In recent years, the concept of the social figure has been established as a particularly productive method of sociological analyses and increasingly given theoretical and historical attention. Social figures are thus frequently used to describe present-day societies. They are neither sociological ideal types in the sense of Max Weber nor purely fictional figures, but rather objects of a society's > collective consciousness <. Social figures emerge between public discourse and debate, media representations, and scholarly theory. My article deals with social figures from the perspective of literary studies. This means, I focus primarily on the aesthetic aspects of social figures: While sociology is usually interested in whether the social figure is suitable to describe a particular social problem, this article is primarily concerned with the representational properties that are characteristic of social figures and that make a realization of their diagnostic function probable. Furthermore, my article takes a comparative perspective on the central characteristics of social figures and situates them against the background of literary and social science research on figures. By doing this, I focus on aspects that are particularly relevant for social figures from a literary-sociological perspective: Firstly, their claim to social representation and their analytical functionalization within the framework of social descriptions and interpretations is constitutive for the social figure. They are figurative ciphers of social phenomena, providing information about emergent processes and pointing to underlying social driving forces and structures. The social expressiveness of figures raises questions about techniques of representation that apply equally to literary and sociological or sociographical figuration processes. The term > social figure < becomes a cipher for multiple figurative procedures with which social processes and phenomena are shaped in texts, and figures are conceived and received in terms of their social representation on a scale between individuality and type character. Their particular appeal lies in combining actor-centered and socio-structural perspectives of social description and combining macro-sociological observations with micro-sociological forms of representation or enriching literary representations with socio-analytical elements. Secondly, social figures are associated with historically different practices of figure genesis, which depend on the respective social, disciplinary, and genre-related sociographic framework. Social figures are produced by authors in an intricate process of observation and recording, concretization and abstraction, which emerges between performative, everyday practices (and their sociographic observation) and media representations. Social figures are characterized by the fact that they refer to the whole of society and its current state in two ways: On the one hand, by being socio-typologically representative of a group of people that characterizes contemporary society. On the other hand, they themselves become the cultural patterns according to which people are socially categorized. Thirdly, the cultural and historical specificity of a particular social figure only emerges regarding the relational ties to other social figures: they must always be considered as part of a constellation of figures. While in social studies they relate through correspondence and contrast to other social groups and their social figurative counterparts, in literary texts they are part of a constellation of figures, in which the entirety of the figures denotes the entirety of the social space depicted. In the (social) figure, literary and social science discourses of the present, which deal with the possibilities and conditions of figurative descriptions of society, come together. The study of social figures enables new perspectives on ways of writing the social from a historical perspective, e.g., with regard to the 19th century. For the study of social figures, this results in an interesting corpus of sociographic hybrid forms such as social reportage or the contemporary diagnostic essay, whose socially figurative methods of representation in turn have an effect on classical literary genres such as the social novel.
