After the cultural turn: For a textural sociology

Texture: Rethinking the cultural dimensions of social life

As one recent commentator has put it, the concept of texture is ‘very much in the air’ and serves to ‘redirect attention to the complex ways in which the world is woven together’ (Paavolainen, 2015, p. 14). Texture derives from the ‘Latin texere, meaning “to weave” ’ and over time came to mean both ‘the thing woven (textile) and the feel of the weave (texture)’ (Adams, Hoelscher, & Till, 2001, p. xiii). The analogy between social life and texture derives then from the fact a ‘textile is created by bringing together many threads and, as such, represents ordered complexity’ (Adams et al., 2001, p. xiii). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987, p. 475), on the other hand, think the ontological suppleness of textility has been overstated and prefer the complexity of something like ‘felt’ where there is ‘no separation of threads … only an entanglement of fibres’ that is ‘smooth’ rather than ‘striated’. However, whether fabric writ large serves as the primary metaphor, or particular instances such as felt, social theoretical deployments of textility-cum-texture seem to be suggesting texture is good to think through the materialities and the spatial and temporal orderings of reality.

How is it then that the cultural turn came to be associated with texts and textuality rather than texture? Clifford Geertz’s (1973, p. 452) influential Interpretation of Cultures did much to influence the equation of culturalism with textualism by suggesting the ‘culture of a people is an ensemble of texts’ which the social scientist ‘strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom it belongs’. Elsewhere, the same author posits the cultural turn involves social scientists ‘see[ing] social institutions, social customs, social changes as in some sense “readable” ’ (Geertz, 1983, p. 8). Geertz (1983, p. 8) added the readability of social forms aligned the activities of the social scientist with those of ‘the translator, the exegete, [and] the iconographer’. In a much-cited passage from Interpretation of Cultures, the anthropologist declares his understanding of culture to be ‘essentially … a semiotic one’ and his approach an ‘interpretative’ science in ‘search of meaning’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 5).

Despite such rhetoric, Geertz found it difficult to limit his account to a purely text-centred framework which neglected texture altogether. First, he describes his mode of cultural analysis as ‘thick description’. The idea that descriptions can be ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ is textural and mirrors the sort of textural evaluations we make about a variety of objects (e.g. whether a given quality in food or drink is concentrated or spread out). Second, one of the key examples discussed by Geertz pertains to the differences between a ‘twitch’ and a ‘wink’, and to the extent the latter exists in the realm of the ‘gestural’ or non-linguistic such communication is hard to frame within a text-based model of how meaning operates. As one scholar of the non-verbal has put it, such communication occurs ‘in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all’ – including those, like pre-linguistic infants, who have not been inducted into the semiotic and representational conventions underpinning gestures (Macdonald Critchley, cited in Pallasmaa, 2009, p. 43). Third, Geertz (1973, p. 12) suggests culture entails ‘habits, skills, knowledge, and talents’, as well as ‘to be in the mood’, and to possess the necessary material objects/technologies, to undertake certain cultural practices. His case in point is playing the violin. But, he adds, ‘violin playing is [also] neither the habits, skills, knowledge and so on, nor the mood, nor (the notion believers in “material culture” apparently embrace) the violin’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 12). Understanding and performing culture involves much more than mastering any one element. Cultural mastery is about how the elements are combined and embodied (e.g. ‘skilfully’ or ‘artfully’). When attempting to capture these hard-to-get-at features of cultural practice, Geertz cites Wittgenstein on the need to ‘find our feet’ in the world:

We learn [the importance of practical mastery of culture] when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country’s language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves). We cannot find our feet with them. (Wittgenstein, in Geertz, 1973, p. 13)

‘Finding our feet with them’ – this could serve as one of the mottos of a textural social science. It reiterates that our theories and methods should ‘aim to be as full of vitality as the life-worlds they endeavour to enact’ (Vannini, 2015, p. 320).

A field where textural ideas have taken root, so as to capture the ‘indeterminacies and contradictions intrinsic in organizational actions’ (Cooper & Fox, 1990, p. 581), is organizational or critical management theory. In fact, there is a nice bridge between our preceding discussion of Geertz and organization studies through the writings of organizational theorist Silvia Gheradi. Her account of ‘safety culture in the construction industry’ opens with Geertz’s paradoxical insight about what it does and does not mean to play the violin (Gheradi, 2006, p. x). However, if violin playing seems an elusive practice, Gheradi (2006, p. x) asks us to imagine how much more difficult it is to ‘recognize “an organizational practice” or to detect how and when “knowing in practice” occurs’.

In her book, Gheradi provides a poignant ethnographic excerpt from co-researcher and co-author Antonio Strati that speaks closely to Wittgenstein’s metaphor of ‘finding your feet’. The observations pertain to construction workers dismantling a tiled roof while standing on it: ‘they were in a literal sense removing the ground beneath their feet. I was also struck by the speed at which they worked’ (Strati, cited in Gheradi, 2006, p. 81). Afterwards, Strati asked the construction workers how they managed this. One of them replied, by stamping his feet, and telling the ethnographer: ‘the secret lay in feeling the roof through [our] feet as if [we] were fastened to it’ (Strati, cited in Gheradi, 2006, p. 81). The implication we might draw from this is that phenomena such as organizational practices are ‘practical accomplishments’ (Gheradi, 2006, p. 51) underpinned by ‘tacit knowledges’ (Polanyi, 1966). It is these hard-to-get-at, situated features of practical actions that make the concept of texture especially relevant to the study of organizational processes:

Texture is a strongly evocative concept which recalls the intricacies of networking but at the same time allows for an analytical, qualitative framework. … The interest of organization scholars in the concept springs from their desire to move from the concept of ‘organization’ as an empirical reality to that of ‘organizing’. … I maintain that the concept of texture paved the way for the study of organizing as practical accomplishment and I consider it the antecedent of practice-based studies. (Gheradi, 2006, pp. 49–51)

Most organizational scholars who have embraced the concept of texture cite the importance of mid-20th-century philosopher Stephen C. Pepper (1942/1966) to textural modes of thought (Cooper & Fox, 1990; Strati, 2000). The latter claims texture is linked to the philosophical worldview of contextualism. Derived from pragmatists such as John Dewey and vitalists such as Henri Bergson, one of contextualism’s central characteristics is a preference for active descriptions of the world:

[Contextualism] is doing, and enduring, and enjoying: making a boat, running a race, laughing at a joke, persuading an assembly, unravelling a mystery, solving a problem, removing an obstacle, exploring a country, communicating with a friend, creating a poem, re-creating a poem. These acts or events are all intrinsically complex, composed of interconnected activities with continuously changing patterns. They are like incidents in the plot of a novel or drama. They are literally the incidents of life. (Pepper, 1942/1966, pp. 232–233)

Pepper’s contextualism involves, as Teemu Paavolainen (2015, p. 14) points out, ‘a process ontology of constant novelty and change’, and ‘events’ are its central unit of analysis. The key terms in this process ontology are quality and texture where the ‘quality of a given event is its intuited wholeness or character’ and its ‘texture is the details and relations which make up that character or quality’ (Pepper, 1942/1966, pp. 238–244). Amongst contemporary social science thinkers, anthropologist Tim Ingold comes closest to Pepper in recognizing that social life represents a delicate web of mutually supportive threads. In books such as Being Alive, Ingold (2011, p. 14) proposes ‘to bring anthropology back to life’ by focusing on what he terms the knotting and weaving that comprise the ‘textures of the world’. He lays out the following meta-theoretical position: ‘in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement – that is, in a world of life – knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence’ (Ingold, 2015, p. 14). Ingold (2011, p. 18) asks with respect to a theory of social life: ‘What, then, would a world be like that is knotted rather than assembled, enchained or contained?’ Such a theory of social life should have as its central focus: (1) ‘the flows and growth patterns of materials’; (2) ‘bodily movement and gesture’; (3) ‘sensory perception, especially touch and hearing’; and (4) ‘human relationships and the sentiment that infuses them’ (Ingold, 2011, p. 18; emphasis in the original). Thus, as we move from text to texture we also encounter a different model of the social scientist. Rather than the translator, the exegete, or the iconographer, the image of the cultural analyst and research practitioner is more likely to be that of the ‘collaborator’, ‘curator’, ‘carer’ and/or ‘correspondent’ (Ingold, 2016; see also Crang, 2010).

Beyond depth ontologies

If texture was present from the very beginning of the cultural turn, there was arguably one obstacle to social science fully embracing it: namely, the preservation of a dualism between surface and depth, style and substance, in much humanistic and social scientific thought. Here academic thought has tended to mirror the society at large in that, despite all our late- or post-modern posturing about the importance of aesthetics and cultural matters to economy, knowledge, technology and self-identity, we are still in many respects the ‘heirs to Plato and the Puritans’ (Postrel, 2003, p. 7). We still suffer from a tendency to think ‘mere surface cannot possibly have legitimate value … [w]e veer madly between overvaluing and undervaluing the importance of aesthetics’ (Postrel, 2003, p. xi).

Surface/depth, style/substance dualisms do not just afflict the critics of the cultural turn. Interpretation of Cultures itself alerts social scientists to the dangers of ‘sociological aestheticism’ and urges them not to ‘lose touch with the hard surfaces of life – with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which [humans] are contained’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 30). But, once you concede there is an unbridgeable chasm between the stuff of culture and social stuff, the enemies of aesthetics, cosmetics, fashion, appearance, the decorative, and so on, have an important weapon in their arsenal. Cultural analysis runs the risk – as feminist critics have pointed out with respect to the gendered aspects of fashion (Wilson, 1985) – of reproducing ‘larger tensions between the “soft” of life – art, aesthetics, symbolism, whimsy – on the one hand, versus the “hard” – technology, mechanics, economy, and rationality, on the other’ (Molotch, 2004, p. 341).

It is no surprise, then, that critics of the cultural turn such as Rojek and Turner chose the term ‘decorative’ to denounce cultural studies and its impact on sociology. It emphasizes that debates about culture have been mired in what Daniel Miller (2006) has termed depth ontologies. The latter writes that when he ‘began [his] career as an academic, committed to the study of material culture, the dominant theory and approach’ was ‘semiotics’ and the most ‘commonly employed’ illustration of how signs and symbols did their communicating was ‘clothing’ (Miller, 2006, p. 12). The kinds of things clothes were seen as communicating included gender, age, class and differing levels of education. However, Miller (2006, p. 14) came to question this semiotic model of clothing when he started doing fieldwork in Trinidad because ‘Trinidadians in general were devoted to clothes, and knew they were good at looking good’ (Miller, 2006, p. 14). He came to see a semiotic approach to clothing as perpetuating unhelpful distinctions about what really matters:

The problem with a theory of semiotics and of treating clothing as superficial is … what could be called a depth ontology. The assumption is that being – what we truly are – is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition to the surface. … But these are all metaphors. Deep inside ourselves is blood and bile, not philosophical certainty. We won’t find a soul by cutting deep into someone, though I suppose we might accidentally release it. (Miller, 2006, pp. 16–17)

Textural thinking provides a way out of such dilemmas. As Pepper (1942/1996, p. 250) suggests: ‘As we analyze a texture, we move down into a structure of strands and at the same time sheer out into its context. A bottom is thus never reached.’ By contrast, in interpretative methods, not reaching the bottom can become a recipe for solipsism or infinite regress (Geertz, 1973, p. 20). In the texturalist universe, coming across yet another ‘strand’ of reality to contemplate is generally a positive thing: ‘At each stage of your analysis (that is, in each new texture into which you have been led), th[e] choice of what strand to follow comes up again, and every strand is more or less relevant’ (Pepper, 1942/1966, p. 250). For Ingold (2015, p. 14) also the problem of surface/depth dualisms evaporates because he conceives of social worlds as resembling ‘the knotting of fibres in net-making and basketry which was among the most ancient of human arts’. In cultural geography too, Crang (2010, p. 194) suggests the defining sensibility in the last decade has been one that ‘problematizes any pre-ordained attribution of significance, any set of qualities of the “big” or “small”, knitting back together grand and intimate geographies’.

The texturalist standpoint would be that it makes little sense to prejudge whether culture is the ‘independent’ or ‘dependent’ or any other specific type of causal ‘variable’; or to pre-decide whether social life ought to be studied at the ‘micro’, ‘meso’ or ‘macro’ levels of analysis. As Harvey Molotch (2004, p. 372) explains, ‘humans accomplish all tasks’ by relying on the ‘entire panoply of emotional and sensate capacities’, so causality is messy and the success of social life relies on having the ‘right mix’ of things coalescing at the right time: ‘We are, with form and function, art and economy, at home not just with chicken and egg, but chicken in egg and egg in chicken. There are no independent variables in this analytic hen house.’ Of course, social actors act as if socio-cultural causalities ‘really’ existed: ‘folks “clean-up” their mess to provide an orderly’ account of social practices when often it is ‘nearly impossible to capture in discourse the complex textures of human agency’ (Molotch, 2004, p. 372). The ‘complex textures of human agency’ is one of the things that propel a textural sociology. The other is the material textures which, directly or indirectly, mediate social life. The latter are discussed in the next section.

Surfaces: On the social life of material textures

In this section, I examine the material textures associated with phenomena such as ornamentation, glamour and glossiness, cities and architecture, and spatial atmospheres. When it comes to material texture, a promising line of recent research – one clearly shorn of an attachment to depth ontologies – is the emergent field of surface studies. A website devoted to surface studies describes it as ‘an area concerned with working on and with different kinds of surfaces, including but not restricted to – skin, screens, lines, interfaces, fabric, and the earth. … Surface studies is therefore an attempt to direct attention to the co-ordination, textures and experiences of surfaces’ (Surface Studies Network, 2013). Despite been short-lived, surface studies has already produced a major piece of scholarship: namely, Joseph Amato’s (2013) Surfaces: A History. The book combines phenomenological and philosophical reflection on how surfaces ‘give manifest testimony … to the plethora of life’ and serve as the ‘primary face of being’ (Amato, 2013, p. 1) with a historical account of societal and technological change. With respect to the latter, the author posits the onset of modernity is marked by the development and diffusion of material textures that are ‘strong, flexible, safe, sanitary, smooth, bright, colourful, and even diaphanous’ (Amato, 2013, p. 5).

The discussion of surfaces and modernity raises an interesting issue: semiotics was deemed conceptually ‘respectable’ in the 20th century while ornament was famously decreed a ‘crime’. But, in retrospect, we can look at the material cultures of the modern period through the lens of ornament – a social science concept that is making a comeback due to the proliferation of ‘new engagements with surface, affect and digital culture’ (Necipoğlu & Payne, 2016, p. 2). The neglect of ornament during the last hundred years in humanities, social science and design thought is a pity as ornamental patterns and textures do much of their socio-cultural work without presupposing the kind of depth ontologies criticized in the previous section. As Jan Bovelet (2012, p. 102) puts it, ‘[o]rnament neither “represents” nor “stands for” something else. … It says nothing, but shows something’; and ornament provides a ‘holistic experience’ that keeps the ‘person within the field’ while ‘not particularly demanding attention or goals-oriented actions in relation to the patterns’ (Valsiner, 2008, p. 77). One mid-20th-century semiotician-cum-textualist who understood the power of ornament was Roland Barthes. In ‘Ornamental Cookery’, he analyses the practice (during the 1950s) whereby Elle magazine featured each ‘week a fine colour photograph of a prepared dish: golden partridges studded with cherries, a faintly pink chicken chaudfroid, a mould of crayfish surrounded by their red shells, a frothy charlotte prettified with glacé fruit designs, multi-coloured trifle, etc’ (Barthes, 1993, p. 78). But the images of these dishes were ornamental not just because they depicted ‘a whole rococo cookery’ of vivid colours and exaggerated patterns (Barthes, 1993, p. 78). They were also ornamental in that they suggested an ‘openly dream-like cookery’ which made the food depicted ‘objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accommodated simply by looking’ (Barthes, 1993, p. 79). ‘Ornamental cookery’ for Barthes implied an ‘abstraction’ of reality that aestheticized the object under consideration and allowed it to be repositioned for purely aesthetic or stylistic purposes.

In the context of mediated consumer culture, a central mechanism through which attention is garnered is the allure and aesthetics of ‘glamour’. The cultural historian Stephen Gundle (2008, p. 2) writes of glamour that it ‘has talismanic qualities’, a ‘sparkle and glow about it that enhance the people, objects and places to which it is attached’. The geographer and cultural theorist Nigel Thrift (2008b) adds glamour has its own materiality and history of material practices. The latter involve ‘a series of “magical” technologies of public intimacy, most of them with long historical genealogies’ that have led to ‘the establishment of human/nonhuman fields of captivation’ (Thrift, 2008b, p. 8). Thrift (2008b, p. 16) notes that glamour can be constructed from the sensory ‘building blocks’ of sound, light, smells, haptic association and even kinetic movement; but in his own reflections he emphasizes the role of ‘colourful materials’ in ‘constructing worlds’ through the ‘unconscious poetry of substance’ associated with mass-produced and mass-circulated synthetic colour. Nowhere is colour more prominent, nor more determinant of cultural and economic value, than in the case of mass-circulated magazines. In her analysis of magazines, Mehita Iqani (2012, p. 82) suggests ‘the material elements of full-colour printing, smooth shiny paper and airbrushing combine to produce a core material dynamic of consumerist discourses which can be summarized as glossiness’. Celebrities are an important aspect of such a magazine culture but the materiality and textures of the magazine medium cannot be underestimated in cultivating reader interest and a general sense of ‘other-worldliness’ around celebrity culture. ‘[A]s the personification of gloss, and glossiness’, the celebrity relies on the materialities and surface qualities of a visual economy that includes ‘full-colour printing on glossy paper, studio photography and post-production retouching processes’ (Iqani, 2012, pp. 83, 89). The materialities of glossiness can of course become attached to objects and situations as well as people. Thus, one of the characteristics of contemporary architecture – which for the last decade or so has been dominated by ‘starchitects’ such as Frank Gehry, Norman Forster and Zaha Hadid, and unusual designs like London’s so-called ‘Gherkin’ – is that one of the functions of architecture has become to embody ‘brand qualities’ through the ‘immersive, sensory nature of architectural space’ (Dyckhoff, 2017, p. 171). Such a development is arguably unthinkable without the confluence of new architectural surfaces (e.g. Gehry’s famous use of titanium) and the accompanying media infrastructure (e.g. how well such buildings photograph not only in traditional media such as print and television but also on social media and new circuits of ‘amateur’ image-production).

Given such developments in the material-textural and political-economic aspects of the built environment, it is not surprising topics such as architecture and design, space and place, and fields such as urban studies and cultural geography, or journals such as Environment and Planning D and Emotion, Space and Society, have been at the forefront of having a textural sensibility cultivated in relationship to them. Crang (2010, pp. 194–195) credits the ‘inspirational manifestos of “non-representational theory” ’ with overturning cultural geography’s perceived ‘retreat from physicality’ and ‘material landscapes’; and suggests the field as a whole is now much better at ‘layering together concerns with the “phenomenological/experiential” and the “social/institutional” and the “discursive” ’. The textural move has also seen a significant amount of renewed interest in the writings of Henri Lefebvre, including his ideas regarding rhythm and spatial analysis (Edensor, 2011); and it is interesting that his all-important contribution to urban theory, Production of Space, is littered with references to the concept of texture – usually in direct contrast to the concept of text. Thus, for example, when discussing phenomena such as unplanned paths through woodlands, fields and pastures, as well as ‘the reticular patterns left by animals, both wild and domestic’ and by people ‘in and around the houses of village or small town’, although they constitute ‘traces of the “values” assigned to particular routes’, these should not, warns Lefebvre (1991, p. 118), be ‘called a text or message … it would make more sense to speak of texture’. ‘Similarly’, he adds, ‘it is helpful to think of architectures as “architextures” ’ in that buildings and other parts of the designed urbanscape are interwoven with the fabric of their surroundings. Production of Space also considers the architectural and urban phenomenon of ‘monumentality’ and suggests monuments possess ‘a complexity fundamentally different from the complexity of a text’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 220). Lefebvre (1991, p. 221) gives the example of entering a cathedral’s monumental space where ‘visitors are bound to become aware of their own footsteps … breathe the incense-laden air’, as well as being ‘plunge[d] into a particular world, of sin and redemption’.

One of the textural qualities that Lefebvre alludes to in the case of monumental spaces has generated its own vibrant sub-field of study: namely, spatial atmospheres. An article introducing a special issue on atmospheres defines them as the sensory and psychological ‘texture of the in-between’ present in landscape, architecture, homes and other spatial environments (Bille, Bjerregaard, & Sorensen, 2015, p. 31). The in-between nature of spatial atmospheres stems from what philosopher Gernot Böhme (1993, p. 114) terms their ‘indeterminate … ontological status. We are not sure whether we should attribute [atmospheres] to objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them.’ It is appropriate to finish a section dealing with material textures with a mention of spatial atmospheres because it highlights yet again the complex interplay of the material and the symbolic in the textural domain. As suggested by Tim Edensor (2017, p. vii) in his recent monograph on how illumination and darkness impact spatial atmospheres, the ‘perception of luminous and gloomy space is a key existential dimension of living in the world’ yet it seems that social science research and analysis of ‘daylight, darkness and illumination is meager’. Given the manner in which spatial atmospheres become entangled in the success or failure of expensive infrastructure projects, or in perceptions of urban vibrancy, one would expect this area of socio-spatial research will continue to grow.

Textural themes in sociology: Georg Simmel and the Yale School

Compared to their disciplinary and interdisciplinary ‘cousins’ sociologists have, arguably, been a little slow to embrace textural approaches. But in this last substantive section I would like to complicate the discipline’s self-image by suggesting instances where textural themes have appeared; and to prepare the way for my Concluding Remarks where I will outline some of the unique attributes of a textural sociological approach. The ‘classical’ sociological author who was most ‘textural’, in his orientation and choice of subject matter, was Georg Simmel. In his sociological universe, social actors, objects and situations are constantly undergoing changes in their forms such that some things become shiny and distinct while others become opaque or dilapidated. Simmel is also interested in the differences that these qualitative states make (de la Fuente, 2016). Thus, in ‘The Ruin’, he suggests ‘so long as we can speak of a ruin at all and not a mere heap of stones’ it is because the ‘crumbling power of nature’ has not yet sunk the products of culture ‘into the formlessness of mere matter’ (Simmel, 1965, p. 261). While urbane and often couched in analogical form, Simmel’s reflections on everyday objects, subjects and spaces contain important hypotheses about how psychic energies and material form combine to make the world feel connected and separated. The essay on ‘Adornment’, for example, speaks of the ‘radioactivity’ of the adorned person, which the author defines as ‘an inextricable mixture of physiological and psychic elements … which issue from an individual in the direction of the environment’ (Simmel, 1997, p. 207). The key sociological mechanisms through which adornment does its work, then, is ‘the sensuous attention it provokes’ and the ‘enlargement or intensification of [the] sphere’ of perceptual influence it bestows upon the wearer and the adornment itself (Simmel, 1997, p. 207). Simmel was also amongst the first to focus on spatiotemporal textures. His essay on the metropolis comments on ‘the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’ characteristic of doing something as mundane as crossing the street in any large city (Simmel, 1950, p. 410).

Simmel (2010, p. 16) famously quipped, ‘I know that I will die without spiritual heirs (and that is as it should be)’. While true in the sense there has never been a Simmel ‘school of thought’, it nonetheless seems to be the case that every new generation of sociologists discover something new in his work and often it is the textural qualities of the thought that are either implicitly or explicitly celebrated. Thus, it is noteworthy that Simmel’s translator and mid-20th-century champion of his work, Kurt Wolff, praised him for being able to think ‘our sense of life as we catch ourselves in the act of sensing it’ (Wolff, 1965, p. viii). This image of Simmel has held through the decades – Olli Pyyhtinen (2010, p. 38) describing his thought as ‘enliven[ing]’ the social, which rather than appearing as some ‘absolute, substantial unity’ emerges as a set of ‘endless entities connected to one another by reciprocal relations’. Simmel’s dynamic sense of the social has ensured that, even if his work has appealed primarily to those who value a ‘sociological aesthetics’, his texturalist admirers also include phenomenologists of perceptual qualities and sociologists of everyday ‘cognitive’ classifications. In the end, whether something is ‘interesting’ or ‘uninteresting’, or evokes a ‘rigid’, ‘fuzzy’ or ‘flexible’ frame of mind involves textural or qualitative judgements (Davis, 1971; Zeruvabel, 1991) – responses shaped by the ‘intensities’ and ‘hues’ of life (Simmel, 1971, p. 353).

In terms of recent sociological approaches, I think there are a variety of contenders for the category of ‘textural sociologies’. In the UK context, there have been departments or groups of scholars working within prominent faculties that have come to embody texturalist sensibilities. One such example would be the Lancaster Sociology Department, which, at one time or another, has housed figures such as John Urry, Scott Lash, John Law, Celia Lury, Sara Ahmed and Elizabeth Shove, and had concentrations of scholars working on topics such as mobilities, science and technology studies, transformations in capitalism, nature and landscape, gender and cultural studies. The major publication approaching a manifesto from this institutional context, John Urry’s (2000, p. 18) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, had as one of its aims ‘to develop through appropriate metaphors a sociology which focuses upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis, structure and social order’. Strong echoes here of the Pepper-cum-Ingold type of process ontology outlined earlier.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there has been a recent ‘school of thought’ that has invoked the concept of texture. I am referring to the ‘Strong Program’ in Cultural Theory. Its online mission statement makes reference to ‘develop[ing] concepts and methods that illuminate the cultural texture of social life at both individual and collective levels’ (https://ccs.yale.edu/about-us). However, much of the early work of the Yale School was about it positioning itself in debates between a sociology of culture versus a cultural sociology (see Alexander & Smith, 2003) – something David Inglis (2016, p. 2) attributes to the fact that ‘in the US both “cultural sociology” and the “sociology of culture” exist more as defined sub-fields, which exist in complex relationships with other sociological sub-fields and the discipline more broadly’. It is also the case that the early work of the Yale School of Cultural Sociology could be said to have left the concept of texture undeveloped. This seems to have been due to a desire to marry such cultural turn tropes as ‘codes, narratives, and symbols’ with a Durkheimian emphasis on the ‘sacred/profane’ via concrete empirical case studies of phenomena such as the Holocaust, the Watergate scandal, the technological imaginary and attitudes towards ‘modernity’ amongst intellectuals (Alexander, 2003).

Only later does the textural dimension of the Yale program become much more prominent. For example, the ‘Introduction’ to the volume Iconic Power makes a strong theoretical claim on behalf of the mediating power of material surfaces: ‘What we experience phenomenologically is a sensible material surface that generates its own aesthetic power’ (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012, p. 2). However, Iconic Power suggests it is not necessary to reverse the ‘logocentrism of Western culture … [by] downplaying discursive meaning and giving priority to the physicality of surface’ (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012, p. 4). The contention is that ‘iconicity allows us to see enchantment as a continuing presence despite tremendous historical change’ (i.e. that modernity does not make aesthetic and sensuous appeal disappear); and that ‘[i]conic power stems from a mutually constitutive (horizontal), not a hierarchical (vertical) relationship between aesthetic surface and discursive depth’ (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012, p. 4).

One of the most interesting pieces of cultural analysis to emerge from within the Yale cultural sociological framework following the ‘iconic turn’ is the book Vinyl by Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward (2015). Theoretically, their framework combines a Yale cultural sociological emphasis on ‘iconicity’-cum-neo-Durkheimian sense of the ‘totemic’ power of certain symbolic artefacts with very generous sprinklings of perspectives drawn from sensory studies, material culture theory and socio-technical studies. We are thus presented with a rich and multidimensional style of cultural analysis that highlights, amongst other things, how the vinyl record’s ‘texture makes the dark surface alive with the game of light’ but where the textured surface is ‘not to be touched, only the edges of the record’. The authors tell us the dirt, captured on the vinyl record’s surface, is both a ‘pollutant’ (as in Douglas’s ‘matter out of place’) and a source of ‘patina’ or of ‘ageing and heritage’ (Bartmanski & Woodward, 2015, p. 85). Such rich and nuanced aesthetic-cum-material cultural analysis is balanced with insights into how vinyl is an artefact whose ‘sensual qualities and physical properties [become] stabilized over years of experimentation, testing and routine use at home and in clubs’ (Bartmanski & Woodward, 2015, p. 92). In the case of the city of Berlin, they found that vinyl was interwoven with various aspects of the city’s identity and its wider cultural economies:

Berlin is not only a city rich in vinyl – like vintage design, third wave coffee culture, bio and secondhand markets, and cutting-edge club scenes – vinyl seems to be an integral part of the city’s fabric and projected self-definition. It is, in fact, something that symbolizes the city, from the chic vinyl boutiques, to gritty and authentic meccas, and just simply out-of-the-way gems, to the Famous Sunday Mauerpark Flohmarkt, where vinyl re-sellers recirculate the music myths of the city in form. (Bartmanski & Woodward, 2015, p. xi)

To the extent that material artefacts are grounded in place, as well as in particular socio-technical and affective-sensory formations, ‘[v]inyl and its pleasures may not be fully describable’ (Bartmanski & Woodward, 2015, p. xi). Yet, Bartmanski and Woodward (2015, p. xi) are adamant cultural sociology needs to hold on to the idea that, even if ‘words cannot grasp all that happens between minds and bodies, language constitutes an irreplaceable medium of human life, just like records uniquely mediate the music’. I think Bartmanski and Woodward’s ethnography of vinyl’s rediscovered materiality, in the digital age, fulfils many of the requirements of a textural cultural sociology.

Concluding remarks

In this article I have tackled the question of what a culturalist social science might look like in the ‘wake of the cultural turn’ and argued that texture rather than text might serve as an appropriate guiding metaphor. Texture derives from the Latin word for ‘weaving’ and this etymological connection, as we have seen, presages the use of texture in social theory and analysis to refer to both the literal ‘surfaces’ of everyday life as well as the metaphorical ‘atmospheres’, unspoken ‘practical codes’ and other implicit orderings at work in social and cultural life. This division between the literal and the metaphorical is purely analytical of course. Ingold (2011, p. 18) advises ‘not to explain any’ dimension of social life ‘in terms of another, nor should we treat knotting in any one as literal and in any other as metaphorical’. For the texturalist, ‘the question is one of how to translate from domain to domain’ and how to render the ‘corresponding’ interweavings of the symbolic and the material in thought and in practice (Ingold, 2011, p. 18).

As a result of this non-reductionist ethos, textural sociology offers a view of sociology that is thoroughly qualitative at the theoretical and ontological as well as methodological and epistemological levels. While there are a number of formulations of the qualitative in social theory, I think Dewey – whom Pepper sees as a forerunner to textural thought – and his notion of the ‘live creature’ is extremely prescient. In Art as Experience, Dewey suggests qualities emerge out of the psychic and other exchanges of energy between self and world:

The live animal does not have to project emotions into the objects experienced. … There are rhythmic beats of want and fulfilment, pulses of doing and being withheld from doing [present within the environment itself] … Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of the living creature is capable of [perceiving] quality. (Dewey, 1934/1958, pp. 16–17)

The only situation in which qualities would not arise is in what Dewey (1934/1958, p. 16) terms a ‘finished’ world, because in such a world, ‘sleep and waking could not be distinguished’. Such a world would be a lifeless or ‘textureless’ world. The question for sociology, then, is this: how can we ensure that the social and cultural worlds we attempt to grasp through our thinking and writing are not lifeless, are not textureless? While there is no one single answer to this question, it is heartening that a number of scholars are starting to engage with the possibilities offered by a textural sociology.