Refashioning Sociological Imagination: On the Conceptual Significance of Materiality and Iconicity

One of the key challenges of meaning-centered cultural sociology is to face the findings of visual  and material culture studies and to come to terms with the implications of the iconic turn. The structuralist assumption of arbitrariness of cultural sign is of limited service in explaining the power of complex representational economies and its variability. There is ample evidence that most social signifiers are not just “the garb of meaning,“ to use the insightful phrase of the American anthropologist Webb Keane. Rather, the actual significatory structures and their material/aesthetic properties co-constitute meanings. Sensory formations are as important for meaning-making as discursive formations. Therefore more integrative and multidimensional models of culture in action are nowadays both needed and made possible by emergence of the systematic research agendas organized around such master categories as performativity, iconicity and materiality. This paper is devoted to charting new explorations in these overlapping cutting-edge domains and systematizing their implications for sociological theory.