社会杂志

• 专题：文化社会学 • 上一篇    下一篇

重塑社会学的想象力——语言/视觉二元论以及文化社会学的符像转向

  

  1. 多米尼克·巴特曼斯基，耶鲁大学社会学系
  • 出版日期:2015-05-20 发布日期:2015-05-20
  • 通讯作者: 多米尼克·巴特曼斯基，耶鲁大学社会学系 E-mail:dominik.bartemanski@aya.yale.edu

 Refashioning Sociological Imagination：Linguality/Visuality Dualism and the Iconic Turn in Cultural Sociology

  1. Dominik Bartmanski，Department of Sociology，Yale University
  • Online:2015-05-20 Published:2015-05-20
  • Contact: Dominik Bartmanski，Department of Sociology，Yale University E-mail:dominik.bartemanski@aya.yale.edu

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摘要： 以意义为中心的文化社会学遭遇的关键挑战之一就是不得不面对当代人类学、考古学、艺术史和物质文化研究等领域的发现。其越来越紧迫的任务就是认识并修正曾经由这些学科所确立的语言学/文本框架之解释的局限性。传统结构主义者集中关注各种话语符码，而且，在理解复杂的表象经济的权力，特别是在履行解释其变异性方面，文化符号之任意性的假设显得捉襟见肘。语言和以沟通为中心的框架通常忽视的事实是，被相信具有因果性社会力量的绝大多数能指无可避免地嵌入在开放的但并非无限制的感情与物质性结构之中。因此，行动中需要整合能力更强且维度更多的文化模式。本文主要讨论符像性对发展一个与此相关的整合性视角的重要性，同时并不抛弃语言学转向的一些构成性洞见。我以亚历山大等当代学者的转型性工作和我自己的研究来证实，被如此构想的文化的复合体才是具因果律的社会力。我的目的在于详尽阐述物质性文化研究中的一个关键原则，即不同的符号秩序对于决定性和/或自主性逻辑而言是不同的主题，并且由此对“社会建构”和历史转型的不同模式做出回应。我们需要继续关注奥斯汀关于如何以言行事的问题，但是不能重复他的局限，即似乎社会之事发生之际同时并不伴随图像、对象、场所、身体和所有它们的特征以及使用暗含。对社会学想象力的这一扩展予以充实，可以帮助我们激活理解和解释文化这一概念所拥有的充分潜力，并由此坚定地转向文化。

关键词: 符像 , 西方智识 , 转向, 文化社会学 , 二元编码

Abstract:  One of the key challenges of meaningcentered cultural sociology is to face the findings of contemporary anthropology, archaeology, art history and material culture studies. Specifically, the increasingly pressing task is to recognize and amend the explanatory limitations of the linguistic/textual 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centered framework typically ignores the fact that most signifiers credited with causal social power are inescapably embedded in openended but not unbounded structures of affect and materiality. There is ample evidence delivered by the recent studies within the aforementioned fields that many such signifiers are“not just the garb of meaning,”to use the insightful phrase of the American anthropologist 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 new 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 (depth) are always embedded in and enacted by the concrete assemblages of materiality and corporeality (surface), they enable sociologists to transcend the linguistic/textual bias of classical structuralist hermeneutics. This paper discusses the importance of iconicity for developing such an integrative perspective without abandoning some constitutive insights of the linguistic turn.
I focus on the key transformative works of contemporary scholars like Daniel Miller, Webb Keane, Ian Hodder, Christopher Pinney, Ian Woodward, Jeffrey Alexander as well as on my own research to demonstrate the so conceived complexity of culture as causal social force. In particular, I aim at elaborating a key principle of material culture studies that different orders of semiosis are differently subject to determination and/or autonomous logic, and thus responsive to distinct modes of “social construction” and historical 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 character and use imply. Fleshing out this expanded sociological imagination helps us to activate the full potential of understanding and explanation the concept of culture possesses, and thus, to decisively turn culture on.

Key words:  ,  cultural sociology , binary codings , icon , western intellectua , turns