understanding of
reality, this system of codings was amenable to association with another master
binary of culture/nature. The particularly powerful dualisms that roughly belonged
to this matrix were the binaries of the mental vs. the sensuous and such correlated
antinomies as objective/subjective and language/vision. Needless to say, in the
history of western social thought these binaries and their relationships were vari-
ably formulated, for instance as reason/emotion, noumenon/phenomenon,
rational/sensuous, word/image, text/picture, or discourse/perception. Regardless
of specific articulation, the spirit of dualism prevailed and profoundly influenced
the social scientific imagination of the 19th and 20th century. Sociology has not
remained unaffected. On the contrary, for most of its history it has been imbued
with the dualistic logic and its corollaries. But why exactly should sociologists care
about this theoretical binary logic today?
For one thing, they have never been neutral ontological distinctions and they
have never gone. Rather, they constituted the sites of epistemological struggle in
the course of which the sensory formations were cognitively ‘colonized’ by the
discursive formations. The modern history of this struggle and its effects can be
delineated through specific conceptual schemes which dominated the theoretical
models and methodologies of sociology. In particular, there were the formal and
abstract languages of philosophy and mathematics that have decisively shaped
the development of the discipline, whereby mostly the quantifiable and
138 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

discursively coded indicators counted as empirical data. This circumstance mat-

ters because, as I shall show in the remainder of this essay, it not only set the
tracks for the development of sociology at its inception but also narrowed down
the social landscape worthy of scholarly attention. It canonized certain works
rather than others, even of the same author (e.g. positivist Durkheim vs. late
Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life) and foregrounded posi-
tivist techniques at the expense of interpretive ones.
These two spheres of discursive and sensory formations were often thought of as
cognitively disparate, fundamentally different, and thus pragmatically separated
and unequal domains. Despite some evidence of ‘the complex mirroring of percep-
tion and language’ (Jay, 1994: 1; see also Lakoff and Johnson, 2003), this state of
affairs has persisted until the 1990s and continues to influence the mainstream. At
best, the status of sensory formations is ambiguous. As Martin Jay (1994: 1)
reflected on the volatile status of perception, ‘depending on the Zeitgeist and
one’s outlook, visuality was seen either as an obstacle or an aid to our knowledge
of reality’. The partial and more self-conscious theoretical inclusion of visuality and
sensuality more broadly has become fact only very recently. Decisively shaped by
the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment, modern social science has always been
inclined to maintain rather strictly the epistemological separations of the reason/
senses dualism. The predominantly rationalist thrust of western modernity institu-
tionalized the aforementioned binary classifications. This meant that one side
tended to be construed as ‘sacred’ and the other as ‘profane’, or at least as suspect
due to its being a source of ‘illusions’ as often as ‘truths’.
The symbolic power of this intellectual culture contributed to a lopsided struc-
ture of much of the western social scientific labour, whereby such signifiers as
‘rational’, ‘logical’, ‘abstract’, ‘universal’, ‘true’ and ‘ideal’ were closely linked to
each other in intellectual practice and then in turn intertwined with linguality; that
is, with the ‘sacred’ scientific sphere of word and text. On the other hand, such
signifiers as ‘emotional’, ‘impressionist’, ‘subjective’, ‘particular’, ‘imaginary’,
‘visual’, ‘aesthetic’, or ‘dramatic’ were associated with perception and sensuality
and all their instabilities. We might think about the former as a Platonic or
Apollonian formation, and about the latter as what Nietsche referred to as the
Dionysian. The opposition of logical positivism and phenomenology, so pro-
nounced in mid 20th century western philosophy, can be seen as yet another
modern variation on this theme. That the dualistic intellectual tropes can be
found all the way from the ancient masters to the 19th and 20th century philoso-
phers provides a remarkable case in point. The dualistic mindset was structuring
major debates in humanistic scholarship, whereby image, perception and material
sensation became the reason’s ‘other’.

Stating the problem

Although this distribution of the sacred and profane was not necessarily incon-
trovertible in academic practice, as far as the mainstream was concerned it meant
Bartmanski 139

that ‘the dominance of speech. . . [had] been pushing the visual research to the
margins of science for a long time’ (Bachmann-Medick, 2006: 329). In fact, until
very recently ‘language’ has been treated by influential social thinkers as the
paradigmatic social fact, ‘text’ as the model of culture (e.g. Ricoeur, Derrida),
and ‘discourse’ as the key social practice (e.g. Foucault). Qualitative sociology,
from Znaniecki to Hall, focused mainly on social narratives. It was the ‘linguistic
turn’ that marked the epochal culturalist transformation of sociology in the
1960s. Many social theorists were persuaded that ‘subjects are constituted dis-
cursively and experience is a linguistic event’ (Scott, 1991: 793). As far as legit-
imate sources have been concerned, archives and written media constituted the
empirical base of sociology, and continue to ground sociology as science.
Of course, these paradigms of thinking about society and culture have generated
powerful research programmes, and their adherence to rationalistic positivism has
been changing over time. Various explanatory categories developed within them
have offered considerable analytic purchase and their techniques proved useful in
different areas. Yet most sociologists, whether materialistically or idealistically
inclined, did not realize two things: (1) their scientific harvest was being reaped
at the considerable expense of phenomenological and aesthetic insights into the
actual workings of people’s interactions with one another and with the material
environment which always contextualized action and order; and that (2) their
models of culture – if they had them at all – remained rigidly representational,
i.e. based on the normative notion of culture as some kind of re-presentation or re-
flection of external social order.
Put differently, sociology was comparatively slow to realize its internal limita-
tions and did not cultivate the domain of sensory formations as substantially and
self-consciously as anthropologists (e.g. Eliade, Turner), or communication theor-
ists (e.g. McLuhan). The sensual, material and aesthetic spheres, visuality included,
were simply not considered a basis for conclusive sociological scholarship (see De
la Fuente and West, 2008: 315). At best, it was a notion of more or less schematic
symbolic representation rather than performative presentation that shaped cultural
sociological imagination. The concept of embodiment and the related metaphors
were neglected (Turner, 2001: 8), and space and place were decoupled from per-
ception and thus reduced to mere physical resource (Löw, 2008). Image was an
‘absent presence’ (Lury, 1998: 2). Consequently, sociology may have seemed a
‘parochial world where ‘‘scientific’’ talk produced an insulated expert world’
(Seidman, 2001: vii).
As a result, the discipline became comparatively myopic, and both theoretic-
ally and methodologically quite conservative despite its overtly ‘progressive’
social and political ambitions. Empirically, it has recently been caught off
guard by the two striking social phenomena: (1) the pictorial transformations
in culture that have reached epochal proportions because of the digital revolu-
tion; and (2) the proliferation of ‘analogue’ material culture, as well as a series of
enduring attachments to its ‘traditional’ physical forms that were recorded in
spite of it and in coexistence with it (see Bartmanski, 2011; Bartmanski and
140 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

Woodward, 2013; Conrad, 2011; Maguadda, 2011; Sadin, 2007). Meanwhile,

cultural studies and cultural anthropology reacted to these tendencies in a
manner which was more timely and audacious. Sociology of culture arguably
played a less pronounced role in exploring what Jay (1994) calls ‘scopic regimes’.
Similarly, the massive consequences of those regimes’ expansion, both inside and
outside virtual reality, have not inspired proportionately significant rethinking of
dominant paradigms in sociology. The issue of how the social was mediated not
just by the linguistic but also by the visual and the sensual in general remained
under-theorized. Sociology not only persisted in its relative exclusion of the per-
ceptual Gestalt of society from the main pool of its legitimate scientific indicators,
but also kept its hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions largely immo-
bilized, disconnecting them from its standardized ‘intersubjective’ methodologies.
It is only as late as in the 1990s and the 2000s that genuine cultural sociology
emerged and the mainstream of sociology started acknowledging those allegedly
secondary registers of sociological action, for example by tying materiality to
perception via Mannheim’s neglected cultural sociology (Löw, 2008) or by re-
focusing our understanding of cultural objects as objects (McDonnell, 2010).
To rectify this lacuna in knowledge and respond to late modern technological
challenges, some contemporary social theorists first began to work on ‘orders of
visibility’ (Geimer, 2002), the ‘rise of image culture’ (Jansson, 2002) and the social
‘power’ of appearance (Seel, 2007). Visibility and vision, sight, display, picture and
the sensual in general were more carefully approached in social scientific literature
(Brennan and Jay, 1996; Howes, 2005; Jay, 1994; Lury, 1997; Messaris, 1997;
Robins, 1996). However, it has been observed that this first wave of the enhanced
focus on visuality has not been followed by a systematic, epistemological reflection
on how it is connected to linguality and whether it can independently structure the
performative order of society. Social theorists have argued that, despite the swel-
ling tide of ‘visual studies’, the issue of the relation between the visual environment
and social factors is actually ignored (Chaney, 2000: 121). Others noticed that,
while ‘many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, few
offer sustained examinations of perception’ (Friedman, 2011: 187). Media theorists
in the arts and humanities still feel obliged to remind social scientists that ‘language
is not external to, but resides behind, the image’ (Groys, 2011: 94). In short, if
visuality has eventually been thematized and identified empirically as a key site of
society, it still remains under-theorized, tethered either to materialistic concepts of
hegemony or to representational–structuralist legacies of cultural theorizing
(Keane, 2005), and thus insufficiently developed. The trick is to work out a cultural
sociology in which materiality, not materialism, will be one of the central
categories.
The present article recognizes this complex challenge, traces the intellectual
genealogy of the relevant theoretical backgrounds and proposes a multidimen-
sional perspective from which to advance a new research programme. The idea is
not, however, to substitute some completely new ideas for the notion of represen-
tation and discourse, but rather to rethink them and connect them horizontally, not
Bartmanski 141

hierarchically, to such phenomena as objective material features, relational affor-

dances of spaces and things, and the patterns of subjective perceptions occasioned
by external qualities of life. After the presentation of a set of main theories
and sociologies of culture, I offer an iconological framework for cultural sociology
that takes materiality and visuality seriously and aims to plug these categories
into the main wiring of sociological theory. The gist of this framework can be
stated simply through two points: (1) materiality in general, and visuality in par-
ticular, constitute an integral dimension of human action and social order, which
structures representational economies on its own terms, enabling and constraining
not only what can be articulated and performed but also how efficiently it can be
done in a given context; (2) visuality and linguality, are mutually constitutive
meaning-makers, not opposing modes of action or spheres of order. If both
points do not seem at present completely unfamiliar in social sciences, it is largely
due to the groundbreaking work of contemporary anthropologists like Webb
Keane and Daniel Miller (Keane, 2005; Miller, 2005), to whose ideas I shall
return at the end.
Nevertheless, these new findings are far from being the sociological common
sense of the day. One of the reasons why this is the case is precisely the persistence
of the dualism and its multiple legacies. While the standard modern paradigms
systematically marginalized aesthetics and materiality as either decorative or banal,
and suspected image of being spurious, ‘repressing the latent linguistic desire of the
image’ (Groys, 2011: 98), the critical postmodern currents tend to celebrate the fact
that nowadays it is images that ‘take precedence over words as the most significant
realm of meaning’ (Chaney, 2000: 112; Mitchell, 1995). Alternatively, they bemoan
the fact that images are the instruments of hegemonic political practices (e.g. Sklair,
2010). I argue that this contrast between the traditional modern and the postmod-
ern stances is yet another instance of dualistic thinking. Because it still constrains
sociological imagination, a clearly defined, less normative and more multidimen-
sional alternative is needed. Instead of foregrounding one of the sides, we need a
more integrative vantage point on the involved issues. Privileging either language/
discourse or perception/materiality means that the dualism is reproduced rather
than overcome. The task is to show how the discursive/ratiocinative and the per-
ceptual/emotive jointly and simultaneously form the collective representations we
live by.
In what follows, I argue that sociologists can discern the pathways and modes of
connectedness of both spheres by studying iconicity, and especially by uncovering
how social icons are produced and maintained. Icons are condensed materialized
meanings, synthetic collective imageries, based as much on words as on the vis-
uals and material affordances of objects that comprise them. Gaining an icono-
logical awareness means understanding that just as there is the much vaunted
‘magical power of words’ (Tambiah, 1968) that makes things happen (Austin,
1975), there is also an iconic power to things themselves (Bartmanski, 2012),
whose totemic (Durkheim), not only fetishistic (Marx), aspects merit unpacking
and reinscribing within sociological normal science. Similarly, just as the form
142 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

of narrative embodies part of its content (White, 1987), so do the material form of
social symbols partake in constituting the character and social efficacy of their
meanings.
Moreover, iconic phenomena offer insights into the differential efficacy of
representational signification relative to the material ecologies and performative
techniques in which and through which they occur. Consequently, the range of
such iconic phenomena in culture reveals a range of variability regarding a cul-
ture’s ‘relative autonomy’ – a historically important cultural category acknowl-
edged by leading cultural theorists (Bourdieu, 1986; Said, 1979) and
foregrounded sociologically (Alexander, 2003), but now increasingly in need of
empirically grounded specification (Olick, 2010). Social iconology enables such a
systematic specification. Taking this into account, I argue that just as culture is
‘differentially internalized’ (Vaisey, 2008), it is also differentially efficacious
depending on its externalized forms and material entanglements (Hodder,
2012; Keane, 2005). If Stephen Vaisey is right, that it is not perfectly clear yet
how exactly culture behaves as an effective condition of social life is partly due to
the fact that ‘we know very little about how the materiality of symbols constrains
and enables their meaning’ (McDonnell, 2010: 1802). This article is designed to
explore one of the key reasons why this confusion and paucity of understanding
persists, and how we can make up for this lacuna in knowledge through the
concept of iconicity.
In order to clearly position my argument vis-a-vis other important statements
and unpack its main meanings, I develop it in four consecutive steps: (1) I briefly
reconstruct one specific mode of the dualistic mindset, namely the language/image
dualism in its ‘classical modern’ forms, and show how and with what effects it
privileged linguality; (2) I discuss the subsequent ‘late modern’ versions of it; (3) I
analyse the paradox of the ‘postmodern’ radical reversal of the dualism; and
finally (4) I show how the so-called ‘iconic turn’ in cultural sociology
(Alexander, 2008b; Bartmanski and Alexander, 2012) enables us to synthesize
the important strands of the received frameworks.

The ‘classical modern’ forms of the linguality/visuality

dualism
As far as cultural sciences are concerned, the binary of language and image was
clearly stated by Ernst Cassirer. Working on his philosophy of symbolic forms in
the 1920s, he realized that what was yet to be done was to reconcile ‘immediacy’ of
life and ‘mediacy’ of thought (Lofts in Cassirer, 2000: xxi). In the contemporary
terms outlined above, Cassirer’s focus was an important part of thematizing the
contrast and relationships between the representational character of discourse and
directly embodied character of perception. To understand how innovative and
indeed urgently needed this postulate must have seemed at the time of its inception,
it is instructive to look at contemporaneously dominant ways of dealing with sym-
bolic processes in sociology. Active roughly at the same time, George Herbert
Bartmanski 143

Mead, the founding father of symbolic interactionism, clearly privileged the medi-
acy of thought in his theory of society. Consider one of his flagship statements:

I know of no other form of behavior than the linguistic in which the individual is an
object to himself, and the individual is not a self in the reflexive sense unless he is an
object to himself. It is this fact that gives critical importance to communication.
(Mead, 1967: 142, italics mine)

Linguality is categorically privileged here as a means of self-objectification, which is

in turn underscored as critically important for sociology. There is no mention of
other possible forms of self-objectification such as art or music, nor of the objective
conditions that make any self-objectification possible and intelligible socially. It was
a typical approach in its time. Mead lived in an era in which the ‘icon’ is thoroughly
absorbed by the ‘logos’ (Mitchell, 1995: 28). This state of affairs continued
unchanged and largely unchallenged for quite some time. With a few notable excep-
tions (e.g. Roland Barthes’ semiology), no sustained and independent field of visual
social studies emerged until the 1980s (Mitchell, 1986: 155). Visual sociology
appeared only in the 1990s (DeNora, 2006: 654). How was this possible? Why was
the logocentric approach so influential and so hard to change, despite growing inter-
est in the symbolic and rather obvious history of self-objectification in art and archi-
tecture, to name just the two most prominent and socially consequential examples?
A complex bundle of religious, philosophical and scientific reasons contributed
to this situation. Though a fully detailed discussion cannot be presented here due
to space constraints, some authoritative treatments of it are available elsewhere
(e.g. Jay, 1994). Contemporary experts in the field of visual culture report that if
images were conceived of as entities that embodied thought at all, they did so
‘sensuously, immediately, and engagingly, in a childish and uncritical manner’
(Andrew, 1997: viii).
As the Enlightenment eclipsed the Renaissance in Europe, the proverbial man of
the Renaissance became an ambivalent role model, if not the symbol of an obso-
lescent quasi-virtuosity. The emergence of critical modern rationality and its the-
matically divided social and political applications was associated with the
preponderance of ‘the age of conversation’, not of perception (Craveri, 2006),
and it led to ‘the culture of critical discourse’, not vision, whether critical, appre-
ciative or otherwise (Gouldner, 1982). Social sciences emerged and subsequently
legitimized themselves as a part of such a broader culture of critical discourse, and
later of cultural criticism. Due to their epistemological and political ambitions that
stemmed partly from the founding myths of the European Enlightenment, sociolo-
gists focused first of all on hidden structures, latent functions, deep plays or dis-
cursive formations that putatively governed social life. These have been among the
master tropes of sociological analysis that promised ‘real’ insights as opposed to
facile impressions. This was in line with the formative divide between the episteme
(cognition) and doxa (opinion), which was a tool of legitimation for western phil-
osophy since its ancient beginnings.
144 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

With the benefit of hindsight, one can discern at least two consequences of this
situation. First, the efforts to quantify, explain and control social reality took
precedence over interpreting and understanding it. When the interpretative
approach seemed indispensable and cultural phenomena were thematized, sociolo-
gists privileged text as the model for culture (Ricoeur, 1970). Second, if visual
research was incorporated at all, it focused on delimited, mostly pictorial artistic
representations and conventional symbols. Here the key descriptive and explana-
tory category was ‘reflection’. From the so-defined scientific vantage point, the
visible, expressive, aesthetic entities designed by individuals and groups typically
‘reflected’ motives and structures of power and/or ‘mirrored’ conditions of their
possibility. Put differently, the visible was constructed mostly passively. The focus
was on why and who made images, not on how and what images themselves did or
could generate in turn.
Moreover, because visual media never reflected perfectly and because their
essentially mimetic character made them deficient in the eyes of influential thinkers
from Plato to Hegel, many of whom tended to explicitly compare them with speech
acts (Belting, 2001), the social significance of the visual and the sensuous remained
unrecognized or at best under-theorized and empirically secondary. Especially due
to the profound influence of Hegel, who symptomatically thought of art as an
‘inferior form of thinking’, and Marx, who viewed objects critically as vehicles of
commodity fetishism, sociology and social philosophy were largely ‘blind’ discip-
lines when it came to literally seeing the world for what it is. Not much of an
alternative came out of the main non-Marxist sociology of Max Weber, whose
disenchantment thesis precluded treating the sensuous seriously. As a result,
modern 20th century social science has made comparatively little progress in
terms of undoing its biases, even when its master tropes were exposed as instru-
ments of the undue ‘absorption of image by logos’ (Mitchell, 1986).
Speaking sociologically, the visible surface, if it was taken into account at all,
has mostly been in the position of a dependent variable. It was of little inherent
value for social scientists, conjuring up the pejorative connotations of superficiality.
The visible integuments of material reality were something secondary, super- and
infra-structural, rather than constitutive and thus ‘real’. This kind of sociological
realism had its merits. Yet it has produced its own blind spots as well. According to
Cassirer, one of the key limitations was the strong tendency to ‘negate the individ-
ual subjectivity of our perception’, whereby ‘‘‘expressive qualities’’ of perception
are replaced by universally determinable and objectively measurable qualities’
(Lofts in Cassirer, 2000: xxx). In the western philosophical traditions which have
always informed the social sciences, abstract thought and its linguistic articulations
were believed to offer tools of critical resistance to immediate informational and
aesthetic inputs that, when unchecked, lead to error and pernicious enchantment
(e.g. Burke, 1998). This is why the constitutive narratives of social sciences tended
to pollute the perceptual and purify the discursive. Simultaneously, sociology came
to diagnose its main subject, modernity, as an allegedly inexorable process of
disenchantment.
Bartmanski 145

This set of fundamental classifications survived largely intact in social sciences

throughout the modern age, despite some well-developed, classical understandings
of materiality and ritual gifts in anthropology (Malinowski, 1961) and totemic
symbolism in sociology (Durkheim, 1995). The uneasy relation of language and
image remained ‘a site of true dialectical tension’ (Mitchell, 1995: 106). This tension
can be heuristically presented in two tables of the opposing intellectual tropes that
organized social sciences in terms of conceptual and methodological master cate-
gories (see Tables 1 and 2). To the extent that they may strike us today as overly
simplistic even for a heuristic, they reveal both the untenable schematism of the
past outlooks and a measure of success of recent discourses of visual studies that
have sought to problematize and rearrange our understanding of all the involved
categories of social science.

Table 1. The classical conceptual binaries.

Visuality Linguality

Concrete Abstract
Expressive Cognitive
Immediate Mediated
Non-linear Linear
Analogical Logical
Imitative Analytical
Sensual Noetic
Ineffable Articulated
Phenomenal Noumenal

Table 2. The classical methodological binaries.

Picture Language

Material Immaterial
Necessary physical properties Arbitrary system of signs
Surface qualities Deep references
Imagery Narrative
Predominantly connotative Predominantly denotative
Reflecting feelings Constituting thoughts
Paradigmatic condensation Syntagmatic flow
Synchronic Diachronic
Phenomenology Structuralism
146 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

The suggestive power of these artificial divisions was such that it translated into
the ever stricter division of scientific labour and intellectual competition, if not
conflict. Consequently, the visual was simply an ‘overlooked domain’ throughout
the modern development of sociology (Emmison and Smith, 2000: ix). The only
visual phenomena worthy of academic attention were the sacred products of ‘high
culture’. Even then, sociology largely relegated the questions of the visual to a
descriptive history of art. These questions were subsequently conflated with nar-
rowly defined issues of beauty, harmony and place- and time-specific styles.
The seminal studies in the history of art by Panofsky and Gombrich are
advanced forms of that classical modern approach, predicated upon the mastering
of image by narrative (Gombrich, 2000; Panofsky, 1962). Half a century of incre-
mental critical debates following those studies was necessary for such works as No
Caption Needed to appear and to legitimate visually sensitive social investigation
(Hariman and Lucaites, 2011). No wonder then that it is only relatively recently
that cultural sociologists have realized that ‘in work on visuality, transcending art
historical foundations is necessary if it is to be effective’ in their discipline (Chaney,
2000: 122). Similarly, only now do sociologists recognize that:

. . .the institutionally ‘official’ frames of aesthetic experience have been strangely inflex-
ible for the past two or three centuries. The number and the forms of those situations
that Western culture has marked as appropriate for the production of aesthetic experi-
ence have been astonishingly small and rigid. (Gumbrecht, 2006: 314)

Pointing out these limitations of the classical modern approach to the visual, cul-
tural sociologists Michael Emmison and Philip Smith emphasized that no matter
how sophisticated art historical visual studies are, they fall short of sociological
demands:

The social world may be visual in far more ways than Gombrich suspects. Gombrich
may be correct to assert that we ‘are entering a historical epoch in which the image will
take over from the written word,’ but like so many other scholars, he common-sensi-
cally equates the study of the visual with the study of images and representations of a
kind we shall refer to as two dimensional visual data . . . There are many more forms of
visual data than the photograph, the advertisement and the television program.
Objects and buildings carry meanings through visual means just like
images . . . Visual inquiry is no longer just the study of the image, but rather the
study of the seen and observable. (Emmison and Smith, 2000: ix)

Contemporary media theorists underscore that Gombrich, credited by McLuhan

with being the first to treat the medium as the message, never really explicitly
theorized this stance (Groys, 2011: 100). While judging Gombrich by the con-
temporary standards of social science may be unfair, the fact that sociologists
still feel compelled to pit their conceptions of the visual against Gombrich’s
speaks volumes not just about his accomplishment, but about the relative
Bartmanski 147

paucity and poverty of relevant theorizations in their own discipline. In fact,

Gombrich’s art historical analyses were often insightful enough to inspire con-
fidence that they denoted more than they ostensibly did. For example, entitled
‘The dream of reason’, his study of the symbols of the French Revolution pur-
ported to say something about that grand social movement, not just the aes-
thetics of its emblems. The problem is that Gombrich himself cautioned against
extending his methods beyond the specific use to which he put them, for he was
well aware that they were designed to help read only ‘the conventional language
of symbolism’ (Gombrich, 2000: 169). There are reasons to surmise that
Gombrich recognized a vital need to go beyond the conventionalism of the art
historical approach. His counterintuitive concept of the ‘penumbra of vague-
ness’, developed to specify the conditions under which cultural entities can
rivet social attention and thus become sociologically resonant, seems to be indi-
cative of that recognition (Gombrich, 2000: 179). Nonetheless, Gombrich’s
impact is one of a brilliant art historian, no less but also no more than that.

The ‘late modern’ forms of the linguality/visuality dualism

If Gombrich’s reluctance to ‘sociologize’ visual analysis and make it less tethered
to epistemic biases of linguality was symptomatic both of the intellectual power of
the word/image dualism and the scientific division of labour this dualism upheld,
then the attempt to carry out at least one of those tasks may be treated as a
feature of the ‘late modern’ project. Perhaps the greatest attempt of this kind has
been made by Roland Barthes. He can be credited with developing an unprece-
dented theory of material symbolism in mass society. His systematic attention to
the visual component of what he called popular modern mythologies was one of
the first social scientific engagements with the visual and the material. Barthes
was a strong voice in the French structuralism that played a particularly signifi-
cant role in providing sociology with ‘a vocabulary for the emergence of a more
cultural form of the ‘‘sociological imagination’’ that avoids the reductionism of
functionalism and purely materialist understandings of social life’ (De la Fuente
and West, 2008: 315). Yet even Barthes’ complex semiotic framework may too
have been indebted to the classical binaries adumbrated above. For instance,
when he describes the visual semiotics of late modern society as a ‘less laborious
system’ of human communication in relation to the ‘complex logical code of
language’ (Barthes, 1985: 41), he seems to attribute much more depth and thus
more stability to the latter, whereby the agentic, experiential significance of the
former is downplayed. Given the historical context of the word/image dualism,
such a qualification may have had equivocal meanings and thus reinforced the old
classifications.
For Barthes himself, focusing on communication meant focusing mostly on
images whose clearly delimited intentionality could incontrovertibly be assumed
(e.g. advertisements). This laudable extension of symbolic theory to the images of
mass media became a kind of liability when later studies revealed that, even within
148 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

the purview of advertising, such assumptions may not always be warranted (Scott,
1994: 264). Being a pioneer, Barthes might not have known this, or at least might
have felt inclined to suspend his judgement in this respect. To sociologize the visual
through the ‘rhetorics of the image’, as he did, was groundbreaking enough. Yet
here the choice of the term that labelled his approach to the visual is symptomatic
of its underlying, albeit somewhat attenuated, linguality and essentially represen-
tational theory of culture. Rhetorics had traditionally been about designed verbal
manipulation, a set of techniques of bending one’s narrative to one’s purposes. As
such, it does not even begin to touch the problems of visuality created outside such
intentionality.
Methodologically, Barthes developed a way of ‘reading’ the broadly conceived
pictures, rather than a set of procedures for integrating the immersive, experiential
qualities of any visually constituted material into the theory of culture.
Thematically, the ‘less serious’ cultural basis of his scholarship can be held respon-
sible for Barthes’ failure to decisively influence the mainstream social scientists of
his day. For example, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, arguably the
most influential work about the ways sociologists imagine the origin and spread of
nationalism, never systematically dealt with questions of pictorial experiences and
the plethora of visually constituted cultural mythologies. Moreover, it did not even
represent linguality fully, for, in a manner typical of its discipline, it marginalized
orality (Wogan, 2001). It is only very recently that mainstream sociologists of
nation and nationalism have tried to systematically incorporate visuality and
materiality into their analysis, thematizing such phenomena as the national sen-
sorium and aesthetic revolution (e.g. Zubrzycki, 2013). This inability to grant rela-
tive autonomy to visuality and take the broadly conceived materiality on its own
terms never really left modern sociology and has even limited the work of otherwise
sophisticated theorists who contributed to the ‘sociologization’ of the visual.
Consider, for example, Rom Harré’s contemporary theory of the word/object
relation. His sociology thematizes visible ‘objects’, not just pictures. He also
makes significant anti-materialistic points, for instance when he argues that ‘it
is not technology that shapes a social world but the social arrangements that are
required or adopted to implement it’ (Harré, 2002: 24). However, in the end he
tends to reduce ‘social arrangements’ to forms of narrativity. This is evident in his
key proposition, from which all other more detailed statements of his conception
stem: ‘An object is transformed from a piece of stuff into a social object by its
embedment in a narrative. . . material things have magic powers only in the con-
texts of the narratives in which they are embedded’ (2002: 25). The crux of the
issue is that Harré, not unlike Gombrich, does not account sufficiently for two
social conditions: (1) the instability of linguistic referentiality occasioned by both
language’s flexibility and its intertwinement with visual significatory practices;
and (2) a given thing is transformed into a social object also by its embedment
in the visual/material and spatial context and the non-verbal channels of com-
munication. His language of social ‘embeddedness’ presumes an epistemological
hierarchy whose pinnacle is language. But there is more to the ‘magic of visible
Bartmanski 149

things’ than Harré allows. He excludes the possibility that social objects may not
be lodged only in the narratives we produce about them, however broadly con-
ceived. Harré’s theory does not enable us to conceptualize objects’ cultural status
as an emergent multidimensional quality, one stemming from the objects’ sym-
biotic relation with the complex web of collective representations in which the
linguistic system partakes along with other registers of meaning. Harré, perhaps
even more than Barthes, emphasizes the abstract capacity of linguality to consti-
tute everything else in society. He too easily succumbs to the magic of linguistic
formulation, according to which ‘visible stuff’ makes sense only on the basis of
‘invisible discourses’. His theory of the word/image relation downplays the fact
that the whole universe of sensory and affective qualities moulds the way in which
we confer significance upon things.
The ‘late modern’ semiotic conceptions of materiality and visuality made sig-
nificant strides towards a sociological theory of the image and the material. They
expanded the applicability of traditional methodologies and introduced some novel
techniques. They also began to connect, even if in somewhat slanted ways, the
visual and the linguistic. Being true heirs to the western culture of critical discourse,
their authors enabled new forms of social criticism by thematizing the ‘spectatorial’
character of capitalism (e.g. Debord) and ‘panoptic’ regimes of modern surveil-
lance (e.g. Foucault). In the case of Barthes we can even talk about an unprece-
dented attempt to decentre the discourse because such categories as ‘modern
mythology’ and his focus on visuality brought the problem of the word/image
relation to the next level. But I have also tried to show that while necessary to
alter the ‘classical modern’ paradigms, these late modern conceptions were not
sufficient to satisfy the demand for a fully fledged visual sociology which, among
other things, would supplement ‘the rhetorics of the image’ with a systematic study
of ‘material culture’ in its own right. It took a postmodern turn in social sciences to
test this radical alternative.

The paradox of postmodern radicalism

One of the first, more radical approaches to the visual, both epistemologically and
thematically, came from the American literary scholar WJT Mitchell, whose ‘icon-
ology’, formulated in the 1980s, proved foundational for the related explorations.
Mitchell (1995: 24) evocatively argued that the tension between word and image
rendered the visual ‘a repressed memory that keeps returning as an uncontrolled
symptom’. He claimed that ‘what distinguishes the iconologist from the art histor-
ian, the aesthetician, and the literary critic is the willingness to contemplate the
‘‘impure’’ image in all its forms’ (1986: 158). In other words, potentially the whole
spectrum of materiality (i.e. all kinds of ‘surfaces’) is culturally significant. It is not
by chance that Mitchell chose to position himself theoretically vis-à-vis those par-
ticular figures and tropes, and that he emphasized ‘contemplating’ rather than
‘decoding’ the visual. There is a clear tendency here to radically reconstruct the
traditional ontological divide between image and word, and acknowledge that the
150 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

aesthetic (phenomenological) and the cognitive (structuralist) inevitably merge

(Mitchell, 1986: 158). Mitchell creatively continued this crucial line of reasoning
in his later Picture Theory, arguing that ‘there are no ‘‘purely’’ visual or verbal arts,
though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of mod-
ernism’ (1995: 5). It was precisely this attempt at purification that can be held at
least partly responsible for imposing the binaries I have outlined above. Although
Mitchell’s earlier works still favoured the ‘arts’ as the empirical site and did not
systematically theorize how the aesthetic and the cognitive ‘merge’ in the non-
artistic sociological contexts, they almost single-handedly managed to turn the
tide of the Anglophone debate in the 1990s.
It is important to underscore here the historical context again. Mitchell’s state-
ments were very significant at the time when they were first announced, the time
when major shifts in social theory were inspired by the events of 1989, including the
growing interest in cultural analysis in sociology. Mitchell opened up a qualita-
tively new space for cultural research and provided a provisional yet clearly stated
position, ‘iconology’, from which a theoretical justification for broadening the
scope of visual studies could be made. Crucially, this fresh, independent stance
seemed to undermine the rationale for maintaining the strict division between word
and image. In the mid 1990s, when postmodernism was arguably at its peak in
social theory, Mitchell described his agenda as the task of ‘taking iconology well
beyond the comparative study of verbal and visual art and into the basic construc-
tion of human subject as a being constituted by both language and imaging’
(Mitchell, 1995: 24).
Nonetheless, in later years the term ‘iconology’ seemed to somewhat lose its
currency for Mitchell. Instead, ‘picture’ gradually assumed a more central role in
his theory. Consequently, he described the shift he advocated as the ‘pictorial turn’.
This move marked the moment in which the polemical thrust of his interventions
seemed to take precedence over a more integrative theorization of ‘iconology’.
Intent on leaving no doubts about the direction of his transformative agenda
and distinguishing his work strongly from the ‘iconology’ of Panofsky and his
followers, Mitchell foregrounded ‘pictoriality’ and accordingly wrote in Picture
Theory: ‘If traditional iconology repressed the image, postmodern iconology
represses language’ (Mitchell, 1995: 28). This was only consistent with the broader
postmodern movement he helped bring to existence, which insisted that ‘the dis-
junctured and fragmented culture that we call postmodern is best imagined and
understood visually, just as the nineteenth century was classically represented in the
newspaper and the novel’ (Gierstberg and Oosterbaan, 2002: 13).
Postmodern sociologists have made a number of provocative claims in this vein.
First, they asserted that the pictorial social systems have nothing to do with nar-
rative (Smith and Jenks, 2000: 23). Second, a claim was advanced that ‘social
change is replaced by a change in images’ (Gierstberg and Oosterbaan, 2002:
48). Third, it seemed that the sheer manipulation of ways of seeing alters the con-
ception of self and society (Lury, 1998). Fourth, a master of postmodern analysis
observed that ‘we are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space, and
Bartmanski 151

hence the very abolition of the spectacular’ (Baudrillard, 1983: 54). Finally, the
visual turn has recently been claimed to mean shifting analytical framing from
‘meaning’ to ‘presence’ (Moxey, 2008: 132). This postmodern shift of emphasis
has seemed well-grounded and groundbreaking at the same time. It was welcomed
by some because it offered a long-awaited and attractively packaged contestation of
the old, ossified epistemological frames. All the same, it posed some new questions.
Are pictures completely non-narrative entities? Is spectacle really over? Can ‘pres-
ence’ be viewed as opposite to ‘meaning’ or as something devoid of meaning? Once
posed, these questions could easily be answered negatively. As in Moxey’s case, the
new arguments reproduce old binaries in a new, twisted manner instead of over-
coming them. While the ‘late modern’ projects seemed not to be going far enough,
the postmodern approaches felt prepared and normatively inspired to accept a risk
of possibly going too far, at least in certain respects. Of course, not all of the
postmodern interventions were constantly pushing the visual arguments to the
extreme. Celia Lury, for example, suggested that we are not dealing with
the total replacement of the synthetic culture of the narrative, but rather with its
‘coexistence’ with the prosthetic culture of the visual (Lury, 1998: 223). However,
‘coexistence’ is too passive a category to account for the complex feedbacks
between the two.
In Mitchell’s case the potential collateral damage is the narrowing, of visuality.
Specifically, reframing visuality in terms of ‘pictoriality’ runs this risk. Mitchell
himself has recently underscored this predicament, indicating that ‘the pictorial
turn’ is ‘often misunderstood as merely a label for the rise of so-called ‘‘visual
media’’’ (Mitchell, 2008: 16). While such a self-reflexivity distinguishes careful
thinkers, the potential and actual misreadings of the ‘pictorial turn’ can partly
be attributed to Mitchell’s own theoretical choices. Other scholars noticed that
he tried to rectify it by pointing out that there were many pictorial turns.
Meanwhile, the proponents of a more radical shift of sociological emphasis
argued that Gottfried Boehm’s theory of the ‘iconic turn’ may guide us better
than the ‘pictorial turn’ because it ‘captures more effectively, perhaps, the sense
of life attributed to visual objects’ (Moxey, 2008: 137). This argument reverberates
in sociology that has been influenced by studies on the ‘agency’ of objects
(Appadurai, 1986; Latour, 2007). In other words, the paradox of postmodern rad-
icalism is that it reproduced the word/image dualism by pushing social sciences to
the other extreme (‘repression of linguality’). By subjugating linguality and aligning
suspicion of language with scepticism towards traditional epistemological regimes,
the postmodernists were inclined to couch the grand paradigm shift in terms of a
historical and technological watershed rather than proposing a new integrative
theory of the image–word relation.
With the benefit of hindsight one can observe that some of the key postmodern
currents which sought to de-emphasize and contest linguality seem to be subject to
the ironic effect of the neophyte’s zeal. That the postmodern theorists may indeed
have protested too intensely became more evident in the light of the expanding
iconic turn. The philosophical iconology of Gottfried Boehm and Hans Belting’s
152 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

anthropology of the image (Belting, 2001) made the turn a real alternative.
Jeffrey Alexander’s conception of ‘iconic consciousness’ charted its sociological
applicability.

The ‘iconic turn’ and materiality in cultural sociology

While it seemed that Mitchell ‘persists in the long tradition of opposing images
to words’ (Andrew, 1997: vii) and that, therefore, the ‘pictorial turn’ may not
do full justice to the newly discovered complexity of visuality, other conceptual
alternatives began to be discussed. One such alternative has been posed by per-
formance studies (e.g. Reinelt and Roach, 1998); another was formulated by
Regis Debray and dubbed by him ‘mediology’ (Debray, 2000: 3). It was, however,
Gottfried Boehm’s consistent use of ‘icon’ as the key term of visual hermen-
eutics that started gaining traction in sociology since the publication of his
edited volume entitled What Is an Image? Although Boehm (2012) tends to recon-
struct the human being as ‘homo pictor’ and – like Mitchell – defines his empirical
zone of comfort in artistic terms, it is the broader ‘iconic turn’ that labels his
entire research programme. This is the case because Boehm’s notion of iconicity
rethinks the underlying logic of pictorial representations without giving up on
notions of meaning, representation, indexicality, and above all the inescapable
materiality behind all these cultural phenomena. He rethinks and realigns them
instead.
Interpreting pictorial entities in terms of iconicity emphasizes the active, deictic
power of images. Through this term one can reconstruct how sensual surfaces
reveal and co-constitute meaningful depths. The visible surface evokes and co-
produces the ineffable of the depth, makes it graspable and thus socially relevant.
Such a conception defines the symbolic boundaries of images in a way that con-
strues them as open and porous. Thus, Boehm allows for carefully specifying the
limits of linguality and its complex, mutually conditioned relation to visuality,
instead of ‘repressing’ the word by the image, or ‘dissolving’ completely all
boundaries between them and the associated ‘media’, as, for example,
Baudrillard would do (see Baudrillard, 1983: 54). This crucial element of his
theory is further complexified by the concept of ‘iconic difference’. Together
with the greater emphasis on the performative and experiential nature of visual-
ity, Boehm provides a possibility of an external hermeneutic recognition that
material objects are not just narratively constituted. He also suggests that the
objects’ extraordinary social efficacy can hardly be categorized as mere fetishism,
as Marx, Benjamin and their followers might argue. There is a kind of independ-
ent power to the visible materialities of social life. As such, this conceptualization,
though philosophically dense, may indeed be more readily amenable than
Mitchell’s to sociological use. This seems to be the case, especially in the research
programmes underscoring that (1) ‘sight is never experienced in the pure state’
(Mirzoeff, 2013: 3) and (2) ‘visual experience is no isolated monologue on per-
sonal pleasure’ but rather ‘a complex dialogical achievement involving the fusion
Bartmanski 153

of the horizons surrounding artist, subject-matter and viewer’ (Heywood and

Sandywell, 1999: 13).
In short, Boehm’s work has indicated that the social ontology of images was
exhausted neither by the functionalist nor the fetishistic model (Seelig and Stahel,
2005). It has suggested a mode of visual analysis, and thus a conceptual ground for
material culture studies, according to which the broadly conceived image is a com-
plex material-cum-cultural structure that has a kind of power over people
(Bredekamp, 2010; Woodward, 2007). One such conception has been proposed
by Hans Belting (2005). He pointed out that the internal (mental) needs to be
connected to the external (media) in a new, integrative way. Belting systematically
argued that the received paradigms obstruct our understanding of perception and
its constitutive meaning for social life (Belting, 2005: 303).
A sociological application of such a theorizing has recently been worked out by
Jeffrey Alexander (2008a, 2008b, 2010). His approach to cultural phenomena con-
strues them as significatory structures that have a materially constituted surface
and a discursively constituted depth. Both aspects are important. Alexander’s stu-
dies on meaning and performativity (Alexander et al., 2006) have been conducive to
embracing and operationalizing ‘iconicity’ as one of the ‘core cultural variables’
(De la Fuente and West, 2008: 316). Notably, he developed and applied the new
concept of ‘iconic consciousness’ (Alexander, 2008b) in order to reclaim the mar-
ginalized phenomenological aspect of the social construction of reality and rein-
scribe it within cultural sociology. Like Belting, Alexander sees the need to expand,
complexify and ‘culturalize’ our understanding of the broadly conceived media.
Like Boehm, he does not treat the notion of icon as a shibboleth of yet another
grand paradigm shift in the social sciences, but rather a missing link in the complex
chain of cultural sociological reconstructions. As a sociologist, he considers the
importance of materiality, or what he calls the ‘material feeling of meaning’
(Alexander, 2008b). Moreover, according to Alexander, the missing link of icon-
icity enables sociologists to productively reclaim parts of classical sociology, espe-
cially to bring Durkheimian ‘totemism’ back into social theory. Durkheim’s ‘totem’
prefigured the icon in some important ways. However, the sociological potential of
this recognition remained unfulfilled in the sociology of culture, which was domi-
nated by the critical Weberian, Marxist and Benjaminian conceptions of disen-
chantment, fetishization and the loss of aura respectively.
In other words, what might be called the iconic turn allows us to reclaim totem-
ism’s analytical purchase and use it in an updated and more complex form
that acknowledges more fully the importance of materiality. For Durkheim, mater-
ial/visual structures were not just negligible vehicles of signification, but note-
worthy carriers of sociability that concretize human inner life and crystallize
cultural identification. As he emphasized: ‘collective feelings become conscious
of themselves only by settling upon external objects’ (Durkheim, 1995: 421).
As Alexander pointed out, Durkheim himself did not manage to flesh out
this insight, nor were his followers in sociology interested in it. What
Durkheim did, however, was lend his authority to the study of society in terms
154 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

of the feelings, not just reasons, that hold it together, and with a necessary con-
nection to materiality.
Inspired by Boehm’s conceptual apparatus on the one hand, and by Durkheim’s
late symbolic sociology on the other, Alexander’s cultural sociology was conducive
not only to advancing a general ‘iconic turn’ but also to addressing the specific
problem once posed by Cassirer. By reconstructing the dynamics of the surface/
depth relation in icons, Alexander’s framework indicates how we might ‘reconcile
immediacy of life with mediacy of thought’ (Lofts, 2000). Here the visual ‘surface’
is emancipated as a ‘relatively autonomous variable’ without alienating the discur-
sive depth that likewise plays a relatively independent causal role in the processes of
the social construction of reality (Lofts, 2006). This, in turn, opens up the possi-
bility of a new multidimensional perspective capable of fusing rather than merely
re-emphasizing the conceptual and methodological binaries discussed above.
Whether we encounter a famous work of art (Alexander, 2008a), or a celebrity
figure (Alexander, 2010), or an iconic object (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015),
and try to adjudicate their social meanings and significance, the role of materiality,
spatial context, mise-en-scene and iconic consciousness are always actively at play.
In fact, these variables are crucial to a sociological understanding of specific cul-
tural effects. ‘Visible tangible social facts’ are not just ‘things’ that passively reflect
values, or tangible screens reducible to the status of mere linguistic referents;
rather, they are ‘sign-facts’ (Alexander, 2011: 88) or ‘objectual media’ with irredu-
cible affordances (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015) that work as cultural objects
in their own right. Here Boehm’s plea to systematically account for effects attrib-
utable to visuality becomes salient.
The question remains, however, of how exactly the material surface and discur-
sive depth interact to produce iconic effects. Another important and closely related
question is how iconic power varies. Alexander seems to approach these questions
by putting more emphasis on the discursive contextualizations and social power of
the performances of professional critics and the series of mediations they exercise
(Alexander, 2012: 27), rather than on material and spatial structurations
(Bartmanski and Woodward, 2013, 2015; Löw, 2013), cultural objects’ material
‘entanglements’ (Hodder, 2012) and constellations of their ‘qualities’ (McDonnell,
2010). In this sense, Alexander puts more emphasis on the arbitrary nature of
cultural power than on the restrictions that materiality imposes on the plausibility
of social performance. Other contemporary cultural sociologists interested in the
visual and the material pointed out that that notion of arbitrariness is insufficiently
detailed to fulfil one of the main explanatory tasks of new cultural sociology,
namely conclusively accounting for the variability of culture’s causality in general
and of iconic power in particular. First, it is the ‘interdependence’ rather than
‘relative autonomy’ (Kurasawa, 2004), and the mutual constitution of materiality
and modes of representation (Miller, 2005) which are seen as crucial tools to rectify
this problem, i.e. to specify how relative is the autonomy of different cultural
aspects in different cases (Olick, 2010). Second, depending on the kinds of
objects/signifiers and classes of representations, their spatial situatedness
Bartmanski 155

(Bartmanski, 2012; Löw, 2008; McDonnell, 2010) and the role of semiotic ideolo-
gies (Keane, 2005), the social efficiency of symbols varies. Thus, it may be errone-
ous to extend without qualification the Saussurean structuralist principles to all
domains of cultural analysis (Keane, 2005; Kurasawa, 2004: 56). There is evidence
that different temporal contexts (Swidler, 1986), different modes of internalization
(Vaisey, 2008), the physical nature of gestures and things (Corbeill, 2004; Hodder,
2012) and particular external configurations and internal properties of objects and
spaces matter (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015). They inform our evaluative
practices, and have their own logic of atmosphere- and mood-creation that influ-
ences what may pass for authentic performance or significant result in a given
context (Löw, 2008; Silver, 2011). In other words, what those authors propose is
that not only autonomy of culture is relative but so also is its seemingly fixed
arbitrary logic, whereby relativity is structured as much by the elements of per-
formance as by the material affordances at hand and spatio-temporal factors that
exist independently of actors’ wills. Seemingly conventional attributions always go
through a process of complex material mediations and associated non-verbal chan-
nels of meaning-making that are situationally circumscribed and physiologically
bound.
That said, we only start to understand the role of materiality in such an expanded
cultural analysis, for sociologists have been traditionally much more preoccupied
with symbolic content rather than material forms of culture (McDonnell, 2010:
1803). The first step is to systematically connect the two spheres, and the iconic
turn in cultural sociology is designed to achieve that. Just as the form of narrative
embodies part of its content (White, 1987), so does the material surface or sensuous
form of social symbols partake in constituting the character and social efficacy of
their immaterial depth. In my own work (e.g. Bartmanski, 2012; Bartmanski and
Woodward, 2013, 2015; Bartmanski, forthcoming) I have offered ethnographically
grounded examples of how the specific ‘bundles’ of qualities (Keane, 2005) and the
narrative genres of a given time and place make certain representational forms more
plausible and thus more socially consequential or more performatively authentic
than others. These effects are far from being arbitrary. Much more research is
needed to conclusively adjudicate the aforementioned issues. The iconic turn, as I
outlined it here, opens up a stable sociological vocabulary with which productive,
relevant explorations can be carried out. Yet the key step is to connect the sensuous
and the linguistic in actual practice.

Conclusion
The present essay has sought to make clear that to emphasize the importance of
‘iconicity’ for qualitative sociological analysis and prefer it to the received cultur-
alist frameworks, especially the new ones foregrounding either pictoriality or dis-
cursivity, means not just recognizing its usefulness in a technologically altered and
more complex world. Rather, a whole new understanding of culture and its relation
to materiality is at stake.
156 Chinese Journal of Sociology 1(1)

I have also argued that due to the particular intellectual genealogy, some of the
major strands of sociological tradition were incapacitated in order to reconcile and
connect linguality and visuality, or even to recognize the problem and its ramifi-
cations in sociology. Consequently, many of these intellectual frameworks have
been unable to account for the fact that what they construed as the pure ‘variables’
and ‘transparent social data’ were complex structures, invariably mediated by
iconic consciousness and a material feeling of meaning. New terms like ‘icon’
and ‘iconicity’ enable sociologists to synthesize the old dualism of the mediacy of
thought and immediacy of perception in a novel, non-reductive way.
This is sociologically significant because we still live in an age of competing
reductionisms. On the one hand, materialistic theories remain as popular as ever,
partly due to their timely political appeal and critical capacity. But as they remain
power-attentive, they are prone to be power-specific, condoning the epistemic costs
of this narrowed focus by pointing to the ideological benefits of this focus’s empir-
ical revelations. On the other hand, while hermeneutic theories exposed the socio-
logical excesses of materialism, they may come across as an ‘ephemeral account of
society’ (Rose and Tolia-Kelly, 2012). Although this kind of reading may reflect a
materialist bias of readers more than any realistic critique on their part, even the
proponents of sociological hermeneutics caution that in its pure form it is prone to
exhibit idealistic bias (Alexander, 2006). Visual sociologists on their part emphasize
that ‘whereas visual culture was first formulated above all as a critical project, the
expanded field of visuality requires the production of new knowledges’ (Mirzoeff,
2013, xxxvi). This statement shows to what extent the nascent visual sociology was
actually limited by the culture of critical discourse I discussed in this article. It is
precisely the production of new knowledge that defines the agenda of the iconic
turn in cultural sociology.
I have also tried to show that situating yourself on either side of traditional
dualisms is conceptually regressive, no matter how progressive it may seem in other
dimensions. Theorists of representation need to become more attuned to the non-
verbal channels of meaning-production and incorporate materiality, rather than
materialism. Proponents of postmodern or postcolonial materialism, on the other
hand, need to see that critical problem-driven research on ‘visual regimes’ creates
additional theoretical problems instead of solving existing ones (Bartmanski, 2013).
This perspective tends to miss the point that ‘the terms with which empire is
criticized derive from precisely that same Enlightenment whose insistence on
reason was attacked as the cause of imperial domination’, and that therefore
‘deconstructive antilogocentrism is a fraudulent basis for a critique of empire’
(Berman, 1998: 7).
To do sociological research after the iconic turn does not simply mean focusing
more on the visual. Rather, taking ‘iconicity’ and materiality on board in sociology
means recognizing the hybridity of representation, including the hybrid nature of the
visual that Mitchell once thematized (Mitchell, 1994). It also means gleaning all the
conceptual and methodological consequences from this recognition, transcending the
rigid divisions schematically outlined by the two tables above. This implies, in turn,
Bartmanski 157

that as far as visual research is concerned, Mitchell’s ‘pictorial turn’ may not con-
stitute the most adequate sociological platform from which to operationalize this
hybridity in imagery. ‘Iconicity’ may grasp the cultural complexity behind cultural
representations more adequately than ‘picture’. It is also more open to applications
within a broad spectrum of material phenomena, as all kinds of entities can become
iconic, many symbols are indexical and visuality is necessarily material in one way or
another. In the end, it is the carefully calibrated combination of the ‘discursive
surround’ (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991), materiality and its qualities
(McDonnell, 2010), physical ‘entanglements’ (Hodder, 2012) and experientially
meaningful ‘emplacements’ and media contexts (Bartmanski and Woodward,
2015; Löw, 2013), not just visuality in its traditional aesthetic sense, that can fully
account for the performative nature of iconic power and its variability.
Of course, as is the case with every novel multidimensional framework, this
synthetic recognition is not entirely unheard of. Although scattered across the
humanistic landscape and rarely implemented together, there have always existed
more inclusive templates for doing cultural research on this theoretical ground.
From the aesthetically refined cultural sociology of Karl Mannheim (Mannheim,
1964: 39–69) through the symbolic anthropology of Victor Turner to the pragma-
tist aesthetics of Richard Shusterman, one finds the basic idea of the constitutive
mutuality of surface and depth. Turner (1974: 270) presciently wrote:

The vain task of trying to find out in what precise way certain symbols found in the
iconography of a given society ‘reflect’ or ‘express’ its social or political structure can
be abandoned . . . Symbols not only reflect but contribute to creating it.

Decades later, Shusterman (2002: 3) restated this finding, arguing that ‘surface and
depth are tightly connected complementarities that are reciprocal in function’. Yet
it is also the case that it is only now that mainstream sociology begins to system-
atically reflect on these insights and to test them in a variety of modern social
contexts, not just in artistic or pre-modern ones. The iconic turn aids this process.

Funding
This work was supported by the project Employment of Newly Graduated Doctors of
Science for Scientific Excellence (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0009) co-financed from European
Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

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