Global Iconology

1. Introduction: The Visual Turn and the Limits of Textual Analysis

The emergence of a visually saturated global culture has generated urgent methodological questions for the social sciences and humanities. Visual information, in the form of images, shapes almost every event of our phenomenological existence, profoundly affecting how we understand and act in the world around us. The reign of the visual is ever-increasing, and it comes as no surprise that the "pictorial turn" has supplanted the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture (Mitchell, 1995). Yet, as Durante repeatedly observes, the dominant approaches to globalization theory — drawn from political science, sociology, and international relations — have remained largely anchored to textual-philosophical frameworks, insufficiently equipped to interpret the symbolic and ideological dimensions of visual culture.

While some scholars have approached the topic of the social imaginary, their investigations still rely on the textual-philosophical, abstract dimension of the phenomenon (Appadurai, 2005; Steger, 2008; Taylor, 2007; Thompson, 1982). As a consequence, there is still a dearth of research on how the global imaginary is symbolically and socially produced. It is precisely to fill this lacuna that Tommaso Durante — currently at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne — has developed the method of "global iconology," a critical visual approach that has evolved significantly from his foundational doctoral research (2007–2013) through to his most recent engagements with digital capitalism and artificial intelligence.

2. Intellectual Genealogy: From Warburg and Panofsky to Global Iconology

Durante's method does not emerge from a vacuum. It is rooted in — and critically extends — the classical iconological tradition of art history. Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts, used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and their followers, that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. For Warburg, the image was always a "symptom" of deep cultural energies; his concept of the Pathosformel (pathos formula) proposed that iconic gestures and symbolic structures persist across history as part of collective memory — what he mapped in his famous Mnemosyne Atlas as the "cultural-geographical and historical topography and migration of images." With this atlas of images, Warburg tried to show that iconic gestures and symbolic structures — the so-called Pathosformeln of the lively arousals of humans — exist always. They are part of the collective memory of man.

Panofsky systematized this into a three-tiered method. Panofsky (1955/1982, 40–41) distinguishes between the first step, pre-iconographical description, the second step, iconographical analysis, and the third step, iconological interpretation. To this day, Panofsky's three steps constitute the core of iconography as a method. The highest tier — iconological interpretation — aims to excavate the "intrinsic meaning" of the image: the cultural symptoms and essential tendencies of a given civilization or historical moment, including meanings that may be unknown to or entirely unintended by the artist.

Durante critically appropriates and expands this tradition. The author expanded to "global urban iconology" the iconological method used in the study of art history (Mitchell, 1986; Gombrich, 1994; Panofsky, 1962; Warburg, 1999) to uncover the socio-historical and ideological background of themes and subjects in the works of art. "Global urban iconology" assists in moving from the analysis of the work of art and the artist imaginary to the analysis of social phenomenon and of collective imaginaries. This methodological leap is decisive: rather than examining individual artistic works or their authors, global iconology turns the iconological lens upon the collective production and circulation of images within the urban spaces and digital platforms of a globalized world.

Scholars outside of art history have appropriated the terms iconography and iconology to denote not a method but an approach. The most influential work in this respect is Mitchell's Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. W.J.T. Mitchell's intervention is crucial for Durante, who draws extensively on Mitchell's argument that images are not passive representations but active political agents. Visual images are powerful "cultural objects" that can convey complex accounts of the social world and, since images are not produced in a vacuum, they unavoidably carry embedded systems of values and ideologies. Concurring with W.J.T. Mitchell, "images are active players in the game of establishing and changing" our collective understanding of the world.

3. The Method Defined: Global Iconology as Critical Visual Analysis

Durante argues that cultural transformations we are going through should be investigated by means of global theoretical frameworks, transdisciplinary approaches, new thinking tools and figures of knowledge, and a new method of critical visual analysis and interpretation, namely "global iconology."

In its most developed formulation, "global iconology" may be defined as a critical visual method and interpretive approach that examines both the manifest dimensions of mixed-media representations and the latent, algorithmic infrastructures — such as AI-driven processes, metadata, and tagging systems — that underpin them. These visible and invisible elements operate as mechanisms of "soft power" (Nye, 2017) and, in this sense, function ideologically as a coherent set of ideas shaping perception and meaning.

The method is critical and deeply transdisciplinary. Durante adopts a transdisciplinary approach, drawing on a background in art history and theory, extended to "global iconology." His research combines critical theoretical analysis with fieldwork and case study methods. The intellectual sources brought into dialogue include aesthetics of globalization, social imaginary theory (particularly Manfred Steger's concept of the global imaginary), ideology critique (drawing on Foucault, Althusser, and Mannheim), media studies, and digital ethnography.

Central to the method is the concept of "visual ideological markers of globality" — a new figure of knowledge that Durante introduces to capture the specific kind of image produced under conditions of globalization. In the age of global corporate capitalism and new media technologies, a new visual global regime of representation and signification is challenging the nationalistic aesthetics of the modern self-contained nation-state. As a result, this new visual regime is affecting local-national meanings and cultural identities at local and global scales, while also reshaping individual experience in terms of cognitive processes, aesthetic representations, and narrative strategies. The particular types of visual images defined as "condensation symbols and other visual ideological markers of globality" can be considered as part of the visual-ideological apparatus of globalization.

The concept of the "condensation symbol" is pivotal here. Murray Edelman defines a "condensation symbol" as a particular type of image that condenses many layers of meaning. For the purposes of this research, the concept of "condensation symbol" refers to a particular type of image that condenses spatial-symbolic scales of the local, national, and the global in one single visual formation or event. This analytical tool allows the researcher to track how globalization is not merely an economic process but a visual-ideological one: the image of a globe on a corporate advertisement, or the iconography of a "global citizen," simultaneously interpellates subjects into a new imaginary that transcends the nation-state.

4. Theoretical Underpinnings: The Global Imaginary and Ideology

Drawing on Appadurai (2005), Steger (2008), and Taylor (2007), Durante's concept of the global imaginary is understood as the formation of common sense about the global in people's everyday lives. The global imaginary is therefore a symbolic and social process that, with the aid of the ideologies of globalisation, is translated at the site of reception — the deeper individual level — into the "common sense" of the global. Global iconology provides the analytical toolkit to make this otherwise abstract concept empirically visible and interpretively tractable. Durante's theoretical and methodological contribution is to insist that this shift must be studied visually — through the images, symbols, and aesthetic formations that populate urban space and digital culture — rather than through discourse analysis alone.

The ideological dimension is equally central. Durante's practice-based research looks at the ideological shift from the "modern social imaginary" to the "global imaginary." In particular, it investigates major changes that are giving rise to a new visual regime of representation and signification in selected global and fast globalizing cities across the planet, observing that the circulation of a particular type of socio-historically and ideologically charged global images is creating a new aesthetic affective landscape. This connects to a broader tradition of critical ideology theory: images do not simply reflect power structures but actively produce and reproduce them.

5. Global Iconology at the Time of Algorithmic Ideology

The most significant recent development in Durante's work is the explicit engagement with what he terms "algorithmic ideology" — the ideological formation produced by the infrastructures of digital capitalism, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This represents a decisive extension of the classical iconological tradition into the conditions of the twenty-first century.

Although in a constant flux of change and transformation, globalization is undergoing a phase that prominent scholars define as "re-globalization" or "de-globalization." Yet, the research addressing the emergence of a new form of social (collective) imaginary, the "techno-symbolic global imaginary," which is supported by the "algorithmic ideology" of "digital (global) capitalism," requires deeper and more nuanced investigation.

The methodological response to this challenge involves what Durante describes as a qualitative, "small data" alternative to the quantitative logic of big data analytics. In investigating and discussing the limitations and abstraction of "big data" quantitative measurement as a new capitalistic mode of operation that colonizes people's perception of the world, the study settles on a qualitative "small data" approach to understand change. Thus, by means of digital ethnographic fieldwork and an alternative media aesthetics framework, assisted by the method of global iconology, the chapter aims to reassess globalization as a visual-ideological phenomenon.

The specific platform of Instagram serves as a key case study. Visual images, continuously produced in forms and on a scale never experienced before by human beings, have come to dominate our experience of the world. They not only represent and reflect the world in which we live but, more importantly, they contribute to constructing and continuously changing it. As a result, visual images play a strategic role in the symbolic and social construction of people's collective imaginaries and historical consciousness. On Instagram, Durante examines how the method of global iconology — along with digital visual ethnography — provides approaches for examining how images function at both local and global levels, almost like dissecting them.

Crucially, global iconology as practiced in the algorithmic age is not limited to the visible surface of images. Global iconology — the study of images, signs, and symbols in a globalized, highly mediated society shaped by AI — offers a critical lens for analyzing the visual rhetoric of virtual influencers and non-human characters. These entities operate within an invisible infrastructure of metadata, tags, and algorithms, influencing culture through anthropomorphism and symbolism. As Warburg suggests, they function as "vessels" (Bilderfahrzeuge), meaning they carry material artifacts that transport visual images and cultural information across time and space. By extending Warburg's archival and migratory conception of images to algorithmic platforms, Durante argues that the deep symbolic function of images has not disappeared in the digital age — it has been absorbed and intensified by technical systems that operate largely below the threshold of conscious perception.

The implications for power are stark. The study investigates how the new spirit of capitalism is inscribed in the global fabric of search algorithms, leading to the "re-globalization" of the world as never experienced before. The platforms hosting this image-world — Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Google — are not neutral conduits but agents of what Durante, drawing on Nye, calls "soft power": the study will also speculate on the imperialistic role transnational media corporations play and on the possibility that they may, or may not, contribute to the rise of a global media order.

The digital algorithm, in this framework, does not merely distribute images — it ideologically pre-structures which images circulate, to whom, and with what affective and symbolic charge. The chief idea of our age now wrestling with the narrative of the arts is the apparatus wherein our own internal mental processes of categorization and production of meaning are pre-structured by rules, most famously executed by organizations like Google. Global iconology, as Durante conceives it, is the critical method required to make this hidden infrastructure legible — to excavate not only the "intrinsic meanings" of images (as Panofsky would have it) but also the algorithmic conditions of their production, distribution, and reception.

6. Application: The Visual Archive Project and Case Studies

The empirical anchor of Durante's research is the Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary, initiated in 2007 and ongoing. Durante received his PhD from RMIT University in 2013 and is the author of The Visual Research Project of the Global Imaginary (2007–ongoing), an online visual archive that collects still images to investigate how symbols found in the urban spaces of global and fast globalizing cities across the planet construct a new social imaginary that is simultaneously local, national and global.

Through this archive, global iconology has been applied across diverse empirical contexts: from Melbourne and Sydney's urban fabric to Shanghai, Dubai, and New York; from protest imagery (Occupy Wall Street) to corporate advertising; from populist political aesthetics to hijab fashion trends and virtual influencers. The text employs digital visual ethnography and global iconology to analyze visual data in populism, arguing that visual ideological markers play a crucial role in shaping perceptions of national identity in a mediatized society. In a recent application to virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela, the study integrates philosophy of technology, critical discourse analysis, visual rhetoric, and global iconology to interrogate how these digital entities operate, the values they embody, and their implications for identity and reality.

7. Concluding Remarks

Global iconology's strengths are considerable: it offers a theoretically coherent, empirically grounded, and methodologically innovative framework for studying visual culture at the intersection of globalization and digital technology. Its insistence on the ideological work of images — against approaches that aestheticize or merely describe them — situates it within the best traditions of critical theory.

Yet, as with any ambitious methodological proposal, it faces legitimate challenges. Classical iconology has been criticized for its elitism and hermeneutic circularity: the method elicited criticism mainly directed at its elitist attitude that only "initiated" scholars with a humanistic education could properly use this method and approach. Durante's global extension does not entirely escape this problem — the selection and interpretation of "visual ideological markers" inevitably depends on the researcher's own culturally situated perspective. The choice of what counts as a "condensation symbol" or a marker of globality requires justification against charges of imposing an external analytical grid onto images whose local reception may be radically different.

Furthermore, the concept of algorithmic ideology, while provocative, remains partially underdeveloped in the extant literature. The relationship between the visible ideological content of images and the opaque computational processes that mediate their circulation demands more systematic theorization — ideally in dialogue with emerging work in platform studies (Gillespie, 2014), critical algorithm studies (Noble, 2018), and the political economy of digital media (Fuchs, 2014).

Nonetheless, as Durante argues, in the dawning age of artificial intelligence and the accelerating global spread of visual technologies, there is an urgent redefinition needed in the use of images in academic research — specifically in the fields of international relations and global studies political theory. This calls for the study of critical visual pedagogy and the study of visual rhetoric and global urban iconology at the university level, to help broaden understanding of the political role of media representations and how visual images affect people's imaginaries and ideologies under present conditions of neoliberal globalization.