Dominik Bartmanski | Technische Universität Berlin (original) (raw)

Books by Dominik Bartmanski

Book Monograph, Dec 18, 2014

Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely... more Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Whilst vinyl never ceased to be the favorite amongst many music lovers and DJs, from the late 1980s the recording industry regarded it as an outdated relic, consigned to dusty domestic corners and obscure record shops. So why is vinyl now experiencing a 'rebirth of its cool'?

Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward explore this question by combining a cultural sociological approach with insights from material culture studies. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, they investigate the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture. Informed by media analysis, urban ethnography and the authors' interviews with musicians, DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, collectors and cutting-edge label chiefs from a range of metropolitan centres renowned for thriving music scenes including London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, and especially Berlin, what emerges is a story of a modern icon.

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Vinyl is a state-of-the-art treatment of an unforgettable object and medium that raises many of the issues central to contemporary anthropology. Its subject-matter should make it appealing to students and general audiences, while its theoretical sophistication makes it relevant to scholars of music, technology, popular culture, and cultural objects.” – Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” – Record Collector magazine

“Bartmanski and Woodward … provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters … Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled.” – Robin Bartram, Northwestern University, Qualitative Sociology

“Vinyl culture is back, and it’s even more vibrant than it was in its heyday, before digitalization. Bartmanski and Woodward take us to the epicentres of this revolution, and let those who are behind it tell us about their passions for this iconic medium. This is an exemplary study of the social and sensory life of things." - David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

“In the age of the digital, with the ubiquitous smart phone and MP3 technologies providing consumers with instant access to global sounds irrespective of where they are, Vinyl explores the persistence of an old technology within the production and consumption of music. In doing so it demonstrates the complex ways in which material objects form a meaningful part of our everyday lives – not just through the sounds of vinyl but by how it feels and looks. The text is beautifully written, impassioned, yet critical. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.” – Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

“A passionate ode to the analogue record, and testament to how vinyl embodies the content it mediates, with each record's unique journey etched into the material” – Hillegonda C. Rietveld, The Times Higher Education

Paperback published on December 11, 2013, Jan 3, 2012

"Iconic Power is a collection of original articles that explores social aspects of the phenomenon... more "Iconic Power is a collection of original articles that explores social aspects of the phenomenon of icon. Having experienced the benefits and realized the limitations of so called "linguistic turn," sociology has recently acknowledged a need to further expand its horizons. "Visual sociology" is emerging as a separate field and prominent scholars announce the coming of "the pictorial turn." The methods and themes taken up in these studies respond to this shift in social scientific interest. Each contribution to this book carefully tests the analytic purchase and empirical implications of iconicity. If we can succeed in understanding the iconic, we should be able to know our culture much better.

As the Australian sociologist of art Eduardo de la Fuente pointed out, "Iconic Power" is "the strongest theoretical statement to yet come out of the 'strong program' in cultural sociology." He emphasized the importance of 'iconicity' as the concept that more than 'ritual' or even 'performance' promises to break free of economistic, linguistic, and other kinds of reductionisms that plague the cultural sciences. The British cultural sociologist David Inglis praised the book's wide empirical coverage. For these reasons, "Iconic Power" can serve as a guide on how to approach the tremendous social efficacy of the visual and other non-discursive symbols. "

Peer-Reviewed Papers & Book Chapters by Dominik Bartmanski

American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2017

Social ‘constructedness’ – and thus malleability of human life forms – is a rather commonplace pr... more Social ‘constructedness’ – and thus malleability of human life forms – is a rather commonplace proposition in sociology. The gist of the idea is: all that is constructed can be reconstructed, deconstructed, in short, changed at will. Radical versions of it hold: all in society is constructed. From the classic ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ by Berger and Luckmann (1966) to ‘The Construction of Social Reality’ by Searle (1995), the theme of ‘constructedness’ has become a leitmotiv in the discipline. Ironically, ‘‘this central metaphor of social theory is understood in widely divergent and conflicting ways’’ (Elder-Vass, 2012). The very titles of the two seminal books indicate the difference of emphasis, and the latter is said to misconstrue what the former posits, ignoring plurality of constructivisms (Knoblauch, 1996: 1460). A degree of confusion still abounds. Sociology is due for a serious reconstruction (Porpora, 2015).

There are several transformative discussions in sociology today that redraw the pertinent conceptual boundaries and restate previously suppressed questions. In 2016 'Qualitative Sociology' journal hosted a special issue with contributions about materiality and culture. Another crucial debate is happening at a recently crystallized intersection between critical realist and constructionist positions in sociology. It centers around the possibilities of merging them. Among various useful agendas, there are realist (and realistic) attempts at ‘‘reconstructing sociology’’ (Porpora, 2015), Margaret Archer’s mapping out of ‘‘social morphogenesis,’’ critical and critically important reinterpretations of ‘‘the reality of social construction’’ (Elder-Vass, 2012), as well as constructivist (and deconstructive) critiques of realism (Reed, 2011). All of these recent works offer advanced new treatments of 'social constructedness'. It is in a theoretical space between those works that sociologists can enhance their understanding of the social. In what follows I discuss the prospects and limitations of these crucially important interventions.

Culture has become one of the keywords of sociology. It is nowadays a central concept and an indi... more Culture has become one of the keywords of sociology. It is nowadays a central concept and an indispensable dimension of this discipline. Yet it is dispersed, institutionally and empirically. There seems to be a degree of confusion regarding how it works and even what it really is. In social life, many of us still tend to locate our problems and salvation in our bodies, minds and respective therapies, rarely going beyond the traditional notion of the self, fetishizing economic performance and political spectacle. Cultural patterns, however, permeate the workings of all those domains. That’s why it is worth asking time and again: What made culture both reappreciated and troubling, powerful and diffuse? And why should we care about it now when late modern formations seem in crisis and post-human ones begin to loom large?

In this paper, we use the case of the vinyl record to show that iconic objects become meaningful ... more In this paper, we use the case of the vinyl record to show that iconic objects become meaningful via a dual process. First, they offer immersive engagements which structure user interpretations through various material experiences of handling, use, and extension. Second, they always work via entanglements with related material ecologies such as turntables, speakers, mixers, and rituals of object care. Additionally, these engagements are complimented by a mediation process which emplaces the vinyl historically, culturally, spatially, and also politically, especially in the context of digitalization. This relational process means that both the material affordances and entanglements of vinyl allow us to feel, handle, experience, project, and share its iconicity. The materially mediated meanings of vinyl enabled it to retain currency in independent and collector’s markets and thus resist the planned obsolescence and eventually attain the status of celebrity commodity with totemic power in music communities. This performative aspect of vinyl markets also means that consumers read closely the signals and symbols regarding vinyl’s status, as its various user groups and champions try to interpret its future, protect, or challenge its current position. Vinyl’s future, and the larger expansion of pressing plants and innovative turntable production around it, largely depend on processes of cultural and status mobility. In the current phase of market expansion, vinyl’s status might be challenged by its own success. Neither a fashion cycle phenomenon, nor simple market conditions explain vinyl’s longevity. Rather, cultural contextualization of vinyl as thing and commodity is crucial for avoiding symbolic pollution and retaining sacred aura.

Sociology had plenty of opportunities to recognize iconicity in the phenomena it had tradition- a... more Sociology had plenty of opportunities to recognize iconicity in the phenomena it had tradition- ally studied, from charisma and fetish to aura and totem. And yet it has not thematized it until very recently. Despite taking on board such categories like symbol and sign, cultural sociology kept icons either outside of its systematic theories, or subsumed them under the generic rubric of arbitrary symbolic signification. Iconicity was barely recognized. This situation has now changed because iconicity can offer a series of uniquely
pragmatic, rather than purely semantic, insights concerning meaning-making. These are the insights that the dominant linguistic and structuralist theories of symbolic communication and culture could hardly generate on their own. Iconicity reclaims these pragmatic material categories, emphasizing how meaning- making is sense-making, with all the rich webs of connotations this term implies: embodied faculties of perception, sensation, feeling, emotion, comprehensibility, significance, import, and so on.

'Journal of Consumer Culture', 2013

This article addresses the enduring cultural appeal of the analogue record at the time of the dig... more This article addresses the enduring cultural appeal of the analogue record at the time of the digital revolution in music consumption and production. Our interest in this phenomenon stems from the observation that not only did the vinyl record manage to survive and persist through the first sweeping wave of digitalisation symbolised by the compact disc, but that nowadays it is also experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Interestingly, the current commercial comeback of the vinyl record occurs precisely when computer-based technologies have profoundly transformed the music industry and rendered our economic and cultural systems irreversibly digital. How could an old and apparently obsolete medium possibly withstand the tide of technological revolution that effectively transforms the music file from cumbersome physical object to weightless electronic information? The story of this unlikely survival is complex and the complexity resides not only in the specificity of the vinyl and its rich history but also in the relational construction of such meanings as old, obsolete, object, information and musical experience. Using the frameworks of cultural sociology, combined with insights from material culture studies and cultural approaches to consumption within business studies and economic sociology, we explore the reasons why vinyl records have once again become highly valued objects of cultural consumption. Resisting explanations which focus solely on matters of nostalgia or fetish, we look to the concepts of iconicity, ritual, aura and the sensibility of coolness to explain the paradoxical resurgence of vinyl at the time of the digital revolution. Along the way we revise the canonical thesis of Walter Benjamin about the putative loss of aura in the modern market societies.

Icons constantly punctuate social life and yet sociology has thematized cultural iconicity only v... more Icons constantly punctuate social life and yet sociology has thematized cultural iconicity only very recently. This article describes what cultural sociology can gain by incorporating iconicity into the catalogue of its explanatory notions. Specifically, it discusses several new prominent iconological frameworks, or modes of seeing culture, and how they alter our understanding of meaning-making, both in social life and social science.

Sociologica : Italian Journal of Sociology Online, Jul 12, 2013

We seem to be living in a time of revolutions which do get televised or at least tweeted, or both... more We seem to be living in a time of revolutions which do get televised or at least tweeted, or both. Yet, for a given observer, most political upheavals are remote “news“ about numerous distant struggles. Following countless observations of this fact, a contributor to this volume notes that ours is a culture of “media-ubiquity“ and “image-saturation“ (Frosh, p.186). Moreover, prominent visual media scholars argue, that visuality is as much about perception as it is – literally and figuratively – a political matter of concealment and spectacle, a “technique of colonial and imperial practice“ (Mirzoeff 2013: xxxvii). The editors of the present book concur. The world is indeed full of conflict and associated visual strife. Each national outbreak has the potential of shaking the international stage and even punching above its own weight, provided it is properly shown and referenced. If this social process does happen, it is possible in no small measure because of sustained visual exposure that helps turn a given local occurrence into a translocal event, or – to use Bruno Latour’s parlance – ‘a matter of fact‘ into ‘a matter of concern.‘

This review essay examines how the book edited by Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly deals with the intricacies of the outlined topic and the related matters, and how sociologists can improve the methods and theories proposed in the volume. In particular, it interrogates the relation between visuality and linguality on the one side, and aims to adjudicate the merits of interpretive cultural sociology vis-a-vis materialist cultural studies on the other."

This is a critical assessment of the book by Isaac Reed "Interpretation and Social Knowledge"

Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=543344, Jan 2012

""In his chapter “Iconspicuous Revolutions of 1989: Culture and Contingency in the Making of Poli... more ""In his chapter “Iconspicuous Revolutions of 1989: Culture and Contingency in the Making of Political Icons,” Dominik Bartmański revisits the European icons of the euphoric year of 1989 and asks what constitutes a powerful iconic fact. Specifically, he explains why the fall of the Berlin Wall emerged as the icon of 1989 and has retained this symbolic status ever since.

The answer is not obvious. 1989 was full of epochal events and important figures busy making history. Especially the earlier, politically unprecedented changes in Hungary and Poland had opened up a revolutionary space in which such events like the fall of the wall became possible at all. And yet they have not attained the same lasting influence on the international collective imagination. To reconstruct this phenomenon is to tell a story about how the iconic can trump the political. By demonstrating what counts in public perception as “revolutionary,” “political signal,” and “beginning” and “end” of a social process, Bartmański shows the role that iconicity plays in constituting these key categories and thus in structuring our ability to notice, understand, and remember events. By "public perception" Bartmanski does not mean only the "lay audiences" but also the producers of the journalistic facts themselves. Indeed, all social groups are deeply enmeshed in and responsive to the background codings and symbolic imperatives of a given culture. It is precisely the various aspects of iconic power that makes events amenable to wide appropriation and socially "resonant". It is their iconicity that turns them into “objective,” temporal markers of history.

Of course, the key question is: what constitutes "iconic power"? Is it purely arbitrary signification structure or something different? What accounts for the fact that some symbolic representations and performances stick and others don't?

To answer these questions the present paper offers an analytical framework that identifies several constituent elements of iconic power. It distinguishes (1) "iconic capital," i.e. the historical accretion of symbolic resources associated with a given entity, (2) "cultural congruity," i.e. the fit between a given entity's character and the genre of cultural performance it is supposed to represent, and (3) "remembrance patterns," i.e. commemorative practices.

Each element is a bundle of material forms and affordances ("surface") and discursive content ("depth"). Only when all the elements coalesce in a felicitous way can an iconic effect emerge. Bartmanski observes that although open-ended and contingent, this iconic process is not arbitrary but instead rooted in the specific meanings structures that make certain social outcomes more plausible than others.

Performing the cultural reconstruction of 1989 along those lines provides a "thick" elaboration of two observations that function as epigrams for the present paper.

The first is theoretical and was made by Roland Barthes in his essay "Rhetoric of the Image": "In every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs."

The second was made by an anthropologist Daphne Berdahl who insisted that "among other things, the revolutions of 1989 were about visibility - making visible 'the people'."

Just like other chapters in this book, the present sociological interpretation of political symbols inevitably takes us beyond the surface of news pictures to the surfaces and depths of events, to singular bodies and powerful crowds, sights and sites, built structures, and symbolically constructed narratives. It is the new prism of iconicity through which the effects of shocking and euphoric events that seem deceptively simple and well known can be explained in full. """

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. I... more The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronislaw Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification.

Chinese Journal of Sociology (SAGE), Mar 1, 2015

One of the key challenges of meaning-centred cultural sociology is facing the findings of contemp... more One of the key challenges of meaning-centred cultural sociology is facing the findings of contemporary anthropology,
archaeology, art history and material culture studies. Specifically, the increasingly pressing task is to recognize the
sociological limitations of the semiotic framework laid bare by those disciplines. The traditional structuralist focus on
discursive codes and the assumption of arbitrariness of cultural sign is of limited service in understanding the power
of complex representational economies and especially in the task of explaining its variability. The language- and
communication-centred framework downplays the fact that signifiers credited with causal social power are inescapably
embedded in open-ended but not arbitrary patterns of material signification. There is ample evidence delivered by
the recent studies within the aforementioned fields that such signifiers are ‘not just the garb of meaning’, to use the
insightful phrase of Webb Keane. Rather, the significatory patterns and their material and sensuous entanglements co-constitute meanings that inform social action.

Therefore, more integrative and multidimensional models of culture in action are needed. Some specific explanatory models have been explicitly formulated by a series of intertwined conceptual ‘turns’ in human sciences: material, performative, spatial and iconic, among others. By showing that meanings are
always embedded in and enacted by the concrete assemblages of materiality and corporeality, they enable sociologists to
transcend the linguistic bias of classical structuralist hermeneutics. This paper discusses the importance of iconicity for developing such an integrative perspective without abandoning some constitutive insights of the linguistic turn. I focus on
the transformative works of contemporary scholars like Daniel Miller,Webb Keane, Ian Hodder, and Jeffrey Alexander, as
well as on my own research, to illustrate the implications of the aforementioned paradigmatic ‘turns’. In particular, I aim
at elaborating a key principle of material culture studies: different orders of semiosis are differently subject to
determination and/or autonomous logic of the cultural text. As a result, differently structured signifiers are responsive to
distinct modes of ‘social construction’ and historical transformation. We need to keep paying attention to the Austinian
question of how to do things with words, but we cannot keep doing it as if things social were at the same time not done
with images, objects, places, and bodies and all that their specific character and use imply. Fleshing out the so-expanded
sociological imagination helps us to activate the full potential of understanding and explanation that the concept of
culture possesses, and thus, to decisively turn culture on.

Is there any difference between the widely discussed ‘pictorial turn’ and the emerging ‘iconic tu... more Is there any difference between the widely discussed ‘pictorial turn’ and the emerging ‘iconic turn’? If so, does it matter? The answers to these questions are positive if we look at the problem from a cultural sociological point of view. It has been observed that the concept of the ‘iconic turn’, coined by a German philosopher Gottfried Boehm, may capture more effectively the sense of life attributed to visual objects than W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous ‘pictorial turn’. This article endorses this conjecture and provides a theoretical context for its justification. It thus contributes to the emerging debate about the paradigm shift in studies of visual culture.

With this volume, we push the study of culture into the material realm, not to make cultural soci... more With this volume, we push the study of culture into the material realm, not to make cultural sociology materialistic but to make the study of material life more cultural. We introduce the concept of iconicity, and alongside it the idea of iconic power. Objects become icons when they have not only material force but also symbolic power. Actors have iconic consciousness when they experience material objects, not only understanding them cognitively or evaluating them morally but also feeling their sensual, aesthetic force.

Acta Sociologica, 2011

Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its puri... more Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its purified signifiers and culturally successful icons within new circumstances? What does it mean when people articulate ‘nostalgic’ commitments to social reality they have themselves recently jettisoned? Drawing on the ideas of the iconic turn and American cultural sociology, the article offers a new framework for understanding post-communist nostalgia. Specifically, it provides a comparative reinterpretation of the phenomenon of so-called Ostalgie as manifest in the streetscapes of Berlin and its counterpart in Warsaw. One of the key arguments holds that ‘nostalgic’ icons are successful because they play the cultural role of mnemonic bridges to rather than tokens of longing for the failed communist past. In this capacity they forge a communal sense of continuity in the liquid times of systemic transformation. As such, the article contributes to broader debates about meanings of material objects and urban space in relation to collective memory destabilized by liminal temporality.

"Theory": The Newsletter of the Research Committee on Sociological Theory, The International Sociological Association, pp. 7 - 12., May 2013

"Sociological theory does not just provide an objective system of understanding; it is a cultural... more "Sociological theory does not just provide an objective system of understanding; it is a cultural performance with irreducible subjective and historical entanglements. Cultural sociology is no different. We can judge not only the logical cohesion and explanatory power of its statements, but also its social authenticity, engagement with intellectual traditions, sensitivity to a given Zeitgeist, interpretive ability, aesthetic appeal, and above all its self-reflexivity. The transformative research agendas must be highly efficient on all those levels of performance at once, and when they are, then conflicts and disputes seem unavoidable. What do I mean by performative “efficiency“ here?
One way of approaching it is to assess how a given agenda deals with a fundamental sociological paradox, namely with the tension between trying to be sufficiently detailed, or "thick" in empirical description of social facts, and striving to reduce social complexity in the conceptual realm.
Using the strong program in cultural sociology as an example of what is at stake in this dual process of scientific labor, I offer a new perspective on an old theoretical directive succinctly put by Alfred Whitehead: "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

The present chapter is a culturalist response to two strategic goals of the book. First, it enter... more The present chapter is a culturalist response to two strategic goals of the book. First, it enters the sociological discourse whose aim is to delineate the patterns of change and continuity in Warsaw under post-communist transition. Second, unlike the bulk of pertinent literature that foregrounds materialist concerns, it contributes to this discourse from a socio-semiotic vantage point. I therefore refrain from discussing the complex problems of economic, financial, and institutional logic associated with the changes experienced by the city after 1989. Instead, I shall outline what Warsaw can and does mean to various interpretive communities existentially connected to the city or preoccupied with it by profession and interest. Hence, what follows is a comparative interpretive glance at discursive tropes, objects and images that comprise Warsaw as collective representation.

Published by Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, USA, Dec 15, 2010

"Bartmanski and Eyerman carefully detail and explain the tangled, distorted, and fraught history ... more "Bartmanski and Eyerman carefully detail and explain the tangled, distorted, and fraught history of the killing of 14,500 Polish military officers and over 7,000 other Polish citizens—representing a significant segment of the elite, professional class of Polish society—by the Soviet army in April 1940. Three years later, when some of the corpses were discovered, the Soviets blamed the Germans for perpetrating the mass killing. This is the basic story the Soviets would claim for decades, with various levels of tenacity, official decree, and threats to the families involved. In the meantime, most if not all of the families knew the truth: members of the Soviet army had killed their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, and nephews. Knowledge of the truth needed to remain unspoken, under threat of losing access to education, jobs, and a public life without harassment in Poland. It remained, for several decades, a personal sorrow and burden rather than a trauma that could be collectively felt and talked about. They write: "Cultural trauma became possible only when the directly affected individuals and communities were able to express themselves, verbally and visually, in a sustained way and project their personal tragedies onto the larger moral screen of the nation."

Literal screens—ones that show films— as well as literature played a crucial role in the extension of the trauma of the massacre and of the distortion of the truth from the affected families to the Polish people and beyond. The transformation of "Katyn" from an occurrence known to a few to a symbol of Polish collective suffering depended on families becoming cultural agents "creating and sustaining the trauma narrative" and on "intellectuals/politicians" who, after official suppression ended, could also create, sustain, and spread the symbolization of "Katyn".

One of the most prominent of these intellectual carriers is the well-known film director Andrzej Wajda, who depicted Katyn in a film in 2007. Wajda emphasized the importance of “showing Katyn to the world” and aimed at triggering moral and cultural shock. The film’s plotting technique moved from the actual victims of the Soviets’ mass murder to the suffering of their families, especially the wives and sisters of the victims."

Z obwoluty książki Jeffreya Alexandra The Meanings of Social Life zachęcają nas do jej lektury ... more Z obwoluty książki Jeffreya Alexandra The Meanings of Social Life zachęcają nas do jej lektury słowa Zygmunta Baumana. W swym krótkim omówieniu tego klasycznego już manifestu kulturalistycznego, Bauman zwraca szczególną uwagę
na jego inspirującą paradoksalność, która spełnia się w przekonującym łączeniu przez Alexandra wątków pozornie przeciwstawnych, w systematycznym dążeniu do zintegrowania tego, co w tradycji socjologicznej pozostawało zwykle rozdzielo-ne lub wzięte za antytezy. Działanie i znaczenie, opis i wyjaśnienie, powszedniość i transcendencja, religijność i racjonalność, wartości i fakty, w końcu poezja kul-tury i proza przyziemności – to według Baumana klasyczne dychotomie ukazane przez socjologię Alexandra w fascynującym i rewidującym dyscyplinę świetle. Celność tej uwagi czyni ją adekwatnym kluczem nie tylko do zrozumienia zawartych w tym tomie tekstów, ale także wyborów intelektualnych, które legły u ich podstaw.

Book Monograph, Dec 18, 2014

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” – Record Collector magazine

Paperback published on December 11, 2013, Jan 3, 2012

American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2017

'Journal of Consumer Culture', 2013

Sociologica : Italian Journal of Sociology Online, Jul 12, 2013

This is a critical assessment of the book by Isaac Reed "Interpretation and Social Knowledge"

Performing the cultural reconstruction of 1989 along those lines provides a "thick" elaboration of two observations that function as epigrams for the present paper.

The second was made by an anthropologist Daphne Berdahl who insisted that "among other things, the revolutions of 1989 were about visibility - making visible 'the people'."

Chinese Journal of Sociology (SAGE), Mar 1, 2015

Acta Sociologica, 2011

"Theory": The Newsletter of the Research Committee on Sociological Theory, The International Sociological Association, pp. 7 - 12., May 2013

Published by Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, USA, Dec 15, 2010

Następujące pytanie umyka często uwadze ofi cjalnych dyskursów dotyczacych kondycji nauk społeczn... more Następujące pytanie umyka często uwadze ofi cjalnych dyskursów dotyczacych kondycji nauk społecznych: dla kogo i dlaczego tworzone są dziś konkretne teorie społeczne? Obserwując logikę rozwoju nauk społecznych, można uznać, iż spora część badań sprawia wrażenie albo wycinkowych ekspertyz polityczno-ekonomicznych albo czysto autotelicznych projektów zamkniętych w elitarnych debatach odgrodzonych od społeczeństwa hermetycznym dyskursem. Centralnym problemem zdaje się być język teorii społecznej i jego funkcje symboliczne. Kto, dlaczego i jak pisze teorie społeczne, a następnie kto, dlaczego i jak może ich użyć, to pytania tego eseju.

Chapter in the Book: "Spielplätze der Verweigerung. Gegenkulturen im östlichen Europa nach 1956" (Playgrounds of Insubordination: Countercultures in Eastern Europe after 1956) edited by Christine Gölz and Alfrun Kliems, Apr 1, 2014

Review of the book "Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity" by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Gi... more Review of the book "Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity" by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, Piotr Sztompka. 2004. Berkeley, the University of California Press, 2004.

Review Essay, Feb 28, 2014

The topics of media and memory have been extensively dealt with in social scientific literature. ... more The topics of media and memory have been extensively dealt with in social scientific literature. Materiality is arguably less explored. However, the recent advances in material culture studies made it virtually impossible to reflect on media and memory without systematically incorporating the concept of materiality and its specific derivatives. Elodie Roy illustrates this point and fleshes out a narrative about music formats and record labels that weaves these three categories together quite seamlessly. But the theoretical framework is vague and inconsistent, inviting the reader to rethink our cultural sociological assumptions.

This Yale Sussman Prize lecture delivered in the Spring of 2012 thematizes one of the key argumen... more This Yale Sussman Prize lecture delivered in the Spring of 2012 thematizes one of the key arguments that emerged out of my graduate work at Yale University. The core argument holds that cultural sociology ought to move beyond the principle of arbitrary signification that upheld the tradition of the linguistic turn. Instead of approaching culture as discursive structure of conventional meanings, sociologists should systematically incorporate materiality and phenomenological registers of meaning-making to understand the actual power of cultural symbols. Iconicity is one of the central categories in this conceptual and methodological reorientation. Hence the iconic turn, but understood not as a reversal of extant research practices in sociology but rather a new move or a recalibration of analytic emphasis that brings language and experience into much needed epistemic balance.