Chinese Journal of Sociology

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 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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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