Book Review: Matters of Revolution: Urban Spaces and Symbolic Politics in Berlin and Warsaw After 1989 by Dominik Bartmanski

Abstract

In Matters of Revolution, Dominik Bartmanski revisits East Europe’s post-1989 transformation to explore two cases of urban metamorphosis and re-signification: Berlin and Warsaw. However, Bartmanski’s book is more than an analysis of two divergent trajectories of post-1989 urban change: it is an ambitious push towards a synthesis of cultural sociology, material anthropology and phenomenology. In my view, Bartmanski’s effort is successful: the book is (1) sociologically productive in delivering excellent thick descriptions and robust explanations (2) theoretically accomplished in merging fitting agendas and developing an intellectually independent and innovative perspective (3) stylistically excellent. In the first two chapters, Bartmanski expounds on his challenge to mainstream sociology, which – following thinkers like Weber – ‘preoccupied itself with ideas’ as ‘abstract mentalities expressed in language’ (p. 16). But to conceive of ideas as disembodied is naïve: according to Bartmanski, ‘socially vital ideas embodied and emplaced ideas. Their significance varies because of material and spatial circumstances in which they are brought to existence and made resonant’ (p. 16). Pulling on threads from structuralist and poststructuralist theories of culture (from Barthes to Alexander), anthropology (Miller or Ingold), and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), Bartmanski carves out an autonomous perspective that allows him to integrate abstract structures of ideas with deep sensitivity to their emplacement (or displacement) through architectural (or broadly material and embodied) performances. The result is a theory of iconicity that breaks with earlier work Bartmanski undertook with Alexander in an edited volume Iconic Power, which neatly separated the ‘relatively autonomous’ (Bartmanski, 2012: 60) depth and surface layers of iconic objects. In the present book, Bartmanski productively challenges this dualism and emphasizes that they are ‘interdependent rather than independent’ (p. 47) and never ‘concretely separated’ (p. 47). In Chapters 3 to 5, Bartmanski deploys his framework to understand post-revolutionary transformations of the East European urban landscape. In Chapter 3, he focuses on the iconic significance of the revolutions themselves, asking why the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall captured the world’s imagination in a way that overshadowed revolutions in other countries, especially Poland and Hungary. Bartmanski argues that the answer lies in 1097938 CUS0010.1177/17499755221097938Cultural SociologyBook Reviews book-review2022