Refashioning sociological imagination: Linguality, visuality and the iconic turn in cultural sociology

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 sociologists to transcend the linguistic 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 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 implications 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 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 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.