Iconic Power Research Articles

A Cosmopolitan Revelation: Travel as a Religious Act with Rick Steves’ Europe

For nearly fifty years, travel writer Rick Steves has been guiding Americans through Europe. Nicknamed a “travel guru” by The New York Times, Steves preaches a prescriptive, redemptive vision of travel: by packing light, pursuing historically-rich experiences, and seeking to become a “temporary local” and extrovert in search the “real Europe,” Americans can be cured of their ethnocentricity and experience a cosmopolitan revelation. It is through this sense of moral purpose that traveling the “Rick Steves way” becomes more than a tourism: it is religion. This article explores how Rick Steves’ vision for travel is performed into being discursively and aesthetically, thereby constructing a particular material configuration of Europe imbued with iconic power.

Above the heteronormative narrative: looking up the place of Disney’s villains

Abstract The article proposes a re-examination of the role and position of the so-called “Disney villains” within the narrative framework of animated films and popular culture as a whole. In the first part, the historical evolution in the representation of these villains will be explored according to the practice of “queer coding,” which involves attributing stereotypically queer traits to them without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity. It will be observed how their non-conforming gender and sexuality, used to mark their moral deviance, challenge and defy dominant gender and narrative norms. It is precisely through their queer performance and camp aesthetic that “evil stepmothers,” “sissy-villains,” and “drag-queen-like” sea witches can emancipate themselves from their traditional roles as antagonists (narrative level) and as social outcasts (discursive level) to seize the spotlight through the screen (manifest surface). This study combines tools of Greimasian text analysis, including the canonical narrative schema and the generative trajectory of meaning, with Lotman’s theory and notion of “semiosphere,” to investigate the centrality and criticality of these “quillains” within the heteronormative narrative framework and the broader cultural context. To capture (or being captured by) the queer aspect of these characters and their stories, the invitation is to look at their visage not as a coded symbol of an underlying identity and truth, but as an image that exceeds any defined meaning thanks to its iconic power.

Visual bodily signals as core devices for coordinating minds in interaction.

The view put forward here is that visual bodily signals play a core role in human communication and the coordination of minds. Critically, this role goes far beyond referential and propositional meaning. The human communication system that we consider to be the explanandum in the evolution of language thus is not spoken language. It is, instead, a deeply multimodal, multilayered, multifunctional system that developed—and survived—owing to the extraordinary flexibility and adaptability that it endows us with. Beyond their undisputed iconic power, visual bodily signals (manual and head gestures, facial expressions, gaze, torso movements) fundamentally contribute to key pragmatic processes in modern human communication. This contribution becomes particularly evident with a focus that includes non-iconic manual signals, non-manual signals and signal combinations. Such a focus also needs to consider meaning encoded not just via iconic mappings, since kinematic modulations and interaction-bound meaning are additional properties equipping the body with striking pragmatic capacities. Some of these capacities, or its precursors, may have already been present in the last common ancestor we share with the great apes and may qualify as early versions of the components constituting the hypothesized interaction engine.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’.

Political Socialization in a Changing Society: A Crisis of Value Orientations or Asynchronization of National Memories?

The article examines qualitative changes in the socio-cultural parameters of intergenerational communication that impact social cohesion and civic identification in contemporary society. Diversification of symbol production and an increase in the number of agents of political communications, a greater heterogeneity of political ideologies, and modes of political representation shape political processes. To adequately address these changes, one needs new theoretical models of political socialization. Such models would examine youth political incorporation as a particular form of communication predicated on the spatial and temporal design of political events within national communities. The focus on generational differences in the interpretation of political events helps explain youth positioning vis-à-vis older generations. In this case, political socialization goes beyond the processes of the younger generation’s adaptation to institutions and value-normative regimes of the “adult” society. It is a communicative process of establishing generational political expectations. Analysis of the legitimating profiles of national memory—those that include competing symbolic representations of images of the future and the past, typologies of the heroic, concepts of guilt and responsibility—is crucial to studying the political socialization of the younger generation. The authors emphasize the significance of both a theoretical and applied analysis of symbolic structures of political memory and the role of iconic power in understanding intergenerational continuity and change. Drawing on the methods of cultural sociology, the authors outline novel theoretical approaches to studying youth political socialization in today’s society.

Iconic bias in Italian spatial demonstratives

ABSTRACT An iconic pattern across spoken languages is that words for ‘this’ and ‘here’ tend to have high front vowels, whereas words for ‘that’ and ‘there’ tend to have low and/or back vowels. In Italian, there are two synonymous Italian words for ‘here’, namely qui and qua, and two synonymous words for ‘there’, lì and là. Qui ‘here’ and là ‘there’ are iconic because qui has the high front vowel /i/ and là has the low vowel /a/, whereas qua ‘here’ and lì ‘there’ are counter-iconic, since their vowels are the opposite. Based on corpus, survey and computational data, we demonstrate that (i) qui ‘here’ and là ‘there’ have been consistently used more frequently throughout history compared to qua ‘here’ and lì ‘there’, respectively; and (ii) in present-day Italian, qui ‘here’ tends to refer to a location that is closer to the speaker than qua ‘here’ does, whereas là ‘there’ tends to refer to a location that is further away from the speaker than lì ‘there’ does. In summary, the iconic demonstrative pronouns (qui and là) are used more frequently and are closer to the prototypical meanings of ‘here’ and ‘there’. We argue that their frequency and prototypicality are motivated by their iconic power. This case study shows how iconicity may work as pressure on language use and language change.

Face Substances. The rhetoric of Kapists’ self-portraits: between self-reflection and confession

Self-portraits are specific kinds of pictures where the subject’s experience is closely combined with the act of painting. Such works constitute a mixture of internal iconic power with external reality, e.g. the artist’s body, his thought, and theory, etc. This applies in particular to self-portraits painted by the members of the Paris Committee since the idiomatic nature of painting was the primary quality on which they based the language and poetics of their art. This paper analyses selected self-portraits by Józef Czapski (1896–1993), Zygmunt Waliszewski (1897–1936), Piotr Potworowski (1898–1964), Artur Nacht-Samborski (1898– 1974), and Jan Cybis (1897–1972). The focus on the strategy of incorporating physiognomy into the matter of painting stems from the fact that on this particular level the intensification of the relationship between the author’s image and his painterly gesture gains the strongest self-reflective potential. This allows for a reading of self-portraits as developing the artist’s reflections about art and himself, included in theoretical writings and intimate journals. Analyses presented in this paper can, therefore, be defined as an attempt to recreate rhetoric of the painterly trace on the basis of choices particular for given work. In this optic, crucial are these aspects of painting that manifest a form of the author’s subjective investment in artistic activity: from emphasising the distance through which the painting presents itself as a code offered to the viewer to decipher (as in Nacht-Samborski’s work) through to declarations to blur the boundary between the artist and the work, which results in an almost organic communion of the body and the matter of painting (Cybis).

Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith

Those who have recently published a book looking at the intersection of science, technology, and society must wish that they could have delayed its appearance. As I write this in the summer of 2020, the world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and is looking for a medical fix, a life-saving vaccine. The public’s faith in science and technology has never been higher. Computer “apps” that explore things such as the frequency of, and point of origin of, COVID-related Google search terms, and Twitter posts, are being used to trace the progress of the virus and to predict the sites of further outbreaks. The United States has been roiled by the death, at the hands of the police, of George Floyd. Floyd’s killing was captured by an app that has been circulating throughout the globe that has acquired the near iconic power of the crucifixion. With the majority of the American people equipped to make audio–visual recording of police brutality and post them on social media, we expect that crimes such as this will certainly diminish.

ВІЗУАЛЬНІ ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ: НАУКОВА ТА ОСВІТНЯ ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ

The establishment of Visual Studies area is the result of reflection over the crisis experience not only logocentric one but also over linguistic turns in the field of cultural research, as well as the crisis of images overproduction, which requires other approaches and criteria in production and consumption of video products. The methodological guideline of this research field is not only the extrapolation of research methods of high culture into everyday life, but also the study of the iconic power, including those techniques of visualization of non-visual (for example, not things themselves, but the relationship between things, scientific data, software and etc.), which are offered by contemporary culture as new objects of vision. The visual turn has become the result of a shift in the field of humanities, which captures not only the interest for visual sources of scientific knowledge, but also the specifics of methods and techniques for studying any cultural phenomena, as well as criticism of the absolutization of textual research methods. Writing is defined as a visual practice in its relation to others. In this context, visuality is substantiated as a new cultural phenomenon in the logic of culture de-differentiation (in particular image and text), as well as a separate subject of scientific research. The place of visual culture in the structure of visual studies is defined as an area that explores first of all not objects that can be seen (especially separate classes of such objects, such as works of fine art), but their connection with “optical media” (F. Kittler) or" visual technology "(N. Mirzoeff), i.e those practices that determine the order of sight. The focus here is on the organization of visual practices in the perspective of technical optical media and video products ratio as an organization order of signifiers. Visual studies emphasize that video production of technical optical media dominates over the bodily parameters of perception (speed and ways of focusing, perception, recollection). The author of the article reflects on the conflicts of problematization of cultural and visual studies in Ukrainian humanities. In this context, the role of "Kyiv worldview and epistemological school" and the methodological meaning of the activity approach developed here are noted. The current state of visual studies and prospects for further development in this area is also defined.

Strong program cultural sociology and Latin America

Over the past decade, a community of strong program cultural sociologists has developed from Latin America against the background of local traditions in the study of culture that mostly have been influenced by Gramsci and Bourdieu. Here, we will provide an overview of this community—its members, sites of production, and recent publications which mark the leading edges of iconic power theory, cultural trauma theory, social performance theory, and civil sphere theory. In particular, we will try to flesh out how the members of this emerging community have gone about extending the horizon of strong program cultural sociology while seeking to maintain their tune with local intellectual sensibilities in the study of culture across the region.

POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION OF CHILDREN AS A SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION OF THE “POLITICS OF CHILDREN”

The article examines the importance of the political socialization of children to ensure generational continuity and stability of political communications. The author supposes that the dominance of the research attitude towards the process of politicization of children as the implementation of the institutional and ideological activity of older generations concerning the age minority limits the ability to understand qualitative changes in contemporary communications. The blurring of boundaries between the “world of childhood” and “adults” in the contemporary society leads to the fact that relations between generations become more complicated and acquire a high degree of variability and arbitrariness. The diversification of symbolic production, the multiplication of actors in contemporary political communications, the growing variability of political ideologies and ways of representing politics, actualizes the study of the political socialization of children as a specific political communication depending on the features of the spatio-temporal design of political events in certain national communities. According to the author, this allows us to take into account the differences in the perception of the significance of certain political events by generations and the peculiarities of the children’s and youth’s positioning concerning the older generation. In this case, the meaning and content of political socialization is not reduced to the process of adaptation of children to the institutions and ideological regimes of “adult society”, but appears as a process of choosing and challenging the collectively significant symbols of the older generation by the younger generation. A decisive role in the study of the political socialization of children is played by the research of the influence of the dynamics of the profiles of the legitimation of national memory, including various competing symbolic representations of images of the past and the future, the typology of the heroic, ideas of guilt and responsibility. The author emphasizes the importance of description and applied analysis of the effectiveness of the symbolic structures of national memory and the role of iconic power in the implementation of politics of children on the example of the US and contemporary Russian cinema. Using the theoretical and practical explications of contemporary cultural sociology as a methodological basis, the author proposes a new approach to the study of the political socialization of children and the politics of children in contemporary society.

Architecture as performance art: evaluating “iconic power” in the development of two museums

Cities around the world have increasingly turned to iconic architectural development (IAD) to compete for tourists, investment and skilled migrants. However, IADs represent more than just an economic development tool, they are explicit attempts to create iconic representations of place. As such IADs provide an important opportunity to better understand how objects gain “iconic power”—defined as the fusion of powerful social meanings with the aesthetic surface of physical objects. Through a comparative study of two museum expansion projects, this article investigates how the production process influences the content and intensity of the meanings attributed to the buildings. Adopting a cultural pragmatics approach, I demonstrate that IADs constitute a social performance where the actions taken by developers to design, construct, and promote their buildings are interpreted by the outside public and inform the meanings attributed to the final buildings. In identifying the relationship between production and performance, this article extends our understanding of iconic power while also demonstrating how theories from the “Strong Program” in cultural sociology can be exported to advance the study of cities and urban development.

The afterlife of Osama bin Laden: performative pictures in the “war on terror”

ABSTRACTIn his interview with CBS News on 4 May 2011, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the power of images when he explained that his government would not release a photo of the dead Osama bin Laden due to moral considerations and security-related issues. How is it possible that a photo is perceived as too horrific to be published and as a powerful threat to national security? In this article, I argue that the concept of performativity helps to acknowledge the iconic power of an image as well as its discursive contextualisation. Yet, the meaning of a picture is not only discursively constituted but made possible by a performative act of showing/seeing. Empirically, I focus on pictures that refer to the killing of Osama bin Laden, based on a critical reading of three defining and prominent images in the US public discourse (that circulated worldwide): the Situation Room photo by Pete Souza, a photo-shopped image purporting to show the terrorist’s dead body and the iconic X-ing out of bin Laden on the cover of Time magazine. This reading looks at three dimensions of performative pictures: (1) their success and failure, (2) their self-reflexivity and sociability and (3) their performativity.

From ritual efficacy to iconic efficiency: ritual encoding and the transformation of Samoan religiosity

Over the past thirty years or so, the iconographic corpus of ethnic tattoo designs has increasingly been used as an efficient, non-discursive way of expressing indigeneity, commitment, belonging, strength, etc. While they are detached from their original destination (the human skin) and due to their primal connection with the body, tattoo designs have an iconic power which rests on a process of naturalization. Their evocative strength together with their high portability tends to an exploitation of their power through a multitude of media. In this paper I will rely on the Samoan tattooed images to address the process of iconicity by downplaying their discursive meaning. To the extent that Samoan tattooing combines a high standardization of patterns’ assemblage, and a socially separated body of techniques with relatively low symbolic emphasis on individual designs, I will try to re-evaluate its visual saliency by looking at its changing semiotic status.

Binding and arresting: surface and pattern in a contemporary traditional Pacific building

In classical Pacific buildings, figures or textures like lalava (lashings) performed iconic and technical functions simultaneously. What happens when the latter are assigned to different methods? The Fale Pasifika at the University of Auckland (opened in 2004) shows that the figures’ binding features outlast their technical necessity. The building attracts a diverse audience — perhaps because in the right constellations it binds together ancestral knowledge and present practices, despite many concessions to alien regulations and rules of production. However, its Pacific atmosphere also attracts non-Pacific people.
 What conditions enable arresting patterns on refined surfaces “to symbolise and effect relations of mana” (Tomlinson & Tengan, 2015: 17) and to channel affective force — even beyond the initiated? How can the notion of iconic power (Alexander, Bartmanski & Giesen, 2012) be a valuable strategic resource and an ordering principle by which to juxtapose contradictory perspectives? How does iconic power relate to Indigenous Pacific concepts? Integrating aspects of materiality, performativity, atmospheres and non-human agency in the Fale Pasifika with more traditional, structuralist insights generates crossovers between architecture and anthropology.
 In Western culture, patterns are commonly considered as flat as the surface that carries them. Tongan tufuga lalava Filipe Tohi disputes this when he asserts that lalava is “deeper than just the lashing”, more connected to a changing world and cosmos—in—motion than given credit. Patterns extend, indeed, into cosmological, social, technological and subjective realms. In a debate concerning the respective authenticity of flat and carved column surfaces in fale Samoa, a classical perspective would suggest that surface and pattern cannot inhabit the same plane. Yet, some Samoan tufuga fau fale (master builders) used carving to produce strange animations, stirring surfaces and patterns that “generate relationships over time between persons and things” (Gell, 1998: 80). Such relationships between arresting figures, ensnaring ground and viewers are founded on the experience of a “mimetic passing over into the object” (Rampley, 1997: 45). When the appearance of things is seen as part of their materiality, images and things converge and act (Payne, 2014: 317, 310), dissolving the boundaries of a subject and her world. Patterns, then, can arrest and entrap a viewer (Gell, 1998: 82).

Defining Beauty: The Paterian Yeats

This essay contends that W.B. Yeats’s quest for beauty in art has far more in common with Walter Pater’s aesthetic views than is generally acknowledged. This article particularly focuses on Greek art, which provided both writers with paradigms with which to articulate their aesthetic theories. Yeats made ample use of Pater’s distinction between Ionian and Dorian art, and this opposition may in fact lie at the root of Yeats’s esoteric system set down in A Vision and based upon two contrary types of individuals, civilizations, and religions. The iconic power of art as a magical transformer of reality is asserted by both Pater and Yeats, and it is perhaps only in the question of the finality of art for Yeats, in the eschatological and magical dimension he attributed to it, that his path diverged from Pater.

Iconic Power: materiality and meaning in social life

Iconic Power: materiality and meaning in social life

The tacit semantics of ‘Loud Fences’: tracing the connections between activism, heritage and new histories

In 2015, in response to harrowing accounts of child sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy in the town of Ballarat, a campaign of public support was launched in the form of coloured ribbons attached to the fences of institutions where the abuse had occurred. The “Loud Fence” campaign has become a global form of protest and commemoration. Institutions’ reactions were varied; some removed the ribbons, to find them promptly replaced, with attendant publicity. Thus was established a silent dialogue that encapsulated the contested nature of the ribbons’ symbolism, and exemplified, too, the campaign’s disparate implied audiences. The paper discusses the meanings of the Loud Fences in relation to divided community sensibilities and intangible heritage, as a performative mode of activism and of heritage-making. It considers ways in which the campaign challenges institutional cultures that stand as extant remnants of colonialism and as edifices of iconic institutional power. The Loud Fences campaign is characterised as a grass-roots quest, initially intended to show solidarity with disenfranchised victims of abuse, that has come to be seen as giving them a symbolic “voice” in the face of institutional denial. The paper touches upon the ways in which such campaigns, based on visual symbols and contested, yet unspoken, “dialogue”, can be historicised.

Heavy Tails in Program Structure

Designing and optimizing computer systems require deep understanding of the underlying system behavior. Historically many important observations that led to the development of essential hardware and software optimizations were driven by empirical observations about program behavior. In this paper, we report an interesting property of program structures by viewing dynamic program execution as a changing network. By analyzing the communication network created as a result of dynamic program execution, we find that communication patterns follow heavy-tailed distributions. In other words, a few instructions have consumers that are orders of magnitude larger than most instructions in a program. Surprisingly, these heavy-tailed distributions follow the iconic power law previously seen in man-made and natural networks. We provide empirical measurements based on the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks to validate our findings as well as perform semantic analysis of the source code to reveal the causes of such behavior.

Materiality, iconic nature, and Albert Bierstadt’s “Great Pictures”

This article builds on the cultural sociological program for the study of materiality, material symbolism, and iconic power. Having a theoretical basis in Durkheim’s claims regarding the social potency of totems and other material symbols, two new concepts – sensuous surface and conductive surface – are introduced. These concepts, which distinguish between icons’ formal aesthetic power and their power as repositories and conduits of symbolic principles of control, elaborate and extend Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of iconic surface. The analytical purchase of these concepts is demonstrated in an analysis of the works of the 19th century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt played a key role in the genesis of the variety of iconic nature – the aesthetically potent, symbolically resonant, and conductively efficacious image of the physical landscape – characteristic of American modernity. The sensuous features of Bierstadt’s work offer a representation of nature carrying constitutive power that is autonomous from its symbolic resonances. This case is significant, given the role played by iconic nature in modern American experience. By shining light on the genetic roots of the American variety of iconic nature, this article helps nuance accounts of the role played by material symbols in the process of cultural differentiation.

Imperial Icons in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. The Iconic Image of the Emperor between Representation and Presence

This paper will explore the imperial image as an icon in the Byzantine perception and, ultimately, question its significance as an icon in the contemporary understanding of the term. Modern scholarship has outlined that imperial the image could rightly be defined as an icon in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, for its powers and status. However, what made the imperial image’s iconicity has yet to be defined. This paper will discuss such iconicity, intended as the fundamental relationship between the iconic character of the image and its meaning, and examine the role of imperial images in the late antique and Byzantine perception. It will question the significance of images of the emperor from a diachronic perspective, from Late Antiquity to the Middle Byzantine period. What is of interest is to determine the iconic power of imperial images, the elements that contribute to transform the representation into an icon - in the common interpretation of this word - and the Byzantine understanding of the portraits of the ruler. Ultimately, this reflection will lead to redefine the status of the imperial image between the boundaries of representation and presence.