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Jeffrey C. Alexander
Afterword: The Strong Program and the Iconic
Turn
(doi: 10.2383/80398)
Sociologica (ISSN 1971-8853)
Fascicolo 1, gennaio-aprile 2015
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Sociologica, 1/2015 - Copyright © 2015 by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. 1
Symposium / On Icons: Media, Visibility, Materiality
and Cultural Power, edited by Marco Solaroli
Afterword: The Strong Program
and the Iconic Turn
by Jeffrey C. Alexander
doi: 10.2383/80398
While the articles in this issue differ from one another in details, and sometimes
in marked degree, they share an animating thrust, which is to push forward the iconic
turn in cultural sociology. In this Afterword, I will contextualize the strong program
in cultural sociology and explain why there has been an iconic turn inside it.
Classical sociology railed against the dark side of modernity, fearing it would
become meaning-less. Marx predicted all that was holy would become profane,
Weber that rationalization would de-magicalize the world, Durkheim that egoism and
anomie would disorder the new day. Mid-Twentieth century functionalism pushed
against these misleading depictions of modernity, but it did not succeed. Parsons
stressed values and solidarity, fighting against a narrow sense of secularization. Claiming
legitimacy from Weber’s sociology of this-worldly asceticism and Durkheim’s
theory of organic solidarity, functionalists developed cultural models of power and
organization, family, polity, and economy. The Achilles heel of ambitious body of
work was its determination to link culture with social stability. Certainly there were
ambiguities and openings, but the fundamental idea of functionalist theory was to
insist that, if culture was powerful, social equilibrium would follow.
This fateful elision doomed the functionalist effort to create a meaning-centered
sociology. Conflict theory challenged its conflation of culture and empirical stability.
In its polemical claim, conflict theory was in the right. Tying social stability and culture
together was a dreadful mistake. If modern societies are fragmented and conflictual,
this hardly suggests that symbolic meanings have disappeared? In its positive
Alexander, Afterword: The Strong Program and the Iconic Turn
2
claim, however, conflict theory certainly was wrong. To explain conflict one theory
does not need to be materialist. Without reference to battles over interpretation,
modern conflict cannot be understood. Conflict theory put blinders on macrosociology
for a generation.
Yet, even as conflict theory became triumphant, a new, post-functionalist way of
thinking about culture exploded on the intellectual scene. It laid the groundwork for
overthrowing conflict theory, and for establishing a truly cultural sociology. The challenge
was to overcome the binary culture/conflict. The existence and social power of
collectively structured meaning had to be separated from the existence of social conflict
and consensus. Sociology needed to find a way to think the analytical autonomy
of culture.
This was exactly what the semiotic revolution and the eruption of symbolic
anthropology allowed sociology to do. Saussurian structural linguistics created a theory
of signs, describing the latter as signifier and signified combined. Signifiers are
general meanings, which are obdurately structured at any particular place and time.
Culture works like a language. Individuals, organizations, and whole societies are like
fish swimming in a vast ocean of meanings – they have no idea, most of the time, that
culture is all around them. Culture is the dark matter of the social universe.
How such largely invisible, generalized meanings come to be applied in everyday
life, however, is another matter, more contingent, more open to reflection. According
to semiotics, this is the problem, not of language, but of speech. There is a
great distance between the signifiers of social language and the signifieds of everyday
social life. Actors may share the same set of signifiers, but how these signifiers get
applied can be a matter of intense disagreement. Does the widely shared value of
freedom, for example, imply a belief in private property or democratic socialism and
radically dissenting speech?
Here, then, is the alternative to functionalist conflation. Culture and conjuncture
can exist at the same time. Levi-Strauss worked out a way to apply the ideas
of semiotics to social primitive social life, and Barthes developed striking semiotic
interpretations of postwar modernity. Derrida and Foucault built on these structuralist
foundations, maintaining the relative autonomy of discourse while emphasizing
more contingent interpretation and social power. Austin made the same intervention
vis-à-vis Wittgenstein, pushing the linguistic turn in philosophy toward pragmatic
performance. Geertz, Douglas, and Turner brought the semiotic breakthrough and
the linguistic turn into contemporary anthropology, reaching out to incorporate aesthetic
theorizing as well.
All this triggered a cultural turn in the social sciences. Influenced by Geertz in
the U.S. and structuralism in Europe, historians and even political theorists began
Sociologica, 1/2015
3
to conceptualize how cultural structures had shaped the modern world. These developments
entered sociology only after Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious
Life [1915] was (re)interpreted as, not simply a study of Aboriginal religion, but
as a theory of the symbolic foundations of modern life [Alexander 1982.] As “late
Durkheim” became classical, displacing the more materialist, middle period works,
contemporary sociological practice seemed in need of equally profound change. If
modern society also involved signs, rituals, purity, and danger, new theories and
methods would have to be invented.
From the mid-1980s, there emerged a discipline that had once seemed oxymoronic
– “cultural sociology.” There were different strands of this new beast. Some were
more Marxist, like Bourdieu; others more neo-institutional, like Meyer; some more
pragmatic and instrumental, like Swidler. Yet even these approaches shared the need
to situate themselves vis-à-vis the issues that semiotics and post-structuralism raised.
What distinguished the “Strong Program” in sociology [Alexander and Smith 2003]
from others was its more full-throated acclamation of the cultural turn. Theories and
methods were developed for bringing textual analysis into the center of cultural sociology,
for making codes, myths, narratives, and symbols into tools to think modern
societies [e.g. Jacobs 2000; Smith 2005.] Following Ricoeur’s admonition to consider
meaningful action as a text, the cultural turn was translated into sociology.
But this was not enough. Over the last 15 years, with the help of immensely
talented students and colleagues, I have tried to open up what I came to think of
as the first phase of the strong program, to push the analysis of social texts towards
action, on the one hand, and towards the materiality, on the other. The first effort
reached out to Austin and performance studies, conceptualizing the cultural pragmatics
of contingency, creativity, reception, staging, power, and interpretative mediation
– without ignoring the powerful effect of backgrounded social texts [e.g. Mast
2013.] The second effort aimed to connect the experience of cultural texts, not with
creative action, but with structures of aesthetic sensibility.
Textual experiences of meanings, no matter how saturated with emotion and
morality, lack a fundamental element of aesthetic experience: the sensual-material
experience of form. In The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil insists that “the
healing power of thought seems to be the same faculty that diminishes the personal
sense of experience.” Illustrating an alternative to this diminution, Musil explains
why “a casual reference to a hair on a nose weights more than the most important
concept,” pointing to “that dumb but deep, exciting sensation, touching immediately
on the self, [when] one sniff’s one’s own skin.”
Can there be a cultural sociology that explores exciting sensations that are dumb
but deep? Answering yes, I have begun to develop a sociological theory of iconic
Alexander, Afterword: The Strong Program and the Iconic Turn
4
consciousness [Alexander 2008a.] Over the last couple of decades and from various
quarters of our intellectual universe, there has emerged a wide-ranging reaction again
textuality. In philosophy, literature, and social theory, a material turn has been pushing
against the cultural one. Such critiques of discourse-centered thinking, however,
typically take the form of calls for aesthetic redemption. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
[2006], for example, condemns “meaning effects” as ratiocinative and merely conceptual,
theorizing aesthetic presence over linguistic absence. I argue, to the contrary,
that both sensual and textual are always already part of social experience. Burke and
Kant were right to link the beautiful and sublime to moral qualities, even if they often
did so in morally circumscribed, essentialist ways.
Icons are symbolic condensations that root broad social meaning in specific
material form. Icons allow the abstraction of morality to be subsumed, to be made
visible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible as something beautiful,
sublime, ugly, even as the banal appearance of mundane material life. With icons, the
signifier (the idea) is made material (a thing.) We experience iconic consciousness
when we encounter aesthetically shaped materialities that signify social value. Contact
with this aesthetic surface, whether by sight, smell, taste, touch, or smell, provides a
sensual experience that transmits social meaning. The iconic is about experience, but
also communication. To be iconically conscious is to understand without knowing,
or at least without knowing that one is knowing. It is to understand by feeling, by
contact, by the evidence of the senses rather than the mind.
Foundational to iconic theory is this intertwining of surface and depth; its research
program studies the social processes of their mutual incorporation. There are
more specific propositions as well:
(1) Iconic social action involves a continuous process of subjectification (internalization)
and materialization (externalization), a dynamic that resembles the dialectic
Hegel called objecitification.
(2) Iconic social order involves a dialectic of generic and unique. The painter
employs a “model” but the model is a singular person in time and space. Each year,
new styles of automobiles are rolled out, but each is a particular version of a genre
type. Beauty salons cut our hair into social styles, but when we stand in front of the
mirror each of us brushes our own hair in our own way. We dress in standardized
fashions, but we are self-fashioning every time we put on our own clothes. The unique
and contingent allow each actor to become a more authentic collective representations.
We are all Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur.
(3) Social icons are performative. Actors and organizations try every which way
to create material surfaces that compellingly communicate moral depth. But the success
of these efforts is highly variable. From icon to audience reception is a long way.
Sociologica, 1/2015
5
Social power tries to ensure and control audience reaction, critical interpretations
make every effort to steer it, but aesthetic effectiveness remains unpredictable in the
extreme [Alexander 2012.]
The idea of iconic consciousness opens up new perspectives for sociological
analysis [Woodward 2007]. It contributes to the decades long effort [Campbell 1987;
Miller 1987] to rescue consumption from the black box of commodity fetishism. Material
meanings are rooted in iconic powers outside the marketplace. Only by seizing
upon such newly compelling forms can capitalism commoditize. The theory of iconic
consciousness also introduces new topics. The trivial things imbedded in everyday
life, like cigarettes [Klein 1993], now become worthy objects of cultural-sociological
study. Clothing and furniture and fashions of all kinds become foci as well, not only as
means for vertical distinction but as meanings in themselves [Bartmanski and Woodward
2015.] Celebrities can be studied as symbolic totems rather than as culture industry
products [Alexander 2010; Breese 2010], nature becomes cultural [Pyne 1998;
Gibson 2009], and high art becomes important in a new way [Alexander 2008b.]
The theory of iconic consciousness challenges the Marxian theory of fetishism,
the idea that commodities can communicate only false and superficial meanings,
which Benjamin extended aesthetically with his argument that mechanical reproduction
eliminates aura. At the same time, however, a new way of doing critique in relation
to material forms is opened up. Perhaps the real danger is not losing iconicity
but having too much of it, not of undermining the authenticity of material meanings
but making meanings seem rooted in some historically specific material forms when
they certainly are not. The trick of iconic consciousness is that it makes meaning
seem natural, as if it grows out of appearance, as if the meaning can only be that
appearance. Iconicity seems essentialist, conservative in a primordial way. It leads
to an inability to separate moral imagination from its particular rootedness in this
time and this place. Phenotypical qualities of race, sex, gender, religion, class, and
ethnicity – how these qualities are aesthetically presented to the senses at any given
historical time – are taken as indications of the social qualities themselves. George
Orwell was firmly convinced the working class smelled, believing, despite his socialist
creed, that this quality recalled moral pollution and constituted a physical barrier
to their social integration [Miller 1997, 235-255.] In fact, of course, surface and
depth combine arbitrarily; the aesthetic valuation of surface forms and the moral
meanings to which they are connected are continuously changing. But this arbitrariness
is not consciously comprehended in the course of everyday social life, anymore
than the sound “tree” is thought of as an arbitrary sound. The conflation of surface
and depth is much more dangerous than the commercialization of meaning can ever
be.
Alexander, Afterword: The Strong Program and the Iconic Turn
6
References
Alexander, J.C.
1982 Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 2: The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and
Durkheim. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2008a “Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning.” Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space 26: 782-794.
2008b “Iconic Experience in Art and Life: Beginning with Giacometti’s ‘Standing Woman’.”
Theory, Culture and Society 25 (5):1-19.
2010 “The Celebrity-Icon.” Cultural Sociology 4(3): 323-336.
2012 “Iconic Power and Performance: the Role of the Critic.” In J.C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski
and B. Giesen (eds.) Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, New York:
Palgrave, pp. 25-38.
Alexander, J.C. and Smith, P.
2003 “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a Structural Hermeneutics.” In
J.C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Alexander, J.C., Bartmanski, D. and Giesen, B. (eds.)
2012 Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. New York: Palgrave.
Bartmanski, D. and Woodward, I.
2015 Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury.
Breese, E.
2010 “Meaning, Celebrity, and the Underage Pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears.” Cultural Sociology
4 (3): 337-355.
Campbell, C.
1987 The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumption. New York: Blackwell.
Durkheim, E.
1915 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Gibson, J.W.
2009 A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. New York: Metropolitan
Books.
Gumbrecht, H.U.
2006 “Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif.”
New Literary History 37: 299-318.
Jacobs, R.N.
2000 Race and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Klein, R.
1993 Cigarettes Are Sublime. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mast, J.L.
2013 The Performative Presidency: Crisis and Resurrection during the Clinton Years. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Sociologica, 1/2015
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Miller, D.
1998 A Theory of Shopping. London: Polity.
Miller, W.I.
1997 Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pyne, S.J.
1998 How the Grand Canyon Became Grand. New York: Penguin.
Smith, P.
2005 Why War: The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: The University
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Woodward, I.
2007 Understanding Material Culture. London: Sage.
Alexander, Afterword: The Strong Program and the Iconic Turn
8
Afterword: The Strong Program and the Iconic Turn
Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, where
he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He works in the areas of theory, culture
and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the
cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. Recent publications include
Obama Power [with Nadya Jaworsky, 2014;] The Dark Side of Modernity [2013;] Trauma: A Social
Theory [2012;] The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology [edited with Philip Smith and Ronald
Jacobs, 2012;] and Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life [edited with Dominik
Bartmanski and Bernhard Giesen, 2012.] He is Co-Editor of “The American Journal of Cultural
Sociology”.