Max Imdahl’s Iconic in the Perspective of Relational Hermeneutics and Cultural Psychology

Theoretical and Methodological Affinities

Abstract

This article analyzes the affinities between Max Imdahl’s concept of Iconic and a relationally oriented cultural psychology, focusing on issues of theory, methodology, and method. Imdahl’s focus on sehendes Sehen and on the image’s intrinsic logic contrasts with modes of identifying thinking and logical subsumption, while opening pathways for methodologically rigorous interpretations of innovative meaning. These insights align with key principles of interpretive social research and cultural psychology, emphasizing relationality, openness to experience, and affective-emotional dimensions. The Iconic’s toolkit – perspective projection, scenic choreography (compositional variation) and planimetry – serves as a methodological resource for cultural-psychological image hermeneutics and for analyzing the relational dynamics between subject and image. Finally, the article addresses the normative dimension of the Iconic: its anti-elitist, radically democratic, and dialogical orientation that highlights the ethical and political scope of aesthetic experience as both selfand world-experience and which is likewise of central relevance to cultural psychology.