Article:

Wie kommt eine Gesellschaft zu ihren Bildern? Oder: Zur bildlichen Konstruktion gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit

In the sociological debate, images are increasingly perceived as a central ele-ment of the constitution of social reality. Accordingly, images are no longer simply objects of research that allow access to social phenomena, but inde-pendent moments of the formation of society. The present considerations at-tempt to trace this sociological function of images theoretically on the basis of the self-images of a society by reconstructing the genesis of socially shared images. For this purpose, current sociological reflections on images as well as a sociology of memory are used to recapitulate the ›collectivization of images‹ as a process of collectivizing ›shared spaces‹ of imagination. The aim is to un-derstand images as already circulating social forms in society, which result from a common access to social reality, and through whose cultural fixation or objectivation an access to a socially shared idea of society is made accessible for the individual members of society.