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 ‘Cause we are living in a material world: on iconic turn in cultural sociology A Master’s Thesis written by Bc. Jitka Sklenářová MASARYK UNIVERSITY • FACULTY OF SOCIAL STUDIES • DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Csaba Szaló, Ph.D. Brno, 2014 2 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis I submit for assessment is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others save to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. 11th May 2014 Signature 3 4 Acknowledgements “We are not at an airport; we are at a university.” I would like to thank Csaba Szaló for these words, for his inexhaustible support and trust, and for influencing my life in many positive ways. I am also grateful for the international and friendly environment he managed to create at the Department of Sociology. • Special thanks go to Werner Binder who spent many hours answering my questions. His enthusiasm and inspirational comments were of great importance for my work. • I also appreciate attention, support, and suggestions received from Nadya Jaworsky and Dominik Bartmański. 5 Table of Contents Abstract 8 Abstract (in Czech) 9 Introduction: Call for a new sociology 11 1. Human and social sciences & the visual: History of a complicated relationship 17 1.1. Semiotics and the notion of a discursive world 1.1.1. Peirce’s triad 19 1.2. Panofsky’s image interpretation 20 1.2.1. Iconology 21 1.2.2. Critique of Panofsky’s method 25 1.3. “Rhetorique of the Image” 27 1.4. Consequences of the linguistic turn 29 1.5. Pictorial turn 30 1.6. Iconic turn 33 1.6.1. Iconic difference 34 2. Iconicity and the strong programme in cultural sociology 18 39 2.1. Strong programme 40 2.2. Iconic theory 42 2.3. The power of icons 45 2.4. Icons as myths 48 6 2.5. Achievements & benefits of iconic theory 2.5.1. Nobody puts images in a corner (anymore) 3. The problem of two iconic turns 51 53 57 3.1. Boehm’s iconic turn 58 3.1.1. Focus: genuinely pictorial aspects of the image 59 3.2. Iconic turn of the strong programme 61 3.3. Suggestions 62 3.3.1. Surface & depth is not enough 63 3.3.2. Problem of pre-­‐reflexive experience 65 3.3.3. Bohnsack’s documentary method 66 3.3.4. Binder’s secular icon 68 4. Conclusion 71 References 75 Index 82 Number of characters: 149 487 Reproduction on the cover: La trahison des images by René Magritte (fragment) 7 Abstract The strong programme in cultural sociology has recently taken up topics of visuality and materiality and made an effort to include them into one theory. The iconic theory suggested in Iconic Power (2012) pursues two main goals. It aims at overcoming the duality of materialism and idealism, two approaches that have in the sociological theo-­‐
ry until now been fully incompatible. The proposed concept of icon combines an aes-­‐
thetic surface and a meaningful depth of a cultural object, which are mutually consti-­‐
tuted and intertwined. Bringing the elusive experience, the feeling of material objects and their deep cultural meanings together seems to be the right way to go for cultural sociology that has dealt with collective emotions and representations since its birth. The iconic theory also makes possible the emancipation and liberation of images from the textual and discursive dominance typical of the sociological thinking in the 20th century. The source of inspiration for the new theory was the so called iconic turn in art theory. However, there seem to be some fundamental disagreements between these two approaches. My thesis presents the newborn iconic theory and reflects its benefits and pitfalls. Furthermore, drawing on the background of developments within the scholarly approach to images and on the currently used sociological methods of image analysis I offer possible answers to the questions and puzzles raised by the theory of iconic power. 8 Abstract (in Czech) Kulturní sociologie se nedávno začala zabývat otázkami vizuality a materiality, jež se pokusila zahrnout do jedné teorie. Teorie ikonicity formulovaná v knize Iconic Power (2012) sleduje především dva cíle. Prvním z nich je překonání rozporu mezi materia-­‐
lismem a idealismem, dvěma nesmiřitelnými myšlenkovými směry, které se doposud v rámci sociologické teorie nepodařilo úspěšně sjednotit. V navrhovaném konceptu iko-­‐
ny se vzájemně konstituují a propojují estetický povrch s významovou hloubkou kul-­‐
turních objektů. Spojení prchavé zkušenosti a pocitů zakoušených při kontaktu s ma-­‐
teriálními objekty a jejich hlubších kulturních významů se zdá být v souladu se směřováním kulturní sociologie, která se již od počátku zabývá kolektivními emocemi a reprezentacemi. Ikonická teorie rovněž umožňuje emancipaci a osvobození obrazů zpod diskurzivní nadvlády typické pro sociologické myšlení 20. století. Zdrojem inspi-­‐
race pro novou teorii byl takzvaný ikonický obrat v teorii umění. Mezi těmito dvěma přístupy se nicméně projevily zásadní neshody. Ve své práci představuji nově vytvoře-­‐
nou ikonickou teorii a reflektuji její přínosy a problematické aspekty. Na pozadí vývoje vědeckého přístupu k obrazům a na základě v současnosti používaných metod obrazo-­‐
vé analýzy v sociologii navrhuji možné odpovědi na otázky a problémy vyvstávající z teorie ikonické moci. 9 “A book is changed by the fact that it does not change even when the world changes.” Pierre Bourdieu quoted in Chartier, 1989 10 Introduction: Call for a new sociology Fourteen years ago, Howard Becker was asked by the Contemporary Sociology Maga-­‐
zine, what sociology should look like in the (near) future. In his answer, Becker (2000: 333) took the question literally; by that move he managed to point out the fact that visual materials were neglected by social sciences for a long time and that it was time for us to change such an attitude1. In fact, the ignorance made explicit by Becker does not exclusively relate to the visual, but applies also to the material in general. Sensual experience never used to be taken into account for the explanation of mean-­‐
ing-­‐making processes, since meaning was thought of as emerging in text, language and discourse. Obviously, this is not enough—there is more to life than discourses. Such a realization could explain why the relevance of sensual experience, gained by encounter with material things and its importance for how we make sense of the world, has nev-­‐
ertheless won further discussion in the last two decades, especially among those advo-­‐
cating the strong programme in cultural sociology. The effort to grasp the sensual and 1
As soon as I have engaged in the problem of image interpretation, which stood at the very beginning of my work presented here, I also encountered opinions stating that the topic was not “sociological enough”. During disputes with professors, colleagues and in interaction with scholarly texts I indeed discovered comments questioning the very idea of the relation between sociology and the visual. I had to conclude that there was a broad range of understandings and conceptions of the role of the visual in sociology, ranging from using it as a mere data-­‐collection or data-­‐presenting method, to qualitative ap-­‐
proaches and interpretation of images, to the theoretical stance of cultural sociology. 11 material side of social life has resulted in an attempt to establish a theory of iconic power. Dealing with such elusive entities as sensuality or emotionality has without any doubt been always a tricky issue for sociologists. The founding fathers of social sciences strived to avoid everything that had to do with emotions in order to gain an unbiased view of reality. Even the most necessary (in our culture, at least) sense of sight was ex-­‐
cluded from inquiring about society. “Real scientists were objective and unsentimental, and photographs seemed to make people sympathetic,” criticizes Becker sociologists’ reluctance to use images in their journals (2000: 333). However, the 21st century has brought about significant changes in sociological research; most notably the strong programme has re-­‐focused sociological attention from analyzing the effects of objec-­‐
tive social structures on actors and culture to considerations about autonomous cul-­‐
ture itself. The new reading (or re-­‐reading, as the protagonists call it2) of Durkheim’s Elementary forms of religious life has provided the new cultural movement with an in-­‐
spiring notion of society. “Durkheim’s vision in the Elementary Forms was of a shared cul-­‐
tural system that is internalized within each individual. It trumps the material base by superimposing upon it a universe of arbitrary but deeply meaningful signs, myths and determinations of action. He wrote: ‘(...) Collective representations very often attribute to the things to which they are attached properties which do not exist in any form or degree. Out of the commonest object they can make a very powerful and very sacred being. Yet, although purely ideal, the powers which have been conferred in this way work as if hey were real. They determine the conduct of men with the same inevi-­‐
tability as physical forces’” (Alexander and Smith 2005: 8–9) It was thus Elementary Forms that furnished cultural sociology with a toolbox contain-­‐
ing concepts such as collective representations, meanings, symbolism, morality, totem, rituals, dichotomy of sacred and profane etc. But even after establishing the research of 2
“Readings proliferate that are unintended and unpredictable, with determinations that go far beyond those that could have been consciously anticipated by the maker of the original text. Time reverses the direction of influence. New contexts of interpretation come to rewrite texts as authors and theories are re-­‐narrated for present relevance.” (Alexander and Smith 2005:1) 12 collective discourses based on narratives and introducing the concept of performativi-­‐
ty, there still was a wish “to extend this new understanding one step further” (Alexan-­‐
der 2008: 9). The broadening of sociological horizons crystallized eventually into icon-­‐
ic turn (the term was borrowed from the German art historian Gottfried Boehm), and respectively into iconic theory, which is seeking after an answer to the question how meaning manifests itself through materiality (Alexander 2010a: 12). Becker’s call for a new sociology which would get more visual was thus surpassed—it has not stuck with vision only and made an effort to integrate the other four senses as well. In short, icon-­‐
ic theory promises to combine the sensual and the material in a way that allows us to sociologically grasp both subjective experience and collective meanings and their rela-­‐
tionship at the same time. It seems to be a logical step in the development of the strong programme to shift its focus to iconicity recently. The aim of iconic theory continues the cultural sociological line, which has since its birth paid a great attention to the study of collective represen-­‐
tations and emotions. The problem with texts is, however, that they cannot raise such strong emotions as other forms of human experience. The main goal of iconic theory was thus the inclusion of sensual experience of material stuff into sociological theory. But why is it important to treat materiality sociologically? How does iconic turn change our understanding of social phenomena? What problems does the iconic theo-­‐
ry solve and what problems it brings? These are just several questions and problems that I deal with in this thesis. My argument is developed and divided into three steps: First, I introduce the background of scholarly development in the field of image inter-­‐
pretation, which made certain progress despite of the prevailing approach inspired by turn to language and discourse in the 20th century. It is essential to begin with these developments since they have mostly provided inspiration for current efforts in dealing with iconicity. In the second chapter I introduce the newly born theory of iconic power suggested by the strong programme, highlight its main points and ideas and outline the main benefits it has brought into sociological discourse. In the last chapter I point out the questions emerging from the first notion of iconic theory and the problems concerning its future direction. Drawing on contemporary research based on art-­‐
13 theoretical methods of image interpretation I also suggest possible solutions to the unresolved issues in the definition of iconicity. 14 15 “Medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan, 1964
16 1 Human and social sciences & the visual: History of a complicated relationship The search for meaning as well as the effort to understand the processes of its emer-­‐
gence was focused exclusively on language for most of the 20th century. By claiming that all philosophical questions are basically linguistic problems and can therefore be solved either by reforming language or by understanding more about the one we al-­‐
ready use (Rorty 1967: 3), the linguistic turn in philosophy was launched. But as Wag-­‐
ner rightly observed, the way how one sees the world inevitably changes “once one as-­‐
serts that all relations between human beings and the world are constituted by language“ (2008: 252). Rorty’s book Linguistic Turn published in 1967 caused a broad paradigm shift that influenced a whole set of human sciences—from linguistics, semi-­‐
otics and rhetoric to art and media studies and sociology. It resulted not only in asking different questions, but also in ability to find new answers and opening new perspec-­‐
tives on social life. Suddenly, society became a text and nature and its scientific repre-­‐
sentations “discourses” (Mitchell 1994: 11). 17 1.1. Semiotics and the notion of a discursive world However, the assumption that everyday reality is constituted by language was by no means new in 1967. The same position was central also for Saussure’s structuralism, one of the biggest inspirations for linguistic turn as well as for the whole linguistics in the 20th century up to now. The main argument in Saussure’s (1996) theory is that signs acquire their meanings from their positions and mutual relations within a sign system, i.e. the language system, which he favored. His semiology, as he called his semiotics, is based on a “dyadic sign model”. In this model, sign consists of signifier (e.g. a word) and signified (i.e. a mental concept evoked in one’s mind by hearing or reading the word). The real object in the world, which the sign points to, is called referent and is not a part of the dyadic model. The crucial assumption here is that the relationship of referent and its sign is purely arbitrary, what accounts for the fact that there are differ-­‐
ent signs used for denoting different referents in different languages. Therefore, the meaning of each sign must be conceptualized as context-­‐dependent, i.e. contingent on positions of different signs within the sign system. As a result, language system does not provide people with contact to reality; language is reality, since everything we refer to as reality is just a convention, a result of the process of signification. Nothing can exist without being thought of and we cannot think of any referent unless it exists in language, unless there is a concept for it. Even though such a conclusion might seem extreme today, it has indeed largely influenced the course of human and social scienc-­‐
es for decades, Mitchell thus talks about “absorption of image by discourse” (Mitchell 1994: 28). If there were any attempts to push the image topic further, they would generally con-­‐
clude that images were themselves linguistic occurrences or demonstrated that they were participating in the signs’ systems as well (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 105). For Boehm, the latter was true for the work of the second “father” of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce. A different reading is proposed by Mitchell who highlights Peirce’s “re-­‐
sistance to taking the symbolic (or the verbal) as the foundational moment of semiot-­‐
ics” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 118). This argument is supported by the fact that Peirce is sometimes considered to be “a visual interpreter of language” (Pietarinen 2012: 251). 18 1.1.1. Peirce’s triad For Peirce, sign is a kind of relation; to be exact it is a triadic relation of representation (Buczynska-­‐Garewicz 1979). The elements of his “triadic sign model” are sign (repre-­‐
sentament), object and meaning (interpretant). An object is always represented by a sign, but since representation is always mediation, the central point belongs to the in-­‐
terpretant3. The interpretant is always general, never individual and constitutes the ideal, logical meaning of the sign. Furthermore, Peirce emphasises that the subject’s experience of a sign is sensational and irreflexive, while meaning-­‐making takes place during the process of construction of interpretant that makes sense of the relationship between sign and object (Petrilli 1999). The next key assumption of Peirce’s semiotics is that sign is always determined by its object. Therefore, he developed a typology of signs based on a triad of firstness, secondness, and thirdness4 that organizes signs by “closeness to their object” (Huening 2006). Whenever a sign stands for its object through some quality of feeling (Atkin 2005), it is called icon (or likeness) and belongs to the category of firstness. “Icons can represent nothing but Forms and Feelings,” wrote Peirce5 (quoted in Buczynska-­‐
Garewicz 1979: 256). Therefore, icon is interpreted as a possibility, i.e. a mental image, typical of its similarity or analogy to the subject of discourse (Lattmann 2012). Indices (or indexes) then stand for their objects through an existential or physical fact (Atkin 2005) and therefore belong to the sphere of secondness. Symbols as thirdnesses stand for their objects through convention, the relation to their objects is therefore purely habitual or defined by rules (Peirce 1998: 5–7). All three sign categories, nevertheless, overlap in actual signs: “Consider a photograph: it has properties in common with its object, and is therefore an icon; it is directly and physically influenced by its object, 3
Interpretant, contrary to a widespread belief, is neither an interpreter nor an individual mind (Buczyn-­‐
ska-­‐Garewicz 1979). 4
Firstness is a category of quality of feeling, secondness stands for actual, concrete and temporary being and thirdness is general, timeless and independent category independent on subjective thinking (Buczynska-­‐Garewicz 1979). 5
Icon is a possibility, i.e. a mental image, typical of its similarity or analogy to the subject of discourse (Lattmann 2012). 19 and is therefore an index; and lastly it requires a learned process of ‘reading’ to under-­‐
stand it, and is therefore a symbol” (Huening 2006). Peirce’s semiology is important for the study of images exactly because it did not, in contrast to the one introduced by Saussure, assume that language is paradigmatic for meaning (Mitchell 1994). For when one considers Saussure’s theory in the light of Peirce, one is “struck by Saussure’s need to characterise the ‘signified’ in pictorial terms in the famous diagram of the sign” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 118). Mitchell (ibid.) therefore acknowledges Peirce’s effort to pave the path for a broader scholarly recogni-­‐
tion of images, later known as pictorial turn. His writings were also acknowledged as highly inspirational by Erwin Panofsky—an art historian whose methods of interpreta-­‐
tion of works of art have recently experienced considerable comeback in many disci-­‐
plines interested in images. There are barely any texts dealing with the image topic that would not refer back to Panofsky. The fact that they still feel compelled to take a stand on his theory only maintains its significance for contemporary research. Also, considering the lack of interest that sociology has paid to the visual during the 20th century (cf. Bartmanski 2012b), it is exactly art history that offers us the chance to look for sociologically useful concepts, convenient terminology and methods of interpreta-­‐
tion in its field of interest. 1.2. Panofsky’s image interpretation “The artist knows only ‘what he parades’ but not ‘what he betrays6’” (Panofsky 2012: 480), could have been the motto of Panofsky’s thinking about art and its forms. The central assumption lying in the very core of his theory was that every perspective is historically determined. Notion of historicity thus became his point of departure for every interpretation. Instead of asking what the artist wanted to express, Panofsky tried to find out what she expresses without being aware of it. His method therefore carries certain resemblance to psychoanalysis, for it tries to reveal the “cultural uncon-­‐
6
The quote was taken from writings by Charles S. Peirce whom Panofsky considered to be “an intellec-­‐
tually stimulating American” (Panofsky 2012:480). 20 sciousness7” in order to find “the unintentional and subconscious self-­‐revelation of a fundamental attitude towards the world which is characteristic in equal measure of the individual producer, the individual period, the individual people, and the individual cultural community” (Panofsky 2012: 479). It is exactly the search for underlying cul-­‐
tural principles that demonstrate themselves in art, why Panofsky’s approach is some-­‐
times referred to as hermeneutics of the visual8 (Binder 2012: 103). Panofsky introduced his method named iconology in 1939 together with a model for interpretation of pictures based on three levels of meaning, i.e. phenomenal meaning, meaning dependent on content and documentary (or intrinsic) meaning. In this classi-­‐
fication, the resemblance to Mannheim’s three kinds of meaning—objective, expres-­‐
sive and documentary (1951: 44)—is by no means accidental9. Another inspiration of Panofsky can be traced back to Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness and third-­‐
ness based on feeling, reacting and thinking (Peirce 1998). Based on these levels of meaning, the suggested technique was supposed to enable the interpreter to grasp more than just the “‘physiognomic’ qualities of the work of art,” since the aesthetic ex-­‐
perience had to be “supported, controlled, and corrected by the history of the style, the types, and the ‘cultural symptoms’” (Bourdieu 2005: 224). To fully understand the character of individual types of meaning, the most convenient way is to introduce them together with Panofsky’s interpretative model. Also, since contemporary scholars inquiring about images almost always refer back to Panofsky’s thoughts, in order to understand these critiques it is essential to understand his approach first. 1.2.1. Iconology The method of iconological interpretation introduced by Panofsky stems directly from the notion of three levels of meaning. An important note is that the differentiation of 7
Credits for this metaphor belong to Binder (2014a). 8
Panofsky’s work and accent on underlying structures is indeed strongly influenced by hermeneutics of W. Dilthey and F. Schleiermacher (cf. Holly 1984). 9
Panofsky adopted Mannheim’s “Weltanaschauungsintepretation” (Eberlein 2003:179), which can be best translated as “interpretation of the world-­‐view” and which is known also as the documentary meth-­‐
od (for its contemporary use in picture analysis see Bohnsack (2007, 2009)). 21 individual meanings used in the model is only theoretical and solely analytical and therefore does not play any role in everyday empirical experience, since people en-­‐
counter all of three levels of meaning at once (Panofsky 2012). Figure 1: Panofsky’s (1955: 40–41) synoptical table summarizing three independent strata of meaning and their respective identification and interpretation. Equipment for interpretation Corrective principle of interpretation (History of tradition)
Object of interpretation Act of inter-­‐
pretation I Primary or natural subject matter: A) factual, B) expressional (constituting the world of artistic motifs).
Pre-­‐iconographical Practical experience description (familiarity with objects (and pseudoformal and events).
analysis).
History of style (insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, objects and events were expressed by forms).
II Secondary or conventional subject matter, constituting the world of images, stories and allegories.
Iconographical analysis. Knowledge of literary sources (familiarity with specific themes and concepts).
History of types (insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, specific themes or concepts were expressed by objects and events).
III Intrinsic meaning or content, constituting the world of “symbolical” values.
Iconological interpretation. Synthetic intuition (familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human mind), conditioned by personal psychology and “Weltanschauung”.
History of cultural symptoms or “symbols” in general (insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts).
The first step in Panofsky’s iconological method (see Figure 1) is pre-­‐iconographic de-­‐
scription. Its focus is the level of phenomenal meaning, whose source is common eve-­‐
22 ryday knowledge and practical experience10. The interpreter thus describes factual and expressive matters of the image. Although it might seem that at this level of interpreta-­‐
tion no special background knowledge is needed, the opposite is true, for it even the pre-­‐iconographical description must already contain certain classifications, for “it is not always easy to recognize what is portrayed in the picture” (Panofsky 2012: 471). Completing the descriptive step therefore presupposes using a corrective principle of history of styles, which informs us about the kind of expression and representation of specific objects or events that was possible in different historical periods and contexts (ibid.: 480), “otherwise we have no means of knowing whether we must apply the norms of modern naturalism or the norms of medieval spiritualism to this suspension in the void” (ibid.: 472). In the focus of iconographical analysis, which is the second step of Panofsky’s method, is meaning dependent on content. Therefore it is motifs, stories and allegories consti-­‐
tutive of the image what the interpreter takes into consideration. Familiarity with lit-­‐
erature, narratives and broader historical context are essential knowledge, since in dif-­‐
ferent historical periods there were different objects used for expression of certain concepts11. This knowledge provides the interpreter also with a corrective principle for iconographical analysis, i.e. with a history of types that informs us “what was imagina-­‐
ble” at that time. For Panofsky, a type is “a depiction in which a specific phenomenal meaning is so closely connected with the meaning dependent on content that it im-­‐
mediately signals that content” (ibid.: 473–474) . The most generalizing part of Panofsky’s model is the last one called iconological inter-­‐
pretation. In this step is iconographic meaning as such treated as a “cultural symbol,” as an expression of specific culture (Bourdieu 2005: 224), in order to find intrinsic (or documentary) meaning of the picture. Documentary meaning is unintentional, sub-­‐
10
The parallel of phenomenal meaning to Peirce’s firstness is evident in Panofsky’s reference to unre-­‐
flected everyday experience. As Peirce noted, likenesses should not be interpreted but “presented to the sense” (1998:8). 11
Again, there is an analogy with Peirce’s indexical signs (secondness) on Panofsky’s second level of meaning; indication “focuses attention” and connects itself with other experience (Peirce 1998:8). 23 conscious, and “fundamental attitude towards the world,” capable of expressesing the Weltanschauung characteristic “of the individual producer, the individual period, the individual people, and the individual cultural community12” (Panofsky 2012: 479). Thus, the focus is not on what the image says but rather how the message is made. In other words, iconology seeks “the fundamental principles,” deep cultural structures that made the image, i.e. structures that underlie not only “the choice and presentation of motifs and production” but also “the production and interpretation of images, stories, and allegories” (Bourdieu 2005: 224). The problem of interpretation of intrinsic mean-­‐
ing lies, however, in the fact that its source is “the world-­‐view of the interpreter,” which is also a fundamentally subjective source of knowledge (Panofsky 2012: 480). Therefore, interpretative “violence” must be kept within certain boundaries set by both interpreter’s synthetic intuition (Panofsky 1955: 40–41) and “historically situated factu-­‐
ality,” i.e. “a sense of general intellectual history which clarifies what was possible with-­‐
in the world-­‐view of any specific period and any specific cultural circle” (Panofsky 2012: 480). In general, Panofsky’s iconology can be seen as a movement “from surface to depth, from sensations to ideas, from immediate particulars to an insight into the way ‘essen-­‐
tial tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts,’” as Mitchell (1994: 26) put it. In 1951, Panofsky published his Gothic Architecture and Scho-­‐
lasticism (1989) and showed that the iconological movement “from surface to depth” was applicable not only for the analysis of pictorial art. Instead, he used iconology to analyse a whole architectonic style, for he was convinced that there was “an obvious and barely random similarity between gothic architecture and scholastic” (Panofsky 1989: 8). For Panofsky, his similarity was not a mere result of parallel development of both. He assumed that there was rather a relationship of cause and effect, i.e. it was 12
The unreflected character of intrinsic meaning is reminiscent of Peirce’s notion of symbols (thirdness-­‐
es) that are also conventional and dependent upon habit (1998:9). Sign as a triad itself belongs to the sphere of thirdness that is “general, timeless, and independent of subjective thinking” (Buczynska-­‐
Garewicz 1979). 24 the scholastic culture that made the birth of gothic possible. As Bourdieu13 summed up, “Panofsky shows that culture is not just a common code, or even a common repertoire to answers to common problems, or a set of particular and particularized forms of thought, but rather a whole body of fundamental schemes, assimilated beforehand, that gener-­‐
ate (...) an infinite number of particular schemes, directly applied to particular situations. This habitus could be defined (...) as a sys-­‐
tem of internalized schemes that have the capacity to generate all the thoughts, perceptions, and actions characteristic of a culture, and nothing else.” (Bourdieu 2005: 233)
1.2.2. Critique of Panofsky’s method Comments on and critiques of Panofsky’s iconology come from various intellectual positions and criticize or appreciate different aspects of his thought. The first problem touches upon the character of the relationship between texts and images. There are those who suggest that Panofsky did not pay enough attention to keep the boundary between images and texts and thus caused the shift of importance to the side of textu-­‐
ality (Boehm and Mitchell 2009). Mitchell (1994) criticizes Panofsky for having signifi-­‐
cantly reduced the power of images and trying to develop a universal template for “reading” them as text. Belting (Belting 2002: 15) uses the same argument as Mitchell and notes that Panofsky wanted to explain visuality through textuality. In contrast to that, Przyborski and Slunecko (2012: 44) point out that Panofsky’s method offered “a certain emancipation from the model of text” and therefore gained central importance in cultural and social research. Bredekamp too assumes that iconology treats language rather as the visual’s counterpart than as and also as “a ‘superior self’ as is suggested by the theory of ‘image-­‐as-­‐text’ which follows the ‘world-­‐as-­‐text’ metaphor” (1995: 366). He appreciates the tendency of Panofsky’s iconology to “recognize pictorial forms not only as carriers of linguistically transmitted meaning, but also, and above all, as factors that disturb it” (Bredekamp 1995: 366). To sum up, the ambiguous character of the re-­‐
lation of texts and images within Panofsky’s method is neatly made explicit in Binder’s 13
In the French translation of Gothic Architecture, Pierre Bourdieu also used the famous term habitus (as “princip that directs action” (Panofsky 1989:18) for the first time. 25 term for iconology; hermeneutics of the visual simultaneously hints Panofsky’s concern about the textual as well as the visual. The second often criticized aspect of Panofsky’s iconology is its neglectance toward spectators. “Panofsky remains blind to his own role as individual interpreter and ig-­‐
nores the potential meanings that paintings might hold for other recipients,” notes Binder (2012: 103). However, there is a passage that addresses exactly the problem of an individual interpreter and reflects her subjective position: “the source of the interpreta-­‐
tion of intrinsic meaning is effectively the world-­‐view of the interpreter (...) this source of knowledge is fundamentally subjective,” (Panofsky 2012: 480). This excerpt rejects also the demur by Didi-­‐Huberman, who insists that “we cannot ignore the fact that we encounter the image in the present” (quoted in Moxey 2008: 135). His other objection seems to be more plausible—he points out that Panofsky did not pay attention to spec-­‐
tator’s response to work of art and was trying to analyse and explain the work by refer-­‐
ring to its circumstances that were thought of as being more stable and less opaque, i.e. to the underlying structures (Moxey 2008: 134–135) . Imdahl stresses a similar point and notes that spectator’s experience has not been taken into account by Panofsky (Imdahl 2006). He also ignored “the genuinely pictorial aspects of the image,” which create social meanings that are not accessible by language but are equally fundamental (Przyborski and Slunecko 2012: 44), what prevented him also from gaining access to the deeper meanings of abstract art. Third, Bartmanski (2012b: 5) criticizes Panofsky for having treated images as if they were mere reflections of deep, underlying structures, and thus the question asked was not what and how images do, but what makes them and why. On the contrary, Bohnsack (2007: 28–31) understands the move from iconography to iconology as a pas-­‐
sage from the question of what is made to how it is made. Hence, Bohnsack does not pose any implicit question of intentionality or purpose and allows also for inclusion and consideration of images’ effects on viewing subject in his analysis. Finally, Panofsky is accused of being concerned with “delimited, mostly pictorial artis-­‐
tic representations and conventional symbols” (Bartmanski 2012b: 5), instead of paying attention to visuality in general. Yet others recognize his effort to inquire not solely 26 about images but also in other forms of art, e.g. music and architecture (Przyborski and Slunecko 2012). After Panofsky, another significant and inspiring effort to push the theory of the image further was made by Roland Barthes. For he was not an art historian but linguist and semiotician, he did not use works of fine arts for study. Instead, Barthes (1977) em-­‐
ployed advertising pictures in his analysis, and by that he took a step toward the theory of the image and the visual in its currently popular form. 1.3. “Rhetorique of the Image” Barthes’s insightful writings about myths and ideologies continue to influence and in-­‐
spire disciplines from media studies to sociology (e.g. Alexander 2003, 2008 & 2010b). His work is, nonetheless, remarkable also from the point of view of image interpreta-­‐
tion, for he focused his analytical effort on “reading” the visual. Drawing on his semio-­‐
logical background, Barthes made an effort in decoding the messages carried by imag-­‐
es. He chose advertising images for the analysis, since he was convinced that the signs contained in this kind of images are used intentionally to construct the desired mes-­‐
sage and thereby they transmit meanings as clearly as possible. On one hand, Barthes makes a distinction between image and text based on their qual-­‐
ities and the way how they create meaning. While images are polysemous, possess pro-­‐
jective powers and transmit the meanings they carry simultaneously, texts are sequen-­‐
tial, have a repressive value and are able to limit the polysemy of images (Barthes 1977: 38–39) . On the other hand, he suggests that it is possible to understand images in the very same way as we do with texts; the tendency to narrow images down to the textual level and to make them readable implies already the name chosen for his es-­‐
say: Rhetorique of the Image (1977; cf. Bartmanski 2012b). “An image is more persuasive than writing, its meaning hits us at once, without being put in order and distributed spatially. It makes no important difference any longer, though. As soon as the image contains meaning, it becomes writing; as writing it requires a Lexis.” (Barthes 2012: 253, italics in original) 27 In the course of analysis of advertising images, Barthes (1977) distinguishes three types of messages one can find in a single photography: linguistic message, coded iconic message and analogical representation14. The image as such contains the latter two messages that are, however, on the empirical level, i.e. in the course of ordinary read-­‐
ing, not separated; "the viewer of the image receives at one and the same time the per-­‐
ceptual message and the cultural message” (Barthes 1977: 35–37, italics in original). In other words, although we see one single image, it is necessary to analytically distin-­‐
guish between literal and symbolic image, while this distinction is analogous to the one between signifier and signified within a sign (1.1). In order to be able to “read” and understand the literal or perceptual image, all we need is a basic knowledge of what an image is and what objects it depicts. The literal image of a given object is not “arbitrary,” it is denoted, since the photograph seems to mechanically represent the untransformed reality, and therefore to be a message with-­‐
out a code15. At the same time, the symbolic or cultural image contains a coded iconic message—it is connoted. What is more, it uses the literal image to support the symbol-­‐
ic message, which lifts it up onto a higher level of meaning—it is “a system which takes over the signs of another system in order to make them its signifiers in a system of connotation,” (Barthes 1977: 35–37) or to put it differently, it is a myth. Barthes (2012) defines myth as a construction consisting of form and concept that can be described as equivalents of Saussurean signifier and signified within a sign. Myth is, in fact, a sign of second-­‐order operating on the level of meta-­‐language, while using the sign from the first order as its form. The trick is, nevertheless, not new—the relation between form and concept is, as well as in Saussurean model of a sign, not naturally given, but cul-­‐
14
The level of connotation corresponds to Panofsky’s level of iconography (1.2), while the denoted, literal meaning has its analogue in Panofsky’s level of phenomenal meaning (Bohnsack 2009:305). 15
A photograph is here opposed to a drawing, which is already a coded message; “the denotation of the drawing is less pure than that of the photograph, for there is no drawing without style” (Barthes 1977:277). Contrary to that, the current scholarly assumption is rather that a photograph has “exactly as many ways to picture the world as painting had before” (Belting 2000: 163). 28 turally constructed16. Mythical concepts can therefore build themselves up, change, collapse or disappear; since they are historical, history can also defeat them quite easily (Barthes 2012: 266). However, Barthes’s effort in “reading” images ends on the level of connotations; he considers the complexity of meaning characteristic of images unverbalizable (Bohnsack 2009: 308). Having deciphered the connotative meaning he thus turns to the textual knowledge and follows the path of myth and its deconstruction instead. 1.4. Consequences of the linguistic turn Already the fact that above mentioned scholars are the only ones who provide inspira-­‐
tion for contemporary study of images shows how far-­‐reaching the impact of the lin-­‐
guistic turn was. The emphasis was put on “the significance of language and interpreta-­‐
tion for human social life, and thus for the study of human social life as well” (Wagner 2008: 247). Comprehending the world as language that resulted in a search for meaning within linguistic occurrences had influence also on scientific attitude toward images. The re-­‐
sults of considering language to be the ultimate creative force (Alexander and Smith 2003: 25) had a deep impact also on sociological methodology; although there has been a considerable progress in methods of interpretation, pictures have been broadly mar-­‐
ginalized (Bohnsack 2009: 297). A strong counter-­‐reaction to the “language-­‐is-­‐everything” approach appeared almost thirty years after Rorty’s turn, at the peak of “postmodern” era, as McLuhan’s “global village” came true and the culture found itself dominated by images (Mitchell 1994: 15). For art historian W. J. T. Mitchell, the need for a shift of scholarly interest and perspec-­‐
tive was fueled by the fact that the 16
Barthes actually points to the role of ideology in creating myths and believes that they are created intentionally (1977, 2012). However, the suggested ideological background of mythical structures only proves that the character of the relation between myth’s form and concept is conventional. 29 “picture now has a status somewhere between what Thomas Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’ and an ‘anomaly’, emerging as a central topic of discussion in the human sciences in the way that language did: that is, as a kind of model or figure for other things (including fig-­‐
uration itself), and as an unsolved problem, perhaps even the ob-­‐
ject of its own ‘science’, what Erwin Panofsky called an ‘iconolo-­‐
gy’.” (1994: 13) 1.5. Pictorial turn Mitchell was convinced that there was a certain anxiety concerning images in texts by Wittgenstein, which he interpreted as iconophobia and need to “defend ‘our speech’ against ‘the visual’” (1994: 12–13) . He understood these claims as indicators of a new, pictorial turn that was taking place in human sciences: “(W)hile the problem of pictorial representation has always been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with unprecedented force, on very level of culture, from the most refined philosophical specu-­‐
lations to the most vulgar productions of the mass media. Tradi-­‐
tional strategies of containment no longer seem adequate, and the need for a global critique of visual culture seems inescapable.” (Mitchell 1994: 16) In other words, Mitchell wanted to win broader attention for the visual. Methods of “reading” or interpreting images that were already at hand he found rather unsatisfac-­‐
tory—though they dealt with spectatorship and various forms of reading, for Mitchell it was unacceptable to explain such phenomena “on the model of textuality17” (1994: 16). Although the society of that time was often described as one of “spectacle” and “surveillance” (which are both vision-­‐based metaphors), there was a significant lack of knowledge about images and Mitchell thus complained that “we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world (...)” (1994: 13). Mitchell’s goal was, however, not only to emancipate images from logos, but also to give them absolute precedence (1994: 28f.). What is also important and distinctive in Mitchell’s approach is the fact that he refused to restrict his study to images to art (Moxey 2008: 135). 17
Especially critical was Mitchell to Panofsky’s model of interpretation (2005:49, see also 1.2.2). 30 One of Mitchell’s inspirations was the book Ways of worldmaking (1978), where the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, at that time strongly influenced by Ernst Cas-­‐
sirer’s work, discussed the role symbols play in the processes of worldmaking, i.e. the creation of meaningful worlds ‘from nothing’. Borrowing Goodman’s vocabulary Mitchell insists that pictures enable us to gain access to events and practices and that they are “‘ways of worldmaking’, not just world mirroring” (Mitchell 2005:xiv–xv) . That is also the reason why for Mitchell, the iconological intepretation in its form as intro-­‐
duced by Panofsky is not a way how to disentangle webs of meaning contained within images; he sees it rather as a kind of ideology. It is nothing more than a “system of nat-­‐
uralization, a homogenizing discourse that effaces conflict and difference with figures of ‘organic unity’ and ‘synthetic intuition’,” he assumes (Mitchell 1994: 30). What is need to be done, then, is “to unweave this tapestry” of “symbolic forms,” which synthe-­‐
tize vision, and space as well as world-­‐ and art-­‐pictures and which were elaborated within Panofsky’s iconology—only after that can pictorial turn accomplish Panofsky’s ambitions for a critical iconology (Mitchell 1994: 19). Therefore, pictures were no long-­‐
er treated as mere passive reflections of reality; the accent put on their active role in worldmaking (one can also use the term meaning-­‐making) made them, in Mitchell’s theory, legitimate participants in social life18. The rather postmodern character of Mitchell’s picture theory becomes also evident as soon as we consider how deliberately he subjectivizes and personificates pictures and argues that they have desires (which is already indicated by the book’s title What do pictures want?), while at the same time the way he suggests for understanding them reminds of Latour’s (2005) notion of objects’ agency: “What pictures want is not the same as the message they communicate or the effect they produce; it’s not even the same as what they say they want. Like people, pictures may not know what they want, 18
In order to show that even though people tend to disrespect those who believe pictures “are alive and want things” (Mitchell 2005: 7) and no one thinks pictures should be treated like persons, “we always seem to be willing to make exceptions for special cases” (ibid.: 31). In other words, “when students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut off the eyes.” (ibid.:9) 31 they have to be helped to recollect it through a dialogue with others.” (Mitchell 2005: 46) The most problematic part of Mitchell’s approach seems to be his method for finding out what effects pictures have on human behavior, since there is none. On one hand, he claims his aim is “to undermine the ready-­‐made template for interpretative mas-­‐
tery” (2005: 49), by which he means psychoanalytical, materialist or Panofsky’s model. On the other hand, he does not offer any substitute for these abandoned methods. What is more, the insistence on considering pictures independently of language, for they have “a presence that escapes our linguistic ability to describe or interpret” (Mox-­‐
ey 2008: 135) practically deprives him of the possibility to say (or, in this case, to write) anything about them. Also, even though Mitchell explicitly states that he wants to step back from questions of meaning and power that were in picture analysis usually taken into consideration, his effort to find out what pictures want eventually employs exactly the old, criticized methods borrowed from linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics and rhetoric (Mitchell 2005: 46). Unfortunately, a certain methodological vagueness pre-­‐
vents Mitchell from offering any plausible interpretation or understanding of pictures eventually; he sticks with mere suggestions of possible meanings one could find and subsequently lets the reader decide which one she prefers (Mitchell 2005: 50). How are we then supposed to accept such bold statements as “(i)mages are active players in the game of establishing and changing values” (Mitchell 2005: 105), if everyone is allowed to decide freely what kind of message he wants to find in a picture? At this point Mitchell seems to be sinking into Baudrillardian thinking characteristic of “floating” or “empty” signifiers. Supposed that values are shared, collective representations, one should be able to identify shared meanings that would be portrayed and also trans-­‐
ferred by images, in order to demonstrate that pictures actually have the power to shape peoples’ values. Otherwise, everything we are left with is just an ephemeral im-­‐
pression of the elusive power of pictures that can never be reduced to or translated into language. It seems that images used to be the victims of rationalizing linguistic turn; after Mitchell’s postmodern crusade that he—in reaction to Panofsky—called critical iconology, language became the defeated: “If traditional iconology repressed the image, postmodern iconology represses language.” (Mitchell 1994: 28f.) 32 1.6. Iconic turn A less radical approach to theorizing about images was suggested in the 1990s by Ger-­‐
man art historian Gottfried Boehm, who became a protagonist of a so called “iconic turn”. Boehm spent, according to his own words, around twenty years trying to answer one question, which became the central problem of his research, namely “how do im-­‐
ages create meaning?” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 106). Despite the fact of linguistic domination during much of the 20th century, studies in art history were still carried out. However, Boehm is rather skeptical to the widely used method of interpretation from Panofsky and criticizes him for having caused a shift of balance between image and text “to the side of textuality” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 107), which was also the point of Mitchell’s (1994) critique. In the centre of Boehm’s interest is the puzzle of non-­‐verbal experience provided by images, which was logically ignored by linguistical-­‐
ly oriented research. Boehm nevertheless self-­‐reflexively remarks that “image is not simply some new topic, but relates much more to a different mode of thinking” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 104). The motivation for his iconic turn was an effort to understand images as iconic “logos”, in the sense of a meaning-­‐generating process (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 105). In other words, “iconic turn stems from the notion that images evade any linguistic logic and since they cannot be understood through anything else they have to be understood from themselves” (Binder 2013: 78). Therefore, Boehm’s vision of ideal icono-­‐logy, which art history should strive for, dif-­‐
fers from Panofsky’s iconological interpretation; optimally, it would seek “the under-­‐
standing and interpretation of the logos of the image in its historical, perception-­‐
oriented and meaning-­‐saturated determinedness” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 107). This claim makes it clear that Boehm’s iconic turn is not based on a “fundamental op-­‐
position to the linguistic turn” as Mitchell’s pictorial turn was19, for he does not suggest repressing the language. Rather, based on his notion of iconology that takes into con-­‐
sideration the embededness of images in various contexts (but refuses to deduce imag-­‐
es from these), Boehm tries to emancipate images from language and also accentuate 19
“When the iconic is invoked, it never implies a withdrawal from language, but rather that a difference vis à vis language comes into play.” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 107, italics in original) 33 the up to now neglected image theory (2009: 105–107). On the other hand, Boehm (Boehm 2006) also insists that there are certain categorical differences between images and texts that cannot be overcome, since words can never grasp exactly what an image expresses. The closest as language can get to image is in a metaphor, whose structural qualities are comparable with those of images (Boehm 2006: 26). Since a metaphor carries multiplicity of meanings and has no conclusion, which makes it a linguistic im-­‐
age, it cannot be translated into “normal” language. In Roland Barthes’s words, Boehm was one of “those who think that signification cannot exhaust the image’s ineffable richness” (1977: 32). On the other hand, contrary to Barthes Boehm and others acknowledge the possibility of image interpretation: “What a sentence can, that must be also for pictorial works available, however, in its own way” (Boehm 2006: 31, italics added). 1.6.1. Iconic difference Boehm stresses that the use of the terms iconic and the Iconic within his iconic turn has nothing in common with Peirce’s notion of icon as a pictorial sign20 (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 108). For Boehm, the term iconic marks an image21 simultaneously as an object and as a process (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 108), since his goal was to “under-­‐
20
Interestingly enough, at the same place Boehm also quotes a sentence from a German translation of Peirce’s work saying that an icon doesn’t necessarily take up a visual form and may therefore be a purely imaginative image (Boehm and Mitchell 2009:108). Consequently, Mitchell in his answer corrects Boehm’s understanding of Peirce and writes: “I wonder if there is not a hidden conceptual resonance between Peirce and Imdahl on the icon as a ‘firstness’, a phenomenological apprehension of immediate sensuous quali-­‐ties as the foundational moment in aesthetics, epistemology, and semiotics, not to men-­‐
tion in Panofsky’s version of the first stage of iconological interpre-­‐tation (the pre-­‐iconographic moment of sensuous encounter). I don’t know Imdahl’s work very well, but I gather that his concept of the iconic is based in ‘the direct phenomenal experience of the plastic/formal structure of an artwork’, a notion that is remarkably similar to Peirce’s iconic ‘firstness’.” (ibid: 119). 21
Since Boehm’s work is written mostly in German, it is probably convenient to start with a clarification of two basic terms. German language does not make any difference between English terms image and picture, both are called Bild. As Belting Belting 2002: 15 notes, pictures should be seen as physical imag-­‐
es, concrete objects of representation, which make images appear. This (not existing) distinction makes translation from German into English problematic, since it always poses the question if one talks about material picture or its mental representation (concept or notion). On the other hand, for German au-­‐
thors it is sometimes convenient to be able to use only one term for “the principle, its manifestation, and the inner representation” (Przyborski and Slunecko 2012: 40) and thus they often neglect the distinction, as was the case in Boehm’s Wiederkehr der Bilder (Moxey 2008: 136). However, later in his letter to Mitchell Boehm explained his perspective and also from the broader context it is clear that Boehm (2006) refers to images and to the visual in general (cf. Moxey 2008). 34 stand images in view of an implicit processuality,” for which he developed a concept of iconic difference, which makes it possible to understand images without any help of linguistic or rhetorical models and devices (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 110). Inspired by Saussure’s semiotic difference22, which describes the fact that words gain meanings not from their similarity with the world but from mutual internal oppositions within sign systems, iconic difference marks the notion that “also the image does not owe its ‘meaning’ to similarity with the real world, but equally to purely internal visual opposi-­‐
tions” (Beyst 2010). Thus, image becomes a self-­‐referential system. For when we con-­‐
sider, for example, abstract art, we come to a conclusion that it is actually able not only to produce meanings without referring to any object in reality but also “to surpass the known Real” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 106). In other words, Boehm draws a differ-­‐
ence between mere physical seeing and viewing, which encompasses the construction of meaning—as he puts it, “(t)he view triumphs over the eye” (Über das Auge tri-­‐
umphiert der Blick. (Boehm 2006: 25)). However, Boehm (Boehm 2006: 30) himself is using the concept of iconic difference in (at least) two diverse ways, as Beyst (2010) pointed out (cf. also Binder 2013): in the first definition Boehm stays “on the surface” and defines iconic difference as a relationship between material carrier of the image and its meaning, between the lines and stains of the image and what they turn out to show as something meaningful, or between the “figure and background”, i.e. the details of the image and its whole. In the second meaning, iconic difference refers to the relation between image and its referent in real-­‐
ity (Beyst 2010): “content that means something absent is raised by iconic difference, in which it becomes visible” (Boehm 2007: 38). On one hand, “both interpretations are intertwined: when the material substrate remains visible, the representation comes to differ from the model in the real world” (Beyst 2010). On the other hand, the result of the fact that Boehm does not distinguish between these two meanings is that he fails to recognize mirror images or photographs as images, and misses the point of under-­‐
22
Although Boehm explicitly refers to an analogy of his iconic difference to Heidegger’s ontological dif-­‐
ference (Boehm 2006: 30), art historian Stefan Beyst (2010) points to its similarity to the semiotic differ-­‐
ence known from Saussure. 35 standing image as a combination of “iconic identity,” based on mere visual similarity to reality, as well as “iconic difference,” which refers to the fact that although visually similar, images are not similar to other senses: “whoever wants to touch his mirror im-­‐
age stumbles on the surface of the mirror, not on a body, and knows precisely there-­‐
fore that he is dealing with an image, not with the real thing” (Beyst 2010). Despite the confusion caused by Boehm’s vague definition (or rather because of it), the term of iconic difference became quite encompassing and gained a broad variety of meanings in later research. One of the possible interpretations builds an insurmountable bound-­‐
ary between image and text (see Binder 2012: 102), which is also one of the main thoughts expressed in Boehm’s work as well as in other contributions in his anthology Was ist ein Bild? The problem of the relationship between text and image is also cen-­‐
tral in Max Imdahl’s work. For Imdahl, image has a unique expressive quality that mediates meaning and that also cannot be substituted by anything else (Imdahl 2006: 300). In other words, “in art there are experiences and meanings present, that one cannot gain without it” (Greub 2001: 20). This distinctive characteristic (unverwechselbare Eigenart) of an image is considered to be the effect of its iconic meaning structure (ikonische Sinnstruktur). In order to grasp image’s distinctiveness, Imdahl suggests a new method—iconic (Ikonik), which Panofsky in his three-­‐leveled model left out. While Panofsky’s model doesn’t allow us to interpret abstract images (or leads inevitably to the conclusion that every abstract image is trivial), Imdahl’s iconic enables the spectator or interpreter to use creative potential and fantasy and makes and effort to involve the experience of the spectator (Imdahl 2006: 315–318). The notion of iconic meaning contains a reflection of what image depicts as well as of the possibilities of image as such. An image’s character differs categorically from narrative succession and also from empirical event experi-­‐
ence and does not allow us to narrate it. This specific feature is called scenic simultane-­‐
ity (ibid.: 308ff.). In other words, thanks to its scenic simultaneity, an image provides the spectator with a unique notion of the interrelations among its elements, but at the same time simultaneity makes it also impossible to find any linguistic substitution for the image’s iconic meaning structure, to translate it into any language expression or to narrate it as a process. Scenic simultaneity is therefore opposed to linguistic succes-­‐
36 siveness, typical of texts. Further Imdahl points out that although the interpretation of images is always inevitably linguistic, it still cannot fully grasp the specific simultaneity that helps us understand the image, i.e. the iconic (ibid.: 310). Boehm himself made a similar point as Imdahl in his letter to W.J.T. Mitchell, where he mentioned “intelligence of images,” which is based on “their respective visual or-­‐
der.” However, as from the rest of the letter becomes clear, even twelve years after the original publication of Was ist ein Bild? the image’s specifics remains rather unresolved and somehow mysterious; we still do not know how we should understand the specific visual order, what are its rules and what is the role played by individuality in under-­‐
standing images (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 110). Some ideas of Boehm’s iconic turn have been subsequently adopted by the strong programme in cultural sociology and used for the formulation of iconic theory (see Alexander 2008, 2010, 2012, Bartmanski 2012). Its protagonists have nevertheless made some changes to the original approach, e.g. the initial inspiration by Panofsky’s interpretation (Boehm 2006) was turned into an explicit categorical rejection (Bartmanski 2012: 5). As I will show in the second chapter, this iconic theory formulates new problems, or rather re-­‐formulates the old ones, and with its emphasis of the emotional aspect of contact with images (and the material in general) reminds of Mitchell’s (2005) question What and how images do?. 37 “Stuff matters.” Jeffrey C. Alexander, 2010 38 2 Iconicity and the strong programme in cultural sociology In this chapter, I present a brief introduction to the cultural sociological notion of iconic theory. Therefore it is convenient to start more generally and to provide the reader with the key ideas that are at the basis of the strong programme in cultural so-­‐
ciology as it was formulated by Phillip Smith and Jeffrey Alexander (Alexander and Smith 2003). The core ideas and concepts used by this relatively young approach will be touched upon in order to show how and why it was fruitful and possible to shift the attention of cultural sociology to iconicity. In fact, Alexander and others have recently made a significant effort to adopt and reformulate some features of the iconic turn proposed by Boehm and also to include them into the core fields of interest for cultural sociology. This new point of departure brought, however, not only opening of new ho-­‐
rizons for us and the opportunity to ask fresh and different question about social life that can be now answered in a different way. Quite expectedly, by virtue of its novelty and focus on materiality, which is for sociology an extremely undertheorized field, iconic theory brings also many questions about its own character, concerning its rela-­‐
tion to the German iconic turn as well as to American pictorial turn proposed by Mitchell, while some of the key problems seem to go much deeper into the history of 39 scholarly inquiry about images. My argument will be thus developed in following steps: 1) I briefly present the main ideas of the strong programme by Alexander and Smith in order to shed light on the character of topics and research interests as well as of the nature of answers it suggests. 2) I introduce the theory of iconic power stemming from the main ideas of the strong programme and its main goals. 3) By summing up Alexan-­‐
der’s writings about iconicity published since 2008 I suggest a notion of Alexandrian icon and its distinctive features. 4) I connect the notion of Alexander’s icon to a broad-­‐
er network of cultural sociological concepts and show why iconic power is believed to provide a missing link in the social theory and 5) I sum up its benefits. The emergent problems and puzzles raised by the iconic theory are addressed in the last chapter. 2.1. Strong programme In the founding article of cultural sociology, Smith and Alexander published a sharp polemic aimed at hitherto existing sociological understandings and studies of culture. In answer to Alexander’s (1988) call for a conception of robust culture, they rejected all opinions suggesting that “culture is something to be explained, by something else en-­‐
tirely separated from the domain of meaning itself,” that “explanatory power lies in the study of the ‘hard’ variables of social structure,” or in which culture is “more or less confined to participating in the reproduction of social relations,” and introduced the concept of cultural autonomy (Alexander and Smith 2003: 12–13). While the former approaches were labeled as “weak”, the newly introduced theory arguing for “a sharp analytical uncoupling of culture from social structure” was referred to as “strong”. In other words, although both types of theory are devoted to studying culture, the weak or sociology-­‐of approach pays attention to the effects of collective meanings, explains how meanings are created, and is interested in how the structures of culture are formed by other, more material, less ephemeral structures. Contrary to that, the strong programme focuses on interpreting collective meanings and makes collective emotions and ideas central “precisely because it is such subjective and internal feelings that so often seems to rule the world” (Alexander 2003: 5). In other words, culture is treated as more than just an environment for social action, but it is rather considered a source of 40 motivation working through “emotions, classification, and collective action” (Alexan-­‐
der and Smith 2005: 13–14). The new interpretation of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms equipped the strong pro-­‐
gramme in such a significant way that one could paraphrase Alexander’s claim about cultural turn and state that cultural sociology owes everything to Durkheim (ibid.: 12). It is not only the conceptual toolbox, but also the core ideas in the very heart of cultur-­‐
al sociology that stem from Elementary Forms. By stressing the symbolic nature of modern social order and of social structure constructed by deep solidarities based on the master binary of sacred and profane, the sociological focus moved explicitly from “decoding culture as text” to payig attention to cultural symbolic forms and their im-­‐
pact on society (Alexander and Smith 2005). Since the way how culture influences peoples’ lives remains unreflected in everyday life and thus also inaccessible from a common sensical perspective, Alexander sets a kind of Freudian goal for cultural sociology. It should make an effort to reveal the repressed, to “bring the social unconscious up for view23” (Alexander 2003: 4). In order to achieve this, Alexander and Smith proposed a method of structural hermeneutics, which makes structuralism and hermeneutics into fine bedfellows. “The former offers possibilities for general theory construction, prediction and assertions of the autonomy of culture. The latter allows analysis to capture the texture and temper of social life. When comple-­‐
mented by attention to institutions and actors as causal intermediaries, we have the foundations of a robust cultural sociology.” (Alexander 2003: 26). As Emirbayer (2004: 8) points out, the fact that the strong programme does not prefer social struc-­‐
ture to other kinds of structures and acknowledges cultural autonomy makes it useful, for it provides us with the opportunity to methodologically isolate cultural structures, map out their internal patterns and logics, examine their interplay with other kinds of structures and historical processes, and to see “how these together constrain and ena-­‐
ble interaction”. 23
That is why he also considers cultural sociology to be a kind of social psychoanalysis (Alexander 2003:4). 41 Yet even Alexander’s emancipation of culture from structure suffered from the pres-­‐
ence of a residue of the Marxist way of thinking, as Emirbayer (ibid.) noticed. By draw-­‐
ing distinction between “ideal” culture and “material” structure, Alexander was actually reproducing the old, materialist binary opposition that was by no means neutral. How-­‐
ever, his recent effort made in the field of iconicity seems promising, since it endeav-­‐
ours to include materiality into the study of culture, by which the dualism of ideal and material should be overcome. 2.2. Iconic theory Inspired by growing interest in the aesthetics in social theory, Alexander (2008) intro-­‐
duced an interpretation of Standing Woman, a famous sculpture from Alberto Giaco-­‐
metti. There, according to his own words, he hoped to pursue “the old romantic dream of reintegrating art and life” (2008: 10). The way Alexander deals with materiality gives voice to the sensual, material experience of art (he calls it iconic experience); however, he immediately extends the notion of such experience to everyday life. In the main argument, Alexander articulates the assumption that material experience is by no means limited to contact with art. Quite the opposite, materiality is essential for hu-­‐
man’s experience of the world24. As we experience material surface of things, we can “feel” it “in our un-­‐conscious minds and associate” it with meanings, i.e. with other personal as well as social ideas and things (Alexander 2008: 6). Making such associa-­‐
tions is typical of and pivotal in the process of typification as defined by Berger and Luckmann (1991) and Alexander is thus able to conclude that materiality lies at the very basis of social life. Furthermore, since human experience of the material is medi-­‐
ated by senses, the concern of iconic theory for materiality required also the inclusion of sensuality: “In the iconosphere of society, the meanings of social life take on sensual 24
Although such a statement may seem rather banal, it is true that the material aspect of human’s life has been broadly ignored by sociological theory, while language and discourses were its preferred points of interest at the same time (for summaries about the effects of Rorty’s linguistic turn and consequent development in human sciences see Boehm and Mitchell 2009, Bartmanski 2012b, Moxey 2008 and Przyborski and Slunecko 2012). 42 form, whether by sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell.” (Bartmanski and Alexander 2012: 11) Even though the notion of iconic experience puts a striking emphasis on sensuality and materiality, it has nothing in common with and must not be confused with material-­‐
ism. The iconic turn in cultural sociology suggested by Alexander (2010a) categorically disapproves of all materialistic approaches that reduce materiality to mere things of use-­‐value. Therefore is Karl Marx one of three modern scholars, whom iconic theory opposes; his concept of commodification remains, according to Alexander, blind to the aesthetic dimension and viewer’s experience. Drawing on Durkheim and the manifesto of the strong programme (2.1), Alexander pursues analytical separation of meaning from social structure, which is supposed to be the first step in the sociological endeav-­‐
or to understand the iconic, i.e. “how meaning, soul, and spirit manifest themselves through materiality” (2010a: 11). The concept of iconicity defies also the notion of dis-­‐
entchantment as suggested by Max Weber. Quite the contrary, the theory of iconic power suggests that we do not live in perfectly rational and emotionless iron cages25, but rather in a world where sensual contact with material things that trigger emotions plays an essential role in the process of meaning-­‐making. From the same argument stems also the critique of Walter Benjamin’s prediction of the loss of aura, which should have occurred with the onset of modernity. Nothing like that has, however, taken place, claim Bartmanski and Alexander and suggest rather shifting the attention to the way how “iconic aura continues to inhabit nonunique items” (2012). To sum up, the theory of iconic power aspires to bring aura, enchantment and fetish back, and hence it uses Durkheimian notion of totemism, which grants economic objects meta-­‐
phorical and emotional powers. Elsewhere, Bartmanski (2012b) regards iconicity to be the missing link that enables us to bring totemism back into social theory. But why had materiality in social research been ignored for such a long time? Accord-­‐
ing to Alexander (2010a), it was because of the tension between materialism and ideal-­‐
25
In criticising Weber has been Alexander truly consistent; similar argument was suggested already in his New Theoretical Movement (1988). 43 ism, which poses a problem that sociology always had to solve or avoid (cf. Alexander 1988). Earlier scholars seem to have escaped to the shelter of scientific realism in order to eschew moralistic and aesthetic fallacy at the same time by claiming to have access to the thing in itself. “It is this realist claim that lurks beneath Peirce’s theory of iconic as compared with symbolic meaning,” adds Alexander26 (2010a: 20). While interpreting Peirce’s concept of icon as “sign by resemblance” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 119), Al-­‐
exander prefers Saussure’s theory by assuming that “(m)ateriality is non-­‐verbal but still conventional” (Alexander 2008: 12). At the same time, he adopts Durkheim’s assump-­‐
tion suggesting that morality is abstract and difficult to imagine, and therefore has to be connected to a concrete object, so that people could comprehend spiritual feelings (Alexander 2010a: 16). Materiality is thus crucial for social life, since “in order to ‘express our own ideas to ourselves’ (…) we need to ‘fix them on material things which symbolize them’” (Alex-­‐
ander and Smith 2005: 8). Therefore, the suggested point of departure for studying iconicity is to consider materiality as constitutive of sociability (Bartmanski and Alex-­‐
ander 2012). Durkheim’s (1976: 207) notion of totem as “a symbol, a material expression of something else,” as a collective representation of the sacred that classifies things as sacred or profane, that plays an important role during rituals, and that personifies and represents collective identity under a visible form (Alexander 2012), is fundamental for the cultural sociological concept of icon, which should help us deal with the key ques-­‐
tion how meaning manifests itself through materiality (Alexander 2010a: 12). 26
Peirce seems to be a highly controversial theoretician. While Alexander criticizes his realismus and “purely pragmatic, non-­‐conventionalist materiality of the icon and index” (2008:12) and backs up this critique by Mitchell’s words, Mitchell acknowledges Peirce as higly inspirational for his own thought: “Peirce’s resistance to taking the symbolic (or the verbal) as the foundational moment of semiotics, and his insistence on the phenomenon of the ‘qualisign’, the sign that signifies by virtue of its inherent sen-­‐
suous qualities, that attracted me.” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009:118). Moreover, Peirce’s claim that icon and index are not based on experience but on the capacity of experience (1.1.1) is similar to Alexander’s notion of iconic consciousness, which is based on a Kantian disposition (see below). 44 2.3. The power of icons The most recent version of still developing iconic theory has been presented in the book Iconic Power, where Bartmanski and Alexander (2012) define icons as material objects with symbolic power. Such modern totems represent social sacred or profane (Alexander 2008: 9) and have significant impact on social actors who encounter them, since people do not just stick with “understanding them cognitively or evaluating them morally,” but they also feel “their sensual, aesthetic force” (Bartmanski and Alexander 2012: 1). It is exactly the aesthetic dimension what makes icons different and somehow special. Once we encounter an icon, we feel affected by it not only in a strictly material manner, but there are also significant sensual and highly emotional aspects at play. Even though such empirical iconic experience is singular, for we encounter icons as single objects or things, on the analytical level they consist of two components that are to be separated (Alexander 2010a: 14). Icons are constituted by the interplay between material surface and meaningful depth, where the latter is made visible by the former. Alexander, following the Saussurean structuralistic notion of an arbitrary relation between signified and signifier, regards the relation of depth and surface as purely conventional as well27 (Alexander 2008: 12). For if we already knew the meaning (of an art piece, for example) before we experience it, the point of aesthetic experience would be lost. It is exactly because the signifier is not determined by the signified, the form not limited by the concept, the surface not restricted by the depth, that imagination can work on the principle of free play28 (Alex-­‐
ander 2010a: 17); as Boehm puts it, “(m)illions of people would not be visiting museums 27
In other words, Alexander takes a stand against Peirce’s signs’ typology (especially against the con-­‐
cepts of icon and index, see above) that presupposes a motivated relation of signified and its signifier, and claims that such a theory is nothing more than a result of Western philosophical tradition, which is used to fetishize images as “natural” signs. In order to avoid such idolatry, “we must not (…) consider material shapes literally, even if it is the textural qualities of their surfaces that give them distinctive communicative power” (2008:12–13). 28
On the other hand, in the mundane everyday experience there is no possibility for free sensuous in-­‐
terpretations, since icons and their meanings are typified. That, nevertheless, changes nothing on the fact that the relations of meaningful depths and visible, aesthetic surfaces are conventional (see Alexan-­‐
der 2010a:18). 45 to look at pictures if they were only being fed what they already knew or had heard at some point” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 106). In icons that function like signs, aesthetic shapes become “middles of semiotic pro-­‐
cess,” (Alexander 2010a: 11) where the signifier is a material thing, which enables us to feel the signified. Feelings are thus activated by the contact with surfaces, but simulta-­‐
neously informed by the meaning structures that dwell beneath the surfaces (Alexan-­‐
der 2010a: 14). Therefore, it is the aesthetic material form that seduces the spectator and invites her to experience immersion that happens when the sensual contact with icon’s aesthetic surface brings forth sensual experience and transition of meaning29 (Alexander 2010a: 11). In short, immersion is a movement from an object’s surface to its depth, a dialectical process between “subjectification” and “materialization” (Alexander 2008: 6). Such a “‘mystical’ experience” lets the “distinction between subject and object” dissolve and the duality between them disappear (Alexander 2008: 7). Alexander (2010a: 11) likens icon’s aesthetic surface to a vacuum cleaner sucking the spectator into meaning. For it is hard to imagine any deep cultural meanings one would find inside of a vacuum cleaner, a better metaphor would probably be one of a portal which, after she touches it, sucks the viewer in on one side and subsequently spews her out in a different di-­‐
mension, that is, in social reality. The sensual contact with surface, “whether by sight, smell, taste, sound or touch,” is essential for the transition of meaning, since “(t)he iconic is about experience, not communication” (Alexander 2010a: 11). This notion of iconicity reminds very much of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink. In the first chapter called The statue that didn’t look right, Gladwell (2007: 3–17) tells a story of a kouros bought by an art museum in California. There was a strong contro-­‐
29
In his narrative analysis of guillotine, Smith quotes a notion of an experience (that could be now de-­‐
scribed as iconic) found in Freud’s interpretation of Moses of Michelangelo statue. “According to Freud cultural objects that are ‘unsolved riddles to our understanding . . .’ and refuse a simple, consensual explanation are often those which produce feelings of ‘awe’ (1955: 211). They have a ‘magical appeal’ and invite us to discover the source of ‘a power that is beyond them alone’ (1955: 213).” (Smith 2003:46) Alt-­‐
hough implicit, in the excerpt one easily reveals the idea of surface and depth distinction as well as a hint of immersion. 46 versy concerning the origins of the kouros: while special tests of statue’s material proved its old age, the art historian and experts on Greek art felt repelled by that stat-­‐
ue, since there was “something wrong” with it—however, they could not tell what it was. Eventually, after the purchase was made and some other materials testifying kou-­‐
ros’s origin were inspected, it turned out that it was a fake. Many art historians knew it at the first sight, though. How could they? I argue, using Alexander’s terms, that the answer lies in their ability to “read” the iconic; once they saw the statue, they knew. They were able to “understand without knowing, or at least without knowing that one knows,” which is the characteristic of iconic consciousness (Alexander 2010a: 11). It is exactly such cases what allows Alexander to describe materiality as a “non-­‐verbal me-­‐
dium for symbolic communication” that does not substitute signs but offers an alterna-­‐
tive for using them (Alexander 2008: 12). However, iconic experience is not exclusively about art—the very opposite is true, as Alexander (2008, 2010a, 2010b) shows. Mundane iconic experience follows the same principles as the one of art, in which there are deep meanings expressed through aes-­‐
thetic material surfaces. The fact that social value is signified by materiality provides the opportunity for sensual contact with the aesthetic surface forms, whether by sight, smell, taste, sound or touch in everyday life as well. But again, it is not the aesthetic surface alone what produces “(t)he thrills and fears” one experiences during an en-­‐
counter with an icon; those feelings are “informed by the meaning structures that lie beneath” (Alexander 2010a: 14). The sensual encounter with the surface then draws the subject during the process of immersion to the social meanings of the depth. For being able to “read” the deep meanings we need iconic consciousness, which is closely related to one’s own experience—the viewer must understand icons “by feeling, by contact, by the ‘evidence of the senses’ rather than the mind” (Alexander 2010a: 11). In this point lies another difference between art and mundane experience and the kind of iconic consciousness needed for such experience. In the artistic realm, the ability to evaluate and experience the aesthetics of art is limited and has to be gained by educa-­‐
tion; however, these conditions do not apply for the surface experience of things in the course of everyday life (Alexander 2010a: 14). As an example, Alexander (Alexander 2010a: 14) suggests that everyone is able to recognize and evaluate a pretty woman or a 47 handsome man, because everyone simply “knows”—and all one needs for such an evaluation is just a Kantian disposition to be moved. During mundane iconic experi-­‐
ence, “self, reason, morality, and society” are defined (Alexander 2010a: 18). Icons pro-­‐
vide us with ontological security, which stems from the sense of being a part of “some-­‐
thing bigger,” something that transcends the single actors, that is “beyond the comprehension of society members” and that allows them to participate in it (Bart-­‐
manski and Alexander 2012: 2). That makes iconicity one of the bases of social life, for it lets us be part of the group and also makes relationships as well as hierarchies possi-­‐
ble (Alexander 2008). 2.4. Icons as myths Alexander’s articles about icons (2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2012) are largely based on critique of Kant’s categories of the beautiful and the sublime, because they do not apprehend the distinction between surfaces and depths; therefore, they are essentializing. Kant seems to have failed to recognize the constructed character of aesthetic surface and concluded that women are beautiful (simply because they are women) and men are sublime. Alexander’s explanation for Kant’s shortcoming is that people, in the course of everyday life, experience icons in naturalized ways, which means that they consider the aesthetic dimension to be also the true meaning of a given thing (Alexander 2012: 26). That is also the reason why the very same “aesthetic essentialism”, which Al-­‐
exander has found in Kant’s works, still plays an important role in contemporary popu-­‐
lar culture and in the way how it works with binary oppositions in the very same gen-­‐
dered way (2010b: 330). In other words, cultural industry produces and presents the “surfaces” of female celebrity-­‐icons that are beautiful and those of male icons that are sublime. Since surface and depth are on the empirical level intertwined, these aesthetic surfaces are consequently used for naturalizing moral qualities. Therefore can the im-­‐
age of a woman be constructed as one of a “light, delicate, erotic” princess, while a man has to be a wise, strong and courageous (anti)heroe (Alexander 2010b: 330–331). Also Becker appositely noted that “people do not experience their aesthetic beliefs as merely arbitrary and conventional; they feel that they are natural, proper and moral” (1974a: 773). Breaking the required image, such as a refusal to wear skirts if you are a 48 woman or having long nails as a man, which is actually an “attack” on aesthetics, be-­‐
comes (because of the intertwinement of surface and form) then an attack on a morali-­‐
ty (Becker 1974a: 773). As long as there are such particular social meanings that seem to “intrinsically demand some specific articulation of the beautiful or the sublime” (Al-­‐
exander 2012: 26), one of the main goals of the newborn theory of iconic power is to overcome the essentializing tendencies of ordinary everyday thinking. By providing answer to the question how meaning, soul, and spirit manifest themselves through ma-­‐
teriality? (Alexander 2010a: 12), we should be able to reverse the process and to de-­‐
naturalize the meanings of naturalized cultural constructions (Bartmanski and Alex-­‐
ander 2012: 2). A similar issue was addressed by Alexander already in his Meanings of (Social) Life (2003), where he argued that naturalized cultural constructions (or myths, in Barthes’s terminology) and essentialized interpretations of everyday experiences are of large im-­‐
portance for society. “We need myths if we are to transcend the banality of material life. We need narratives if we are to make progress and experience tragedy. We need to divide the sacred from profane if we are to pursue the good and protect ourselves from evil.” (Alexander 2003: 4) However, at that time the theoretical emphasis of cultural sociology was still put on language, narratives and performances. It was only after the recognition of materiality’s role in social life that icons appeared on the list of natural-­‐
ized cultural constructions. Since there is a strong similarity between the concept of myth as it was worked out by Roland Barthes during the 1950s (1.3) and Alexander’s notion of icon (and Barthes’s work has without any doubt influenced Alexander’s thinking, for he quotes him quite frequently), in the following I compare their perspec-­‐
tives and make explicit the parallels between the concepts of myth and icon. The notion of myth draws on Saussurean dyadic sign model; Barthes’s myth consists of form and concept, which stand in a conventional, culturally constructed relationship to each other. Analytical distinction put between form and concept has its equivalent in Barthes’s image analysis (1.3), where the form consists of literal, denoted image, while the concept is made up by symbolic, connoted image. It is the same idea from which Alexander’s distinction between iconic surface and depth stems. Therefore, the myth can be thought of as the deep cultural meaning hidden beneath the surface. 49 Moreover, one mythical concept may be repeated and represented by a number of dif-­‐
ferent forms (Barthes 2012: 259–261), as well as there may be different surfaces for the meaning connoting an iconic social thinker (e.g. Foucault and Malinowski as demon-­‐
strated by Bartmanski (2012a)). Such possibility of various form-­‐substitutions is also illustrated by Barthes’s claim “(f)orm is empty, but present; meaning is absent, and therefore full” (2012: 270). Also, as well as in icon, the relation between the denoted and the connoted is culturally constructed and therefore conventional, e.g. there is no “natural” connection between, e.g. a sausage and the idea of “Germanicity” evoked by a sight of a package of sausages or a smell of them etc. The iconic surface points to the meaning and eventually seems to be the meaning itself, and it is on the very same principle how “the denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message” (Barthes 1977: 45). The process of naturalization of myth has in Barthes’s example of advertising pictures considerable persuasive force, since the literal surface of a photograph makes the impression of being the “evidence of this is how it was30” (1977: 44, italics in origi-­‐
nal). To sum up, this debate leads to the conclusion that icons have mythical character, for they do, as well as myths, have the power to naturalize “arbitrary meaning structures” and to essentialize “historically contingent aesthetic forms” (Alexander 2012: 26). As Barthes (2012: 269) puts it, “(m)yth begins where meaning ends.” Therefore everyone who endeavors to interpret icons runs a normative risk and “must beware of assuming that a ‘look’ naturally expresses anything,” because it does not (Alexander 2010a: 20). However, “iconic consciousness inevitably makes it seem that way” (ibid.). 30
The current approach to photographs acknowledges the fact that they make “an impresion that some-­‐
thing happened this way,” but at the same time they actually “represent one way of seeing, one perspec-­‐
tive of the reality,” and therefore are a reductive selection of reality (Pilarczyk and Mietzner 2000: 345). Becker (1974b: 10) makes a similar point: “As you look through the viewfinder you wait until what you see ‘looks right,’ until the composition and the moment make sense, until you see something that corre-­‐
sponds to your conception of what's going on.” 50 2.5. Achievements & benefits of iconic theory To begin, when looked at from a more general perspective, the theory of iconic power poses a logical step in Alexander’s theoretical effort whose beginnings can be traced back to the 1980s. In his essay The New Theoretical Movement (Alexander 1988) he pre-­‐
sented a critique of hitherto existing social theories and suggested a neo-­‐functionalist, synthetic attempt to combine Parsons’s functionalist theory with subjectivist interpre-­‐
tative approaches. By uniting the one-­‐sided micro-­‐ and macro perspectives, the old dichotomy of individualistic and collectivist approach would be overcome. Yet there were more problems and theoretical dilemmas to solve; in particular, Alexander dealt with the issue of reconciling the notion of freedom and order in society that was close-­‐
ly linked to the question of rationality of social actors. “It is the independence of the individual that makes order problematic, and it is this problematizing of order that makes sociology possible. At the same time, sociologists acknowledge that the every-­‐
day life of an individual has a patterned quality. It is this tension between freedom and order that provides the intellectual and moral rationale for sociology,” he wrote (Alex-­‐
ander 1988: 85). In order to overcome these intellectual challenges, Alexander formulated a basic re-­‐
quirement, namely that “action and structure must now be intertwined” (1988: 77). Hence he suggested a new theoretical direction that made an effort to reconcile both collectivist and individualist approaches by postulating structures on one side and non-­‐rational actors, driven by ideals and emotions, on the other side (ibid.). The source of ideals and emotions is culture, an independent sphere of collectively struc-­‐
tured meanings that is situated between structures and actors, shapes social life, inter-­‐
feres with it, and directs what happens (Alexander 2003: 3). Yet it was already in the essay from 1988 where Alexander’s call for a “robust conception of culture” appeared, which was later established by the strong programme manifesto (2.1). The strong pro-­‐
gramme has, nevertheless, in the first decade of its existence mostly focused on collec-­‐
tive representations, emotions, morality and other immaterial issues. Such interests have, however, rather contributed to the reproduction of materialistic distinction be-­‐
tween “ideal” culture and “material” structure (Emirbayer 2004). 51 Thus, the newborn iconic theory with its effort to synthesize materiality and culture seems to be overcoming of materialism and idealism and hence filling up the “empty” spaces that have been until now dwelling in the core of Alexander’s bold theoretical attempt from the 1980s. It is also noteworthy that the way how Alexander understands icon mirrors the same principles that analytically distinguish between action and structure. In other words, the relation of iconic surface and depth that intertwines form and content is analogue to the distinction of action and structure. Second, by bringing the topic of aesthetics, which is normally a concern of humanities into sociology, iconic theory managed to formulate a completely new research pro-­‐
gramme (Bartmanski 2012 even talks about a paradigm shift). To be sure, the shift of sociological attention to the visual and material has opened new perspectives for theo-­‐
retical effort as well as it brought new questions, disputes and research topics. Third, the theory of iconic power succeeds in including sensuality and emotions linked with the experience of the aesthetic and material to the sociological discourse. The emphasis put on culturally produced emotions and their analytical grab and analysis successfully follows the direction laid out both by Alexander in 1988 (see above) and in the manifesto of the strong programme (2.1). By stressing the importance of iconic ex-­‐
perience in modern life, cultural sociology continues to walk the Durkheimian line that lies at the very heart of the strong programme, for it managed to include totem in the form of icon to the contemporary sociological theory. Next, iconicity also supplements the list of cultural representations that used to consist of narratives and performances that through the concepts of myths and rituals re-­‐
searched concrete events and actions. After the iconic turn in cultural sociology, iconicity as cultural representation was included and the concept of icon was devel-­‐
oped for analysis of materiality (Binder 2013). Furthermore, the theory of iconic power compensates by its concept of iconicity for the linguistic one-­‐sidedness of structuralism and hermeneutics (Binder 2014b). The iconic turn has caused a significant expansion of the opinion that the relationship be-­‐
tween text and image has to be radically rethought (cf. Binder 2013, Bartmanski 2012b, Bohnsack 2007 & 2009, Mitchell 1994 & 2005, Przyborski and Slunecko 2012). Since the 52 issue of rethinking of the relation of texts and images within the discourse of social sciences is of crucial importance, for it suggests changing of the language-­‐oriented ap-­‐
proach typical for human sciences in the 20th century and brings certain crucial ques-­‐
tions about the future direction of sociological approach toward the visual. Although there is a view that the focus on everyday iconicity, in the way how it is used by the theory of iconic power, has brought not much more to cultural sociology than a fresh, new opportunity to narrate “colourful stories about the rise of icons to fame” and to show what their impact on collective identity is (Giesen 2012: 249), drawing on Bartmanski (2012b) I argue that one of the considerable benefits of iconic theory is the effort to overcome the preference for language, which marked the character of sociolo-­‐
gy for decades. 2.5.1. Nobody puts images in a corner (anymore) Human and social sciences of the 20th century lived and developed in an era of “ab-­‐
sorption of image by discourse” (Bartmanski 2012b: 4). Especially after Rorty’s Linguis-­‐
tic Turn the focus of scholars was mainly (save some scarce exceptions) on language, texts and discourses. “Meanings can only be shared through our common access to language” (Hall 1997: 1), was a predominant, common, and widespread belief. The “epistemological preference for words to images” (Bartmanski 2012b: 5), caused by the turn to language, was the reason why social research remained ignorant to pictures and preferred texts; social reality in its scientific form thus also must have taken on the form of protocols, i.e. texts, notes Bohnsack (2007: 22). Furthermore, with the assump-­‐
tion that meaning was constituted by language, research data were constructed31 in the same, linguistic way (ibid., see also Przyborski and Slunecko 2012). As a result, the “sensual and aesthetic spheres, visuality included, were simply not considered a basis for serious sociological scholarship,” notes Bartmanski (2012b: 2). The other extreme position ensued from so called pictorial turn announced by W. J. T. Mitchell (1.5). While trying to gain more attention to the visual culture, Mitchell was 31
The term “construction of research data” is used in the same sense as formulated by Latour (2005). 53 determined to give absolute precedence to image and to suppress the language. Thus, although he asked a very similar question as cultural sociology does (namely, what sort of power pictures have to effect human emotions and behaviour? (Mitchell 2005: 28), his approach did not offer any promising nor useful alternative for social sciences, for in his radical opposition to linguistic turn Mitchell had simply gone “too far” in its post-­‐
modernity. As a result, the old, established duality of image and text was continuously reproduced. On one hand, there was a modern logocentrism that was suppressing sur-­‐
faces and, on the other hand, there was Mitchell’s postmodernism downplaying discur-­‐
sive meaning (2012b). The problem with privileging either text or image and condemning the other is that the distinction drawn between them is never neutral; in fact, it can be rather seen, us-­‐
ing Durkheimian terms, as a binary opposition of sacred and profane, as Bartmanski puts it. He also claims that sociology needs a new perspective in order to overcome this binary and to bridge the two competing opinions. The inspiration for such a new per-­‐
spective, he suggests, can be found in the strong programme in cultural sociology in-­‐
spired by the iconic turn that gives preference to neither32. In this new perspective, the iconic and the discursive are treated as mutually constitutive, equal members of the process of meaning-­‐making. Put differently, the iconic theory recognizes the im-­‐
portance of visuality and its influence on the symbolic order of society, and acknowl-­‐
edges that visuality and linguality are both relevant meaning-­‐makers constitutive of human collective representations (Bartmanski 2012b: 2). This perspective can be illus-­‐
trated with Alexander’s critique of Harré’s claim that “a material object is transformed to a social object by its embedment in a narrative” (quoted in Alexander 2010a: 12). In line with the iconic theory he argues that it is the sensuous, visual surface of the thing that leads us to the narrative. As Przyborski and Slunecko sum up, “(w)e not only dwell in a house of language but also in a house of images. Our access to the world is no less structured by images than it is by language” (2012: 40). 32
Mitchell himself acknowledges that for a scientific use the iconic turn proposed by Boehm will be more convenient than pictorial turn. Pictorial turn, he writes, takes place on the level of society, while iconic turn implies the scientific use (Boehm and Mitchell 2009:115). 54 According to Bartmanski (2012b), the impact of the visual on the symbolic order of so-­‐
ciety remains after many years of ignorance under-­‐theorized. With reference to Panof-­‐
sky he argues that previous research of the visual was concerned with “delimited, mostly pictorial artistic representations and conventional symbols33” (2012b: 5). Contra-­‐
ry to that, contemporary studies of iconicity should focus on the interaction of surface and depth and on “connecting discursive meaning with the perceptual and palpable” (Bartmanski and Alexander 2012: 2), so that they do not prefer either word or images and by that will not reproduce the old dualism, for both language and image play an essential role in establishing a meaningful collective life. As Mitchell once declared, “(v)ision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it’s not reduci-­‐
ble to language, to the ‘sign,’ or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language.” (Mitchell 2005: 47) It seems that, at least in the per-­‐
spective of cultural sociology, the attempt to liberate pictures from discursive hegemo-­‐
ny proved successful. Nevertheless, the current notion that scholarly attention should be paid not only to language but also to the visual—since iconicity is as well as text fundamentally important for processes of meaning-­‐making—appears to be the last assumption shared both by the cultural sociological iconic theory and by the art histor-­‐
ical iconic turn (1.6). 33
This argument is, however, at least in the case of Panofsky, not valid; his iconological interpretation looking for underlying principles and a modus operandi of art production was aimed at interpretation of media of various kinds including architecture or music (cf. Panofsky 1989, Imdahl 2006, Bohnsack 2009 and 1.2.2). Furthermore, the claim that Panofsky has treated images as mere passive reflections of “struc-­‐
tures of power” (Bartmanski 2012b: 5) needs to be—not only with the respect for the following argumen-­‐
tation—reconsidered. From Panofsky’s writings follows that iconological interpretation was meant to transcend the iconographical analysis, which was only the second and only step in his method (1.2.1) that was concerned with representations and symbols (cf. Bohnsack 2009). Elsewhere, Bohnsack also ex-­‐
plains that the move from iconography to iconology is the same as the change of question of what is made to how is it made, not in the sense of images reflecting some structures but rather in the sense of understanding images as cultural products of specific era and specific individuals sharing the historically and culturally specific space of experience (2007:28–31). This space of experience is based on tacit, pre-­‐
reflective or atheoretical knowledge, accessible through iconological analysis, and produces “characteris-­‐
tic meaning that documents itself” (Wesenssinn) or, to use a more popular term, habitus. 55 “Pictures have the same quality, in the sense of energy, as guns.” Horst Bredekamp interviewed by Wood, 2012 56 3 The problem of two iconic turns Theorists of the iconic turn proposed by Boehm as well as cultural sociologists were given voice in Iconic Power, a book with the goal of making “the study of material life more cultural” (Bartmanski and Alexander 2012: 2). But once familiar with the ap-­‐
proach of art-­‐theoretical iconic turn, when one starts reading the book, there are cer-­‐
tain questions that keep popping up in her mind. How much do these two perspectives actually have in common? Is the iconic turn in cultural sociology indeed inspired by Boehm’s iconic turn, as Bartmanski (2012b) suggests? And what are the differences be-­‐
tween these two approaches? Considering the incongruence one finds when reading Iconic Power, it seems that Moxey (2008: 136) was true not only in his comparison of pictorial and iconic turn: “Curiously enough, the Anglo-­‐American and German initiatives often appear to be un-­‐
aware of each other, though they have much in common.” In the following chapter, I argue that there is a similar unfamiliarity34 emergent between the notion of iconic turn 34
Interestingly enough, Alexander has never quoted any of Boehm’s work (the only exception is the introduction to Iconic Power that was, however, written in cooperation with Bartmanski 2012). This fact may shed light on some fundamental differences between “their” respective iconic turns. 57 in the form proposed by Boehm and the iconic turn suggested by the strong pro-­‐
gramme with the purpose of comparing the two rather different perspectives made visible by Iconic Power. Although both approaches indeed agree on the importance of shifting scholarly atten-­‐
tion to the visual, which has been deliberately ignored for decades, and that both visu-­‐
ality and linguality are equally fundamental for meaning-­‐making, I was dealing with the question how is it possible that Bartmanski, with reference to the iconic turn, sug-­‐
gests to overcome the duality of word and image, while Boehm and other theorist of iconic turn insist on their categorical difference? Drawing on the research presented in the previous chapters, on arguments suggested by Bernhard Giesen (2012) in afterword to Iconic Power and also on current efforts made in picture analysis, I argue that the crucial differences stem from one simple fact that was already pointed out by Giesen: they have and work with different conceptions of iconicity. 3.1. Boehm’s iconic turn The core of Boehm’s theoretical effort is, in the first place, strictly art theoretical. As such, the method used for analysis of visual objects draws mostly on the interpretative effort made by Panofsky (1.2) that is constantly kept in use and improved to fit con-­‐
temporary needs. The iconic turn proposed by Boehm insists on keeping categorical boundaries between images and texts because it recognizes their different ontological status. Similar as-­‐
sumption can be found in the work of Roland Barthes, who mentions projective pow-­‐
ers and polysemy of images that are opposed to repressive value of texts. From his per-­‐
spective, texts are usually used to “fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs,” i.e. to reduce the polysemy35 (Barthes 1977: 38–
39). 35
Barthes also differentiates two functions of text in relation to image: anchorage using repressive value, and relay that works in a complementary relation to an image Barthes 1977: 39–41 . 58 For Boehm, too, the way how images and texts create meaning is different. If there are any structural qualities of text comparable to those typical of image, they are to be found in metaphor, which is characteristic by “incompleteness, openness and ambigui-­‐
ty of the form,” (Boehm 2006: 26) and by the impossibility to translate a metaphor—
linguistic image—into normal language. Boehm calls the specific ability of images to activate passions and evoke meaning iconic difference (for a broader discussion of the term see 1.6). Iconic difference constitutes the possibility to see “something” in the im-­‐
age, something different than strokes, lines and stains of color; it “separates the visual surface of an image from its emerging visual depth” (Binder 2012: 102, my italics). Icon-­‐
ic difference can also be (due to its rather vague definition) interpreted as “the rela-­‐
tionship between the material presence of images and the represented, but in fact ab-­‐
sent, reality” (Giesen 2012: 248), which, in other words, means that the image “shows itself, but also something different” (Binder 2013: 78). Iconic difference thus makes im-­‐
ages distinct in comparison to texts, for it accounts for their simultaneity, which pro-­‐
vides images with specific meaning that cannot be substituted by anything else (Bohnsack 2007: 35). It is also due to their iconicity why “(p)ictures don’t allow us to translate them fully into discursive language.” (Michel 2006: 64) To sum up, the basic assumption of iconic turn is that images are categorically different from linguistic sys-­‐
tems by their simultaneity and iconicity. Thus, if we want to treat images equally fun-­‐
damental for creating social meanings as we do with texts, we have to focus on these special qualities. Hence, as Moxey (2008) puts it, iconic turn considers physical proper-­‐
ties of images as important as their social function and stresses the independence and autonomy of the visual. 3.1.1. Focus: genuinely pictorial aspects of the image Therefore, the methods suggested by proponents of iconic turn focus exclusively on the “genuinely pictorial aspects of the image” (Przyborski and Slunecko 2012: 44), as is the case of Max Imdahl’s iconic36. In reference to Panofsky’s method, iconic was meant to improve the model suggested for iconological interpretation. For Imdahl, the prob-­‐
36
The following description of Imdahl’s iconic draws heavily on Bohnsack’s (2009) article about picture interpretation and the documentary method. 59 lem of iconology was that it searches meanings with the help or through texts (consid-­‐
er the iconographical analysis based on literary and textual knowledge (1.2.1)). There-­‐
fore, iconic interpretation begins on the level of pre-­‐iconographical description and subsequently does not proceed to the level of meaning dependent on content. Instead, Imdahl focuses on the formal composition and significance of forms, trying to abstain from textual iconographical knowledge. The methodological suppression of textual knowledge enables Imdahl to treat image as a self-­‐referential system37, while the picto-­‐
rial composition itself provides him with access to iconic meaning. This meaning (Sinnkomplexität des Übergegensätzlichen, translated as “complexity of meaning char-­‐
acterized by transcontrariness”) escapes verbal expression38 and can only be described “in direct reference to the picture” (Bohnsack 2009: 308). That is also the reason why Imdahl always introduces and demonstrates his iconic empirically on images (Przyborski and Slunecko 2012: 44). A similar goal to come up with an interpretive method that would cease to explain im-­‐
ages through texts was pursued by Mitchell (1994), who suggested a new, revised ico-­‐
nology called critical iconology. However, the problem with Mitchell’s iconology is that it does not distinguish between pictures and visual culture (Belting 2002: 15). To un-­‐
derstand why it is important, from the perspective of iconic turn, to differentiate be-­‐
tween two-­‐ and three-­‐ dimensional works of art, it is suitable to turn to Imdahl’s work again. In his text about iconic (2006), he develops an argument concerning the con-­‐
trast between the medium of image and of sculpture or object. He argues that the ex-­‐
perience induced by an image and by an object is incomparable at least in three as-­‐
pects. First, there is one possible view for an image but an indefinite number of 37
The principle is similar to Boehm’s concept of iconic difference that, too, assumes that images gain their meanings from mutual internal oppositions. 38
It is important to distinguish between the impossibility to translate the exact meanings of an image into language and the impossibility to interpret or talk about these meanings at all. For example, Barthes expresses the opinion that we cannot describe this complexity of meaning, which he calls “obtuse” and which exists outside the language system (Bohnsack 2009: 308). Contrary to that, Imdahl and others approve of the possibility of interpretation: “Though images can never be completely translated into language, we are able to talk about images and share our experiences with them” (Binder 2012:103). This assumption is also crucial for a scholarly study of images; as Binder (2013) also aptly points out, if we do not develop a way of talking and writing about images, we will become mystics. 60 possible views of a statue. Hence, second, the image, its view, and the experience of it stay the same for ever, while with the sculpture there is no main-­‐view and no main-­‐
experience given. Third, the imagination is in both situations focused differently: when encountering the object, the consciousness is focused on the present, while during viewing the picture the spectator’s imagination focuses on the absent (Imdahl 2006: 319–324). Now, the focus on the absent, which is created by iconic difference and therefore distinctive of images, becomes one of the principal disagreements between iconic turn introduced by art theoreticians and between the second iconic turn, an-­‐
nounced by cultural sociologists. 3.2. Iconic turn of the strong programme The fact that there are different matters of interest formulated by proponents of re-­‐
spective iconic turns becomes clear when we compare the main questions asked. On one hand, there is the problem of How images create meaning? (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 106). On the other hand, we have a question How meaning manifests itself through materiality? (Alexander 2010a: 12) Therefore, the focus of iconic theory suggested by the strong programme lies not ex-­‐
clusively on images, but it seems to encompass everything39: from images to objects and persons to events. Obviously, the meaning of “iconic” denotes something different in comparison with Boehm; in fact, the word is used in a common, everyday way, and therefore understood as “socially eminent status” (Giesen 2012: 249). Furthermore, to-­‐
gether with the emphasis put on emotions triggered by icons, the cultural sociological notion of iconicity becomes rather sensual and therefore similar to aura, continues Giesen. “If we can reduce without remainder the meaning of ‘iconic’ to ‘auratic’ or ‘charismatic,’ why do we need the term?” (Giesen 2012: 250). In reaction to Giesen’s critique, Bartmanski and Alexander (2012) admit that the prob-­‐
lem how to define iconicity will probably become a contested issue, provided that the 39
While Alexander talks about his “vitalist vision, with its omnivorous, boundary-­‐crossing aestheticism” (2008: 11), Giesen in his critique prefers the term “colourful multifariousness” (2012: 249). 61 concept of icon will gain broader attention within sociological theory. If we do not want to evade the problem of defining icon (even though Sonnevend (2012: 223) argues that due to various substances and complex interrelations of icons it is impossible to define them for sociological purposes), two elementary problems and puzzles remain to be solved. The first main question for us to ask is, whether iconicity should refer to visual images exclusively or whether we should make an effort in encompassing the whole sensual experience. The second questions deals with the problem of “sacred-­‐
ness” of icons; should we focus on mundane objects of everyday experience, or should the iconic theory deal only with “sacred,” auratic things? (Bartmanski and Alexander 2012: 11) The purpose of the following discussion is to suggest possible solutions to the-­‐
se crucial problems. Drawing on the approach of art theoretical iconic turn, Panofsky’s iconology and Bohnsack’s documentary method for analyzing pictures, I argue that future approach to iconicity should stick with its visual definition. Subsequently, I also demonstrate the benefit of combining both visuality and sacredness in the definition of icon in Binder’s approach. 3.3. Suggestions Although there is probably no art historian or theoretician who would not know, refer to or oppose Panofsky’s method of iconological interpretation of works of arts, in the sociological field has Panofsky remained relatively unnoticed. The importance of his work is mirrored in the vocabulary used by scholars dealing with arts, namely in cogni-­‐
zant and unified use of terms pre-­‐iconography, iconography, and iconology. Therefore it is rather confusing to adopt only the “surface” without its “depth”, i.e. to use the terms independently on their (almost traditional) meaning in the way as cultural soci-­‐
ology in its iconic theory did. As a consequence, Alexander (2008) treats the icon-­‐ words completely arbitrarily and mixes iconic with iconographic etc. When Panofsky gets quoted, it is only for the sake of a general critical reference to the iconological method40. However, it seems that greater familiarity with Panofsky’s writings would 40
Bartmanski writes: “(I)f visual research was systematically conducted at all, it focused on delimited, mostly pictorial artistic representations and conventional symbols (e.g. Panofsky). Its key descriptive and explanatory category was ‘reflection’. From the so-­‐defined scientific vantage point, the visible, ex-­‐
62 not only prevent the terminological inconsistencies and limit the use of icon-­‐ terms to images, which are just a tip of the iceberg. Until now, as Bartmanski rightly notes, “sociology has evidenced hardly any concern for iconicity” (2012: 11), and therefore its methods for dealing with pictures are still “in infancy” (Bohnsack 2009: 317). The main benefit of giving voice to Panofsky and his successors is that it can provide us with more elaborated methods for gaining access to and interpretation of images. “If we distinguish just between surface and depth, we risk plunging immediately to the iconological dimension,” warned Giesen (2012: 248) against too simplistic and reductive division of analytical components of icons. Let us take a closer look at this statement. 3.3.1. Surface & depth is not enough The fact that Alexander’s analytical perspective on icon draws heavily on Barthes makes him to miss some important achievements of art theory. In Alexander’s concept of icon we find an interplay of two constituents, namely of surface and depth. This ana-­‐
lytical division is based on Barthes’s notion of myth, as I demonstrated above (2.4). In other words, iconic surface stands for mythical form and iconic depth for the content or meaning of the myth. Moving from the theoretical level to practical image analysis, the Barthesian form has its equivalent in the literal, denoted message, while the mes-­‐
sage filling up the content is connoted. Now, translated into terms of Panofsky’s icono-­‐
logical method, analyzing the denoted message corresponds to the pre-­‐iconographical description on the level of phenomenal meaning, and decoding of the connoted mes-­‐
sage is analogue to Panofsky’s iconographical analysis of meaning dependent on con-­‐
tent, which is based on the textual knowledge (in this point we recognize the assump-­‐
tion about the mutual relationship of image and word or, in other words, of surface and depth). Hence, the conceptual problem with icon becomes obvious—what has been left out is the level of intrinsic or documentary meaning that can be achieved on-­‐
pressive, aesthetic entities designed by individuals and groups typically ‘reflected’ motives and struc-­‐
tures of power and/or ‘mirrored’ conditions of their possibility. Put differently, the seen was constructed mostly passively. The focus was on why and what made images, not on how and what images themselves do or can generate in turn.” (2012b: 5) 63 ly by iconological interpretation. Although Giesen (2012) argues that the surface-­‐depth division causes an immediate passage to the iconological dimension, after the compar-­‐
ison of writings by Panofsky, Barthes and Alexander, a conclusion suggested by Ralf Bohnsack seems more plausible: “On the basis of Roland Barthes’ theory of semiotics, there seems to be no successful way to develop a method for the interpretation of pic-­‐
tures which is relevant for the social sciences and is able to transcend the surface of iconographical or connotative meanings.” (Bohnsack 2009: 308) Bohnsack also sup-­‐
ports this claim by pointing at Barthes’ notion of “obtuse” meaning that transcends the level of connotative meaning, is characteristic for images, and exists outside the lan-­‐
guage and therefore remains inarticulable and inexpressive by words and interpreta-­‐
tion. Analytical distinction of surface and depth does thus not go deep enough, and practically prevents us from talking about and interpreting the obtuse meaning charac-­‐
teristic of images. To support this argument, I revise Alexander’s account of icons tak-­‐
en from his Iconic Experience in Art and Life (2008) and Celebrity-­‐Icon (2010b) using Panofsky’s terminology. In the analysis of Giacometti’s Standing Woman, Alexander begins with an extensive description of the statue’s surface, which reminds of Panofsky’s pre-­‐iconographic de-­‐
scription. Afterwards he introduces Giacometti’s biography, while quoting his diary and other resources documenting changes in artist’s methods and worldview. This se-­‐
cond step is thus, by its embedment in narrative, analogue to iconographical analysis based on literary knowledge. A very similar approach is used in the example with Audrey Hepburn’s Little Black Dress. Here we are offered with a collection of stories connected to the famous actress, the famous movie and the famous dress. The iconic character of the dress is illustrated by strong feelings of thrill experienced and noted by Hepburn’s fans who have encountered garments once owned and worn by the actress. The sensual surface of the icon draws us into the depth and enables us to feel the icon-­‐
ic meaning. In both cases, however, the icons described by Alexander are embedded in discourse, which bestows them with deeper meaning (Binder 2012: 102). In other words, if the dress would not have starred in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the experience of wearing it would not have been the same. The problem of this approach is that without narratives, Alexander’s icons become mere stuff. If one does not know the movie, he 64 can barely experience immersion when he encounters the Little Black Dress, for he will encounter a little black dress; the same applies to the statue of Standing Woman. However, if we limit our notion of iconic experience to images and define iconicity as their unique quality, we may proceed with the analysis further, drawing on the ability of images to create visual depth on the principle of iconic difference. Only then it is possible to claim that “the emergence of iconic depth is never completely arbitrary, but rather tied to the iconic properties of the surface” (Binder 2012: 102). In other words, icons-­‐images have the power to elicit emotional reactions even if the viewer does not know the context to which their surface points to (consider Binder’s example of iconic photographs from Abu Ghraib (2013), or Nick Ut’s famous Napalm Girl). But we should not stick with mere wrapping of the sensual experience of an icon into related narra-­‐
tives, for this approach terminates on the iconographical level of analysis and cannot transcend it: “What we can achieve (…) is a range of colorful stories about the rise of an “icon” to fame and its impact on collective identity” (Giesen 2012: 249). 3.3.2.Problem of pre-­‐reflexive experience Bartmanski notes that the unresolved questions that should be answered by iconic theory are “How exactly does the visual inform what we know and shape what we be-­‐
lieve? How contingent is its elusive power on other aspects of social life?” (2012b: 13). The underlying assumption of these questions, namely that images condition our en-­‐
tire worldview (Weltanschauung) and that they not only conserve and transmit it, but also help to mediate and negotiate it (Przyborski and Slunecko 2012: 40), is shared also by recent sociology influenced by Boehm’s iconic turn and dealing with images. The problem is that one cannot directly ask people about their perception of images, for such a question would be based on the assumption that they are able to formulate their habitualized knowledge (ibid.: 47). Put differently, iconic experience is pre-­‐
reflexive, i.e. below the level of explication (Bohnsack 2009: 299)—this assumption corresponds to the notion of sensual iconic experience, which is based on understand-­‐
ing by “feeling” described by Alexander (2010a). According to Becker, such emotional effects of works of arts are produced by shared, social conventions and customs (Beck-­‐
er 1974a: 771). Belting calls this a phenomenon of period eye, by which he expresses the 65 fact that the way how people view works of arts41 is closely bound up with conventions of perceiving of our own time that cannot be explained by mere physiological vision42 (Belting 2000: 161). However, different conventions of perceiving are limited not only temporarily, but also culturally, for people from different cultural contexts do not share the “way of viewing” (e.g. reaction of the Arab world to Mohammed cartoons compared with Abu Ghraib photographs (Binder 2012: 114)). In order to achieve under-­‐
standing in a communication via images, there is a necessary condition of being “able to read visual images in roughly similar ways” (Hall 1997: 4). People use conventions for understanding images unreflexively, “just as we may not know the grammar and syntax of our verbal language though we speak and understand it” (Becker 1974b: 6). The unreflexive character of understanding is recognized also by Alexander, when he writes that iconic knowledge is based on experience—one “simply knows”. However, he grounds the ability of “simply knowing” in one’s disposition to be moved and does not address this issue any further. By that he rather evades the issue of atheoretical, aesthetic experience, which thus remains a challenging question iconic theory in its cultural sociological form. 3.3.3.
Bohnsack’s documentary method The point of departure formulated by Bohnsack is congruent with the basic assump-­‐
tions of iconic turn: social reality is constituted by images that have the capacity to provide orientation for action and everyday practice, since typification is based on mental images that depend on iconic knowledge (2009). However, the understanding “through the medium of iconicity is mostly pre-­‐reflexive,” and therefore belongs to the level of atheoretical or tacit knowledge, which is imparted by iconicity, text and prac-­‐
tice (ibid.: 299). On one hand, the access to tacit knowledge is provided by the transi-­‐
tion from iconography to iconology in Panofsky’s analysis that enables us to reveal the instrinsic, documentary meaning—Wesenssinn (i.e. characteristic meaning that docu-­‐
41
The reference to art does not, however, prevent us from assuming that the same hold true also for viewing in general. 42
The period eye phenomenon reminds of Boehm’s distinction between seeing (as a physical process) and viewing (as a meaning-­‐making activity) (1.6.1). 66 ments itself), or habitus. The problem with Panofsky’s method is that it was not meant exclusively for analyzing images but rather aimed at different media. On the other hand, if we want to analyze only images, we can proceed from the pre-­‐iconographical description in a way suggested by Imdahl (3.1.1) and transcend the iconographical level by analyzing the composition and formal structures in a medium of picture. Imdahl’s iconic treats images as self-­‐referential systems and avoids explaining pictures by texts, while the main focus lies on formal structures of images, which are considered docu-­‐
ments for “the natural order” produced by actors themselves (Bohnsack 2009: 316). The goal of Bohnsack’s documentary method remains the same as the one of iconology—it aims at the level of tacit knowledge and documentary meaning and endeavors to gain access to the space of experience of picture producers. A central element of this space is then individual or collective habitus. Panofsky’s “habitus could be defined (...) as a system of internalized schemes that have the capacity to generate all the thoughts, perceptions, and actions characteristic of a culture, and nothing else,” wrote Bourdieu (2005: 233). With the concept of habitus one can then explain both the reception and the production of images, for it emerges on the underlying principles characteristic of a given culture and epoch. A similar view expressed Boehm by claiming that “images are bodies that are subject to historical de-­‐
terminants and effects as well as forces generating images and claiming recognition,” (2012). The assumption that reception is part of habitus confirmed Michel in his study (2006). Since images are open and contain no inherent meaning, the meaning emerges in the process of understanding, during which the form and the content are put in a relation. This understanding is directed by a convention of a specific group and thus socially embedded he concludes (Michel 2006: 20). The problem with Bohnsack’s method is that the search for habitus through the analy-­‐
sis of surface qualities of an image leads us to the sphere of tacit knowledge, which is informed by images and its central element habitus. Asking how the visual shapes what we believe thus seems to lead to pre-­‐reflexive experience (reception), conven-­‐
tions and production of images (photographs, to be exact, since Bohnsack’s method is aimed at them), which all stem from atheoretical knowledge and are part of the habi-­‐
tus. The genuinely social aspect of icons as defined by Bartmanski and Alexander, the 67 power to generate strong collective feelings and catalyze action while having impact on collective identity, is then left out. At this point, the approach to icons suggested by Werner Binder (2012, 2013) seems promising. 3.3.4.
Binder’s secular icon First of all, Binder pays attention to the origins and meanings of the word icon. On one hand, it denotes pictures and images, i.e. it is connected to vision, and on the other hand it is a religious symbol, an object of modern rituals. Further he shows that visual-­‐
ity and sacredness were fused not just in the religious icons of past time; quite the con-­‐
trary, he finds a fusion of the same elements in contemporary secular icons (Binder 2012: 101–102). That leads him to define and treat icons as visual representations of the sacred43. The notion of visual character of icons allows Binder to adopt methods of image analy-­‐
sis suggested by art theory and Bohnsack, which take into account the pictorial aspects of an image. “The prerequisite of iconic depth is of course the iconic difference. Only because the image has the power to reveal something else is the emergence of an icon-­‐
ic depth possible.” (Binder 2012: 107) Thus, special qualities of the surface allows for the creation of immaterial depth, which is “created by an interaction of spectator and ma-­‐
terial surface, by the dialectic of ‘immersion’ and ‘materialization,’ informed but not determined by discourses” (ibid.). To sum up, there are two important elements to this understanding of secular icon. The visual surface allows us to employ the methods for image analysis based exclusively on formal and compositional qualities of an image, which suppresses the textual-­‐based knowledge of context. At the same time, the analy-­‐
sis of iconic depth takes discourses and rituals into consideration and allows for em-­‐
bedment of meaning of the secular icon in the context made up by narratives and prac-­‐
43
The use of cultural sociological master binary of sacred and profane is by no means consistent in the literature. Alexander (1990) interpreted sacred as good and profane as evil, which does not correspond to Durkheim (1976) who distinguishes between pure and impure sacred (good and evil) in opposition to profane. Elsewhere (2010a), he uses the same distinction translated into aesthetic terms, when the sa-­‐
cred-­‐good is thought of as the beautiful and the profane-­‐evil becomes the sublime. However, Binder interprets Durkheim’s binary as the opposition between sacred as collective versus profane, mundane as individual. Contrary to that, Alexander’s understanding is always collective, distinguishing between sacred as extraordinary, transcendental, auratic etc. and mundane, everyday (2008). 68 tices. Thus, in this approach the aesthetic qualities and the social aspects of a secular icon are separated for the sake of respective analysis, but combined and intertwined in interpretation. “Secular icons, due to their specific visual surface, create an iconic depth that allows them to become symbols in modern rituals. To be sure, it is always the properly socialized spectator and the civil discourses that endow an image with deeper public meanings. However, the emergence of iconic depth is never completely arbi-­‐
trary, but rather tied to the iconic properties of the surface.” (Binder 2012: 102) 69 70 4 Conclusion Whether scholars were “bored with the ‘linguistic turn’” (Moxey 2008: 131) or simply inspired and excited by the aesthetic experience of the material world that encom-­‐
passes us, the accent put on materiality by the strong programme in his iconic theory represents an important step toward giving voice to material objects that shape and influence collective identity and social action. The effort to include materiality into sociological theory has brought sociological thinking closer to everyday life, for it fo-­‐
cuses not only on aesthetic experience of art but also on common mundane experi-­‐
ence, in which iconic consciousness gained by experience plays a central role. Without doubt, the idea to make sensational experiences part of serious sociological interest is similarly groundbreaking as pioneering work of Mitchell or Boehm in art theory was years ago. To suggest a cultural sociological iconic theory is to declare emancipation of scholarly interest from its discursive limits, to offer new possibilities for gaining access to social reality, and thus open new horizons for research as well. By giving voice to the visual and the material we can extend our understanding of how cultural meanings work; they are not anymore transmitted and reproduced only by narratives and per-­‐
formances. The inclusion of material environment into sociological theory is also of considerable importance with respect to Alexander’s general theoretical effort. The notion of icon as he understands it reproduces the analytical distinction of action and 71 structure and by concentrating both on materiality as well as sensuality it enables his to bridge the old Marxist opposition and incongruence between materialism and ideal-­‐
ism. One of the main benefits of iconic turn in cultural sociology is, after all, the shift of scholarly attention it brought. This does not mean sociologists will cease to analyze discourses and start to study society through images; the most important thing about the change of perspective is that they will not grant language epistemological prefer-­‐
ence over images anymore. Although it might sound odd and quite against our com-­‐
monsensical experience, the visual has, in the view of social science, only recently be-­‐
come equally important for social life as language. Sociological analysis of pictures is still quite young and therefore dependent on interpretive methods developed and used by art theory and history. Emancipating images from discursive domination, however, does not mean that one can analyze and interpret images in the same way as texts. This is the key message we receive from the proponents of iconic turn, art theorists gathered around Boehm. Con-­‐
trary to the claim that the meanings of images and texts are mutually intertwined, both iconic turn as well as pictorial turn stresses the necessity to analytically separate imag-­‐
es from textual resources during interpretation. What we gain by this separation is a focus freed from connotations and other literary meanings that enables us to analyze image on the basis of its genuinely pictorial aspects. Unlike texts, images transmit their meanings simultaneously, so the viewer receives the whole set of information at one and the same time. Furthermore, images are open and ambiguous, what leaves a great room for interpretation that actually never reaches its end, for there is no final mean-­‐
ing contained within an image. And since the meanings gained from images are histor-­‐
ically and culturally dependent, the methods suggested by art history and art theory endeavors to gain access to the broader context in which images were made, to the space of experience shared by specific individuals within specific groups and societies in a specific time. The original method of iconological interpretation suggested by Panofsky has in one of its steps taken literary knowledge into consideration. Imdahl’s method called iconic enables the interpreter to reach the level of documentary mean-­‐
ing exclusively by analysis of compositional and formal qualities of an image. 72 Bohnsack’s documentary method aimed at photography interpretation draws on both methods and seeks for the habitus of picture producers. To sum up, there is a lot for us to learn, especially from art history and theory. Since sociology lacks years of experi-­‐
ence in dealing with images, it is advisable, especially if it wants to integrate the aes-­‐
thetic dimension into its theory, to look for inspiration in other fields of human sci-­‐
ences. Familiarity with concepts and methods of art theory could help us develop a strong sociological theory of iconicity. As I showed above, today’s reality is different; there are rather controversies than unity regarding the iconic theory in cultural sociology. There are voices declaring almost every material thing an icon, while others rather stick with its traditional, strictly visual definition. The problem of missing definition makes the iconic theory quite vague and omnivorous and the study of iconicity rather uncoordinated. As I also demonstrated, it holds current analyses on the iconographical level and does not allow us to transcend it. My suggestion draws on Bohnsack’s methodology, on its application in cultural so-­‐
ciological image interpretation by Binder and prefers a narrower use of the iconic term. I argue that the term should remain reserved for visual media in their specific, sacred form. What we gain by this definition of icon is the possibility to grasp both the aes-­‐
thetic experience bound to iconic surface and the meaningful depth partly informed by discourses and social practices. In this visual and sacred (or to use Binder’s term secu-­‐
lar) icon, the creation of iconic depth is directly linked to and enabled by its aesthetic properties. In other words, if we want to get deeper in the analysis of iconicity and to transcend the everyday, commonsensical experience and perspective of social actors, paying attention to the formal rules and conventions of the composition of an image seems to be a fruitful way to go. On the other hand, there is no need to reject the use of iconographical analysis that searches for the context based in narratives. Even if the iconic turn suggested by cultural sociology does not eventually manage to encompass successfully the whole sphere of materiality, the shift of scholarly attention to the visual is itself a great achievement. As Rorty (1967: 2) remarked wisely, “no such revolution is in vain. If nothing else, the battles fought during the revolution cause the combatants on both sides to repair their armor, and these repairs eventually amount to a complete change of clothes.” 73 74 References Alexander, J. C. 1988. “The New Theoretical Movement” Pp. 77–101, in Handbook of Sociology, edited by N. J. Smelser. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications Inc. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 1990. “The Sacred and Profane Information Machine: Discourse about the Computer as Ideology” Archives de sciences sociales des religions. 35: 161–171. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2003. “Introduction: The Meanings of (Social) Life: On the Origins of a Cultural Sociology” Pp. 3–10 in The meanings of social life. A cultural sociology, edited by J. C. Alexander. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2008. “Iconic Experience in Art and Life: Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti’s Standing Woman” Theory, Culture & Society. 25: 1–19. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2010a. “Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning” Thesis Eleven. 103: 10–25. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2010b. “The Celebrity-­‐Icon” Cultural Sociology. 4: 323–336. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2012. “Iconic power and performance: the role of the critic” Pp. 25–35 in Iconic power. Materiality and meaning in social life, edited by J. C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, and B. Giesen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 75 Alexander, J. C. and P. Smith. 2003. “The Strong Programme in Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics” Pp. 11–26, in The meanings of social life. A cultural sociology, edited by J. C. Alexander. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2005. “Introduction: the new Durkheim” Pp. 1–37 in The Cambridge companion to Durkheim, edited by J. C. Alexander and P. Smith. Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press. Atkin, A. 2005. “Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference” Transaction of the Charles S. Peirce Society. XLI: 161–188. Barthes, R. 1977. “Rhetoric of the Image” Pp. 32–51 in Image, Music, Text, edited by S. Heath. New York: The Noonday Press. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2012. Mythen des Alltags. Vol. 4338, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Bartmanski, D. 2012a. “How to become an iconic social thinker: The intellectual pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault” European Journal of Social Theory. 15: 427–453. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. 2012b. “The word/image dualism revisited: Towards an iconic conception of visual culture” Journal of Sociology: 1–18. Bartmanski, D. and J. C. Alexander. 2012. “Materiality and meaning in social life: toward an iconic turn in cultural sociology” Pp. 1–12, in Iconic power. Materiality and meaning in social life, edited by J. C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, and B. Giesen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Becker, H. S. 1974a. “Art As Collective Action” American Sociological Review. 39: 767–
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A new sociology of modernity, Cambridge: Polity. 80 81 Index A Buczynska-­‐Garewicz ........................................ 15, 16, 20 Alexander 11, 23, 25, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, C 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61 Cassirer ........................................................................ 26 Atkin ............................................................................ 16 D B Didi-­‐Huberman .......................................................... 22 Barthes ........................... 22, 23, 24, 29, 43, 44, 51, 53, 55 Dilthey .......................................................................... 17 Bartmanski ... 17, 22, 23, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, Durkheim .............................................. 11, 35, 37, 38, 60 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59 Becker .................................................... 10, 11, 42, 44, 57 E Belting ................................................... 21, 24, 29, 53, 58 Benjamin ...................................................................... 37 Eberlein ....................................................................... 18 Berger ........................................................................... 37 Emirbayer .............................................................. 36, 45 Beyst ............................................................................. 30 F Binder ... 5, 7, 17, 21, 22, 28, 30, 46, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63 Foucault ....................................................................... 43 Boehm ... 7, 11, 15, 16, 21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 39, 47, Freud ............................................................................ 40 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 66 Bohnsack . 7, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 46, 48, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, G 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63 Bourdieu ................................................. 9, 18, 20, 21, 59 Giesen ....................................... 46, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57 Bredekamp ............................................................. 21, 49 Gladwell ....................................................................... 40 82 Goodman .................................................................... 26 Mitchell ... 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, Greub ........................................................................... 31 38, 40, 46, 47, 48, 53, 61 Moxey .................................. 22, 26, 27, 29, 37, 50, 52, 61 H P Hall ........................................................................ 46, 58 Harré ............................................................................ 47 Panofsky .... 6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, Holly ............................................................................. 17 29, 31, 32, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62 Huening ....................................................................... 16 Parsons ........................................................................ 44 Peirce ........................... 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 29, 38, 39 I Petrilli .......................................................................... 16 Pietarinen ..................................................................... 15 Imdahl ................................. 22, 29, 31, 48, 52, 53, 59, 62 Pilarczyk ...................................................................... 44 Przyborski ............................ 21, 22, 29, 37, 46, 47, 52, 57 K R Kant .............................................................................. 42 Kuhn ............................................................................. 25 Rorty ..................................................... 14, 25, 37, 46, 63 L S Latour ..................................................................... 27, 47 Saussure ................................................. 14, 15, 16, 30, 38 Lattmann ..................................................................... 16 Schleiermacher ............................................................ 17 Luckmann .................................................................... 37 Slunecko .............................. 21, 22, 29, 37, 46, 47, 52, 57 Smith .......................................... 11, 25, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40 M Sonnevend ................................................................... 54 Malinowski .................................................................. 43 W Mannheim .............................................................. 17, 18 Marx ............................................................................. 37 Wagner ................................................................... 14, 25 McLuhan ................................................................. 13, 25 Weber .......................................................................... 37 Michel .................................................................... 52, 59 Wittgenstein ............................................................... 25 Mietzner ...................................................................... 44 83