ALTAMIRA
PRESS
ARCHAEOLOGY IN SOCIETY SERIES
SERIES EDITORS
Ian Hodder, Stanford University
Robert W. Preucel, University of Pennsylvania
In recent decades, archaeology has expanded beyond a narrow focus on
economics and environmental adaptation to address issues of ideology,
power, and meaning. These trends, sometimes termed "postprocessual,"
deal with both the interpretation of the past and the complex and politically
charged interrelationships of past and present. Today, archaeology
is responding to and incorporating aspects of the debates on identity,
meaning, and politics currently being explored in varying fields: social
anthropology, sociology, geography, history, linguistics, and psychology.
There is a growing realization that ancient studies and material culture
can be aligned within the contemporary construction of identities under
the rubrics of nationalism, ethnoscapes, and globalization. This international
series will help connect the contemporary practice of archaeology
with these trends in research and, in the process, demonstrate the relevance
of archaeology to related fields and society in general.
Volumes in this series:
UNESCO, Cultural Heritage, and Outstanding Universal Value: Value-based
Analyses of the World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention,
by Sophia Labadi (2013)
In Defense of Things, Bjernar Olsen (2010)
Dwelling, Identity, and the Maya: Relational Archaeology at Chunchucmil, by
Scott Hutson (2009)
The Social Construction of Communities: Agency, Structure, and Identity in the
Prehispanic Southwest, edited by Mark D. Varien and James M. Potter
(2008)
Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and
Uzma Z. Rizvi (2008)
Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities,
edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T. J. Ferguson (2007)
Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology,
Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell (2005)
Archaeology of Performance: Theatre, Power, and Community, edited by
Takeshi Inomata and Lawrence S. Coben (2005)
In Defense of Things
Archaeology and the
Ontology of Objects
Bjornar Olsen
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Contents
Published by AltaMira Press
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Copyright © 2010 by AltaMira Press
First paperback edition 2013
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of
Congress as follows:
Olsen, Bjornar.
In defense of things: Archaeology and the ontology of objects / Bjornar Olsen.
p. cm. — (Archaeology in society series)
Indudes bibliographical references and Index.
1. Archaeology—Philosophy. 2. Material culture. 3. Landscape.
4. Phenomenology. 5. Actor-network theory. I. Title.
CC72.048 2010
930.101—dc22 2010000867
ISBN: 978-0-7591-1930-7 (doth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-7591-1931-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-7591-1932-1 (electronic)
CA,TM
C:2 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992.
List of Illustrations vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Brothers in Arms? Archaeology and Material Culture
Studies 21
3 Material Culture as Text: Scenes from a Troubled
Engagement 39
4 The Phenomenology of Things 63
5 Tacit Matter: The Silencing of Things 89
6 Temporality and Memory: How Things Remember 107
7 Living with Things: Matter in Place 129
8 In Defense of Things 151
Notes 175
References 179
Index 197
About the Author 203
Printed in the United States of America
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1.1. "Societies or nation-states are not cognitive sketches
resting in the minds of people; they are real entities
solidly built and well tied together." Walltown Crags
(Hadrian's Wall), Northumberland, UK (photo:
Alfredo Gonzälez-Ruibal). 4
Fig. 1.2. "If there is one historical trajectory running all the
way down from Olduvai Gorge to Postmodernia, it
must be one of increased mixing: that more and more
tasks are delegated to nonhuman actors, and more
and more actions are mediated by things." Bay Bridge
and San Francisco (photo: Wernher Krutein/
photovault.com). 10
Fig. 2.1. Landscapes—what difference do they make to the
way we live, think, and act? Integrated living,
southern Iceland (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 30
Fig. 2.2. "And it seems possible to say very little in these
studies about the dull, ordinary, and inconspicuous
materiality that people constantly engage with....
How do we 'sublate' a coal mine or a derelict town in
the Russian North?" Apartment house, Lovozero,
Kola Peninsula, Russia (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 33
Fig. 3.1. "Consider the biography of a Neolithic megalith."
Megalith tomb of Dombate, Galicia, Spain (photo:
Alfredo Gonzälez-Ruibal). 48
vii
viii List of Illustrattons List of Illustrations ix
Fig. 3.2. "This 'conversation' is not intellectual rhetoric; it can
be activated only by a 'physiognometic' dialogue that
restores to things their own materiality, allowing them
to speak to us in their own language." Leftover
machinery in the abandoned mining town of
Pyramiden, Svalbard, Norway (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 51
Fig. 3.3. "Many of us inspired by poststructuralism all too
easily came to ignore the differentes between things
and text." Stranded vessel, Höpsnes, Iceland (photo:
Bjornar Olsen). 60
Fig. 4.1. "In this mode, we do not 'see' the thing, but are
practically and skillfully involved with it." Uniting
with the kayak, West Greenland, ca. 1880 (photo:
M. P. Porsild). 70
Fig. 4.2. "Bad things, an the other hand, have no soul to lose.
They never become 'homesick' since they have always
been part of a serviceable Bestand." Harbor
installations in abandoned mining town of Pyramiden,
Svalbard, Norway (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 83
Fig. 4.3. Lakes, rivers, valleys, mountains, and sea: rock surface
as meaningful microtopography. Hjemmeluft, Alta,
Arctic Norway (photo: Karin Tansem). 86
Fig. 5.1. "New styles and materials became associated with
the 'vulgar' works of engineers." Glass meets iron and
stone, Palace of the National Bank, Bucharest,
Romania (photo: Elin Myrvoll). 93
Fig. 5.2. Already blurred? Sämi sacred site, Seitjaur, Kola
Peninsula, Russia (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 100
Fig. 6.1. "Despite the fact that much of it may have ceased to
be useful, and maybe never will be actualized as
recollections or in habits, it has not ceased to be."
Window ledge assemblage in the abandoned mining
town of Pyramiden, Svalbard, Norway (photo:
Bjornar Olsen). 119
Fig. 6.2. "Things themselves also assign or 'instruct' a certain
bodily behavior. They require certain formalized skills
to actualize their competences." Music studio in the
abandoned mining town of Pyramiden, Svalbard,
Norway (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 123
Fig. 7.1. "A fisherman is not just a person, a human body
equipped with a mind." Cod fishing, Lofoten,
Norway, 1956 (photo: NTB/Scanpix). 137
Fig 7.2. "To act is to mobilize an entire company of actors."
Launching a small actor company, West Greenland,
ca. 1906 (unknown photographer; Heims's collection). 142
Fig. 7.3. Man, kayak, and hunting gear, Narsaq Kujalleq,
Nanortalik, West Greenland, 1911. The man's kayak
suit (tuilik), made of softened, water-resistant seal
skin, was sewn as a hooded jacket with drawstrings.
These secured the suit around the face and wrists and
fastened the bottom opening tightly around the
coaming of the kayak cockpit. When the man was
seated and strapped in, he and the kayak operated as
a unit, with all hunting gear (weapons, float, lines,
etc.) mounted within easy reach (photo: John Moller). 148
Fig. 8.1. "Habitual use is not 'trivial,' in the derogatory sense
of the word; it implies knowledge, care, and respect
for what objects are in their own being." Persistent
tools at Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway (photo: Bjornar
Olsen). 154
Fig. 8.2. The existential importance of things is most
dramatically disclosed in those exceptional cases in
which entire thing environments are lost or disturbed.
The ruined fishing village of Berleväg, Arctic Norway,
after the German withdrawal in 1944 (photo:
Krigsarkivet/ Scanpix). 160
Fig. 8.3. "Even when things are discarded, destroyed, and
demolished, something is nearly always left—in other
words, gathered." Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway
(photo: Bjornar Olsen). 167
Fig. 8.4. Stranded Skoda in the field, Lyngmo farm, Arctic
Norway (photo: Bjornar Olsen). 168
Fig. 8.5. Revealed privacy, Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway
(photo: Bjornar Olsen). 171
1
Introduction
But has my mise-en-scene thus mortified the quartz, drained it of any
material vitality, its very shimmer dulled by being subjected to an archaeological
epistemology where its role, within this too harmonious
scene we call history, is never to be itself but always, always to represent
something else?
—Bill Brown, A Sense of Things
In his book from 1987, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Daniel
Miller referred to material culture as "a surprisingly illusive component
of modern culture," which "has consistently managed to evade the
focus of academic gaze, and remains the least understood of all central
phenomena of the modern age" (1987:217). Twelve years later, Michael
Schiffer wrote that social scientists have "ignored what might be most
distinctive and significant about our species [that] human life consists
of ceaseless and varied interaction among people and myriad kinds of
things" (1999:2). And well into the new millennium, Bruno Latour has
confirmed that little has changed:
Muchlike sex during the Victorian period, objects are nowhere to be said and
everywhere to be feit. They exist, naturally, but they are never to be given
a thought, a social thought. Like humble servants, they live an the margins
of the social doing most of the work but never allowed to be represented as
such. (2005:73)
Irrespective of the different perspectives and disciplinary entanglements
of their authors, these quotes signify the growing concern with the neglect
2 Chapter 1 Introduction 3
of things in the social sciences. Despite the grounding and inescapable
materiality of the human condition, things seem to have been subjected
to a kind of collective amnesia in social and cultural studies, leaving us
with a paradoxically persistent image of societies operating without the
mediation of objects. Needless to say, there are of course exceptions and
brave attempts at repatriations that throughout the last century have
included figures as varied and famous as Bergson, Heidegger, Benjamin,
and Merleau-Ponty. However, despite the nuances and exceptions that
any attempt at a gross generalization will encounter, it can still be argued
forcefully that the material components of what we have come to think of
as "social life" have been marginalized—even stigmatized—in the social
sciences and philosophy during the twentieth century.
Why has this marginalization taken place? Why has the physical and
"thingly" component of our past and present existence become forgotten
or ignored in contemporary social science research to such an extent?
How has this attitude affected those disciplinary fields still actually devoted
to the study of things, most notably archaeology? These questions
form some of the background to this book. With the possible exception
of the last one, these questions are of course not novel to material culture
studies (Miller 1987:3ff.; Dant 1999:9ff.; see Olsen 2007). My own motivation
for readdressing them is partly based an a felt need to provide more
convincing answers. More important, however, is the fact that these questions
are closely related to the main inquiries which form the basis of this
book: How do things and objects "mix" with human beings to form those
configurations we call society and history? What role do things play in
enabling and securing social life? Moreover, if things make a difference,
which they obviously do, are these differences grounded in qualities that
go beyond their relational significance? In other words—and challenging
the semiotic and structuralist mantra—is things' difference, and thus capacity
to act, grounded in qualities unique and essential to them?
These inquiries transgress disciplinary concerns while at the same time
being strongly linked to archaeology. Archaeology has become a popular
(if somewhat worn out) catchphrase among philosophers, psychologists,
social scientists, and literary critics. However, few of those fascinated by
its metaphorical payoff have bothered to think seriously about what an
archaeological contribution to the topics they address might have actually
looked like. In this sense, this book is also about reclaiming a concept.
However, this should not be misconceived as either an attempt at repatriating
or restricting it to a confined disciplinary field or an attempt to
reaffirm a traditional concern with the distant past. Archaeology in my
opinion is first and foremost a concern with things, and when the object
now seems to reenter social ar\d cultural-discourses, archaeologists, as
the most dedicated students of things, should naturally make their voices
heard. Archaeology's long-held concern with things constitutes an intellectual
skill that is clearly highly relevant to these debates. Moreover,
due to our concern with things, I also find it appropriate that writing and
reading theory from an archaeological point of view should make a difference.
Our theorizing, although in part dedicated to common phenomena
and the processing of similar philosophies, should be distinguishable—at
least to some extent—from other theoretical discourses. This book is also
written to contribute to this difference.
CREDO: NOT ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR
During the last two decades we have witnessed a new interest in things,
materiality, and landscape in a number of disciplines. However, for some
reason, this interest has largely left void the intrinsic material significance
of things and the qualities they possess beyond human cognition, representation,
and embodiment. Although serious and pertinent criticism
has been voiced against the textual and linguistic reductionism implied
in many former interpretive archaeologies, a dominant trope is still that
material culture and landscapes are sites of "inscription," metaphorical
"stand-ins" that always represent something else and more importantly:
the "social," the "cultural," the "political," and so forth—all implicitly
conceived of as extramaterial entities. A subtext in most contemporary
approaches is an implicit conception of culture as somehow "prior" to
or detached from matter, with an assumption that cultures, "already different,"
approach the material world in unique ways, causing a variety
of material expressions and meanings. Thus, despite much talk about
somatic experiencing and bodily practices, things and landscapes seem
to have little to offer to this experience beyond being plastic, open ended,
and receptive.
Given its title, I reveal no big secret by admitting that this book has
been provoked by a growing discomfort not only with the dominant
antimaterial conception of culture and society within the human and
social sciences, but also with the way archaeology and material culture
studies, despite their self-proclaimed success (cf. Miller 1998a:3; Buchli
2002), have to such an extent moved away from the material qualities of
things and subsumed themselves to hegemonic antimaterial and socialconstructivist
theories.' Thus, the following observation made by Schiffer
in 1999 is still pertinent:
beyond being marginalized material-culture studies often suffer from a more
severe problem: they simply project conventional ontology and theories into
new empirical domains, treating people-artifact interaction as secondary to
4 Chapter 1
processes of culture. The manufacture and use of artifacts is regarded, for
example, as just one more arena in which people negotiate culturally constituted
meanings. (6)
This book is grounded in a realist attitude in the sense that I do believe
the material world exists and that things constitute a fundamental and
persistent foundation for our existence. Things, materials, and landscapes
possess real qualities affecting and shaping both our perception of them
and our cohabitation with them. A large portion of recent studies in archaeology,
anthropology, geography, and cultural studies seems to have
been guided by a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Ricoeur 1970) in which
"all that is solid melts into ah/1'2 including things and the physicality of
the world—which sometimes seem reduced to little more than discursive
objects or "phenomena" of the subjects' cognitive experience. As noted
by Judith Attfield, the material world has become dematerialized to the
extent that we can no longer "believe our eyes" (2000:42). Denying or
ignoring any integrity and autonomy to that which is beyond our perception,
we are left with an "intentional world" held together almost solely
by human cognition (cf. Ingold 2000:40-41).
Figure 1.1. "Societies or nation-states are not cognitive sketches resting in the minds
of people; they are real entities solidly built and well tied together." Walltown Gags
(liadrian's Wall), Northumberland, UK (photo: Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal).
Introduction 5
SOCIETIES CONSTRUCTED OF WHAT?
Symptomatic of this anthropocentric attitude, if also somewhat semantically
misleading, are the antiessentialist buzzwords of invention and
construction. Tradition and cultures are invented, nations imagined, and
knowledge constructed. Even far outside the relativist settlement, it has
become commonplace to say that social reality is "constructed" (cf. Hacking
2001; Latour 2005:88ff. for a general discussion). Of course, tradition
and cultures are invented and societies constructed, but this does not
make them unreal or false. Societies or nation-states are not cognitive
sketches resting in the minds of people; they are real entities solidly built
and well tied together. As the etymological roots suggest, facts are made
and the real is fabricated. Rather than "revealing" entities as constructed
and made up, our attention should be devoted to analyzing how these
entities (e.g., societies and cultures) are put together and the real building
materials—the concrete and steel, rebar and pillars—involved in their
construction. In other words, we should pay far more attention to the
material components that constitute the very condition of possibility for
those features we associate with social order, structural durability, and
power (Latour 1999b, 2005).
It would be a grave overstatement to say that these building materials
play any central role in the various conceptions of society applied in the
social and human sciences. Marxism represents an exception, but even
here, things, albeit important, are largely reduced to a confined structural
feature and the means of production within the total social formation. Societies
and cultures are otherwise rather consistently treated as collectives
of humans held together by social relations and social forces—in short, by
people without things. In a textbook aimed at university students, anthropologists
Thomas Eriksen and Torunn Sorheim define society as "a system
of roles, obligations, and relations between humans sufficiently extensive
enough to facilitate that most of its inhabitants get most of their needs
satisfied" (Eriksen and Serheim 2006:40, my translation). We further learn
that culture consists of the "thoughts, knowledge, and skills that humans
have acquired as members of society. . . Culture can thus be considered
as a kind of mental matrix for action, the sum of all the experiences, knowledge,
and values that we carry with us and that ground our actions" (41,
my translation, emphasis in original).
Even in an apparently thing-specific subject such as gift exchange, the
objects providing the logic to its naming are often trivialized or regarded
as being more or less irrelevant. Here, too, a common assumption is that
the gift's role is epiphenomenal to the primary social relations between
persons. Thus in his study of ancient Norse gift exchange, Aron Gurevich
arrives at the conclusion that "what mattered was not the transferred
6 Chapter 1 Introduction 7
object itself, but the persons who owned the object and the fact that they
had chosen to transfer it" (Gurevitch 1992:179). This typifies a common
attitude within social studies by which persons or subjects constitute
categories that can easily and naturally be bracketed off from things and,
in this unequipped state, become sufficient to explain the phenomena in
question. However, as argued by ID6ra Paursdöttir in her discussion of
gift exchange as narrated in the Icelandic sagas,
The object was not just an incidental substitute, a "stand-in," which represented
"social" relations and transactions, but was in itself of central importance
in the establishment and maintenance of the relationship---without it
the relation was unthinkable. . . . A friendship, or any other relation, was
therefore not formed between two parts in a vacuum but through collective
interactions between entities of things and people. The objects were not abstracted,
incidental things but constantly engaged, concrete manifestations,
and thus fundamental parts of these associations. (2007:61)
In order to understand how society works—and thus is made possible—
we have to become more liberal and inclusive and to acknowledge that
far more constitutive entities than humans (and their thoughts, knowledge,
and skills) are woven into its fabric. In other words, we have to take
into account that societies consist of myriads of real and co-working entities
composed of both humans and nonhumans. In this respect, some of
the founding sociologists such as Emile Durkheim provided glimpses of
insights that seem much more sensitive and humble toward the material
world than the perspectives of later fellow sociologists and philosophers
(cf. Joerges 1988:224)? In The Suicide (published in 1897), Durkheim wrote
that
it is not true that society is made up only of individuals; it also indudes material
things, which play an essential role in common life. The social fact is
sometimes so far materialized as to become an element of the external world
. . in houses and buildings of all sorts which, once constructed, become autonomous
realities, independent of individuals. It is the same with avenues
of communication and transportation, with instruments and machines used
in industry and private life. . Social life, which is thus crystallized, as it
were, and fixed an material supports, is by just so much externalized, and
acts upon us from without. (1951:313-14)
To Durkheim, for this moment at least, artifacts were also social facts. Unfortunately,
however, neither he nor the vast majority of his successors
paid much attention to this fact in their research. Actually, as noted by Joerges,
"the closer one moves to the sacred inner circles of theory-building
and systematic empirical generalisations, the more devoid of things social
science becomes" (1988:223).
THE SOLITUDE OF THE BODY
There are signs of change, of course, and the timely advent of the body
in social and cultural studies during the past twenty to thirty years has
been particularly promising (e.g., Butler 1993; Meskell 1996; Williams
and Bendelow 1998; Tilley 1999; Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow 2002;
Sweeney and Hodder 2002; Joyce 2005; Waskul and Vannini 2006). The
material potential of this somatic turn, as especially reflected in various
readings inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, seems obvious: as human
beings we are somatically inserted in the world, and prior to the Cartesian
"I think" it is necessary to acknowledge a practical lived component
expressed in routinized practices and actions, in bodily habits (MerleauPonty
1962:137ff.; Macann 1993:175-76; cf. foreword to Meskell and Joyce
by Turner, 2003; Joyce 2005).
From this corpus of phenomenological thinking we have learned that
knowledge is not something just sitting in our heads. It is also acquired
through and stored in our bodies. Once a certain habitual skill has been
learned, we only need a short time to familiarize ourselves with a new
city, a new car, or another archaeological museum. The time is too short
to develop completely new sets of conditioned reflexes—our familiarity
with organized spaces and with materiality and things, in short our material
habitual competence, permits us to project a potential for movement
and actions that can rapidly be modified to accommodate specific differences
(such as coming to a new house or city;Merleau-Ponty 1962:145-47;
Macann 1993:176). As the famous American phenomenologist John Travolta
stated after returning to America from three years of fieldwork in
Amsterdam: "It's the same as here, but different" (Travolta teaching his
gangster buddy about cultural differences in Pulp Fiction, quoted after
Löfgren 1997:106).
This somatic turn, also as inspired by (and reflected in) the works of de
Certau, Foucault, and others, clearly paved the way for less logocentric
approaches in social studies. It also contained the potential for challenging
the taken-for-granted primacy of language as the means for coming
to grips with the world, although sometimes rather the opposite was
proposed (cf. the discussion of Butler's work in chapter 3). However, despite
its indisputable material potential, there is usually something crucial
missing in most of these accounts of the competent body found in disciplines
such as philosophy, literary studies, sociology, and anthropology:
the things that the body relates to and blends in with—in short, the material
components of the world it is being in. One often gets the impression
that in these disciplines, the human body is the only flesh of the world,
and that this lived-in body roams the ground rather unconstrained by
other types of beings.
8 Chapter 1
Consider the concept of habit memory, a very important concept that we
owe to Henri Bergson (see chapter 6). It refers to how memories are stored
in the body as dispositions and habits. In contrast to so-called cognitive or
recollective remembrance, habitual memories are lived and acted rather
than represented (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1962; Casey 1984; Bergson 2004).
Biking is often used to exemplify this type of memory, here nicely formulated
by Elaine Scarry: "What is remembered in the body is well remembered.
When a fifteen-year-old girl climbs off her bike and climbs back
at twenty-five, it may seem only the ten-year interval that her body has
forgotten, so effortless is the return to mastery" (Scarry 1985:109). Something
rather essential, however, is missing in this story: the bike. The other
half is entombed in the celebration of the clever body, and we are once
more left with the sound of one hand clapping. But try to bike without a
bike; try to think of your day-to-day practices without things. Think how
the routines, movements, and social arrangements of our daily lives are
increasingly prescribed, defined, and disciplined, as well as helped or encouraged,
by assemblages of material agents. All we need to do is to think
about moving around a house, a university campus, or a city to realize
how they ground programs of action that schedule and monitor our dayto-day
activities (Boast 1997:188). In all of our daily conduct, objects are
involved as (more or less) taken-for-granted and inherent aspects of our
doings. They do not just provide frames, scenes, or background for our
actions (cf. Miller 1985), but are intrinsically and indispensably involved
in enabling those very actions. Thus, the firne seems overdue to credit
them some social recognition. This is not to say, of course, that things are
the only vital component of social order and constitute the site where all
our attention from now on should be focused. As remarked by Latour,
"there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and
sheer inexistence" (2005:72).
For obvious reasons, one would expect the picture to be very different
in the growing number of archaeological studies of the body (cf. Meskell
1996; Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow 2002; Joyce 2005). Here, however,
the body seems taken even more literally. Guided by the long-held concern
with signaling and identity formation (status, gender, ethnicity, personhood,
etc.), the material cultural focus has been primarily related directly
to bodily display and inscriptions (ornaments, dress, tattooing) and iconic
manifestatiorts such as figurines, masks, anthropomorphic rock art, and so
on. Despite the claim that "under the influence of phenomenological approaches"
the focus has shifted to analyses of "the production and experience
of lived bodies" (Joyce 2005:152;cf. Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow
2002), the pivotal role of the human being is rarely challenged. Rather than
exploring the possibilities opened by focusing on somatic experiencing
and, consequently, on being as a materially entangled being, many archaeIntroduction
9
ologies of the body may actually be seen as reinforcing the anthropocentric
bias. (See, however, Meskell and Joyce 2003; Meskell 2004). This adopted
bias accentuates my initial claim that archaeological theorizing should
make a difference by always and consistently remembering things.
REMEMBERING THINGS
A main part of the agenda of this book is thus to suggest a more egalitarian
attitude in the way we perceive society and culture, a more "symmetrical"
way of attending to past and present lifeworlds. This is founded
on the premise that things, all those enormously varied physical entities
we by effective historical conventions refer to as "material culture," are
beings in the world alongside other beings such as humans, plants, and
animals. All these beings are kindred, sharing certain material properties,
"flesh," and membership in a dwelt-in world (cf. Merleau-Ponty
1968). They all share the capacity for making a difference to the world
and to other beings (Harman 2002:167). Symmetry, if we stick to that
concept (see Latour 2005:77), does not imply that they are equal—hence
reducing everything to sameness. Entities are of course different, in fact
they exhibit—between and among themselves—extremely varied forms
of beings that actually constitute the very basis of collective action (see
chapters 7 and 8). However, this difference should not be conceptualized
in compliance with the ruling ontological regime of dualities and negativities;
it is a nonoppositional or relative difference that facilitates collaboration,
delegation, and exchange (cf. Pickering 1994; Latour 1999b:180-82).
However far back we go into "talkative history and silent prehistory"
(Serres 1987:209), humans have extended their social relations to nonhumans
with whom they have swapped properties and formed collectives
(Serres 1987:209; Latour 1999b:198). According to Michel Serres, this capacity
of advanced material bonding becomes constitutive of what it is
to be socially human; it is the main difference between our society and a
society of animals:
Our relationships, social bonds, would be airy as clouds were there only
contracts between subjects. In fact, the object, specific to the Hominidae,
stabilizes our relationships, it slows down the time of our revolutions. For
an unstable band of baboons, social changes are flaring up every minute....
The object, for us, makes our history slow. (1995a:87)
If there is one historical trajectory running all the way down from Olduvai
Gorge to Postmodernia, it must be one of increased mixing: that more
and more tasks are delegated to nonhuman actors, and more and more
actions are mediated by things. Only by increasingly mobilizing things
10 Chapter 1 Introduction 11
Figure 1.2. "lf there is one historical trajectory running all the way down
from Olduvai Corge to Postmodernia, it must be one of increased mixing:
that more and more tasks are delegated to nonhuman actors, and more and
more actions are mediated by things." Bay Bridge and San Francisco (photo:
Wernher Krutein/photovault.com).
could humans come to experience "episodes" of history such as the advent
of farming, urbanization, state formations, industrialization, and
postindustrialization. The features we associate with historical change
and the attributes we ascribe to development and progress were all made
possible by humans increasingly becoming more entangled and "assemblaged"
with nonhumans (cf. Renfrew 2004).
The important thing-lesson entailed in this story is that these other
entities do not just sit in silence waiting to be embodied with socially
constituted meanings. Landscapes and things possess their own unique
qualities and competences that they bring to our cohabitation with them.
Throughout history, the properties of soil and water, bone and stone,
bronze and iron, have been swapped with those of humans. Thus, the
claim of such an egalitarian or symmetrical archaeology becomes very
different from that of Karl Marx (and Gordon Childe): man did not make
himself!
OUTING THE OBSTACLES
Remembering things may seem to be an obvious task in order to conduct
adequate studies of society and culture. Only a brief reflection an
our current existence, irrespective of being lived through the bodies of a
shopkeeper, a philosopher, a reindeer herder, a novelist, or a cybermedia
artist, will reveal to us how inextricably it is enmeshed with things and
with objects always-already combined and included in all our everyday
doings. Just try the (impossible) experiment of imagining an existence
without things, without matter. The more we realize how past and present
human existence is mixed with materials, the more extraordinary and
paradoxical becomes the blacklisting of them from the social sciences.
However, and for various reasons, relearning to ascribe action, power—
or, to use that old mantra, agency—to entities other than the human subject
has proved a very difficult task. One major obstacle is that it implies
opposing what Graham Harman (2002:4) has termed "the long dictatorship
of human being" held in philosophy, social theory, and the social
and human sciences at large. This is a persistent and vital regime, well
defended by the effective history of Western thought and successfully
infiltrating the most remote corners of the academic landscape. This epistemological
and ontological legacy has entombed most of our thing experiences
and made us inattentive to the being of things (cf. Benso 2000).
According to this legacy, things do not act (outside mechanical causality)
and have no meanings, goals, or any other qualifying properties that may
facilitate their enlistment into the social. These are qualities reserved for
the rational and intentional subject—in short, for humans only.
Attempts to do away with this regime have largely been dismissed,
obstructed, or prevented. To ascribe more than usefulness and aesthetics
to things has largely been seen as mystifying and fetishistic, a dangerous
primitivism prescribed for the other, the premodern. Thus, an important
aspect of our social and academic education has been not to confuse
social relations with object relations or to ascribe what is thought of as
human properties to objects. As noted by Miller, the dominant imperative
has been "that primary concern should lie with direct social relations
and 'real people'" (Miller 1987:11). So we have one set of relations
that are taken for granted as real, authentic, and honest (humans among
themselves) and another set that a priori are false. Transgressing the
border between the "us" and the "it" easily leads to dismissal and moral
contempt.
This border and these sanctions are, of course, related to the wider
moral-political legacy of modernity (see chapter 5). Numerous philosophers
and social theoristssaw the emergence of the mass-produced, massdistributed,
and mass-consumed object from the Tate nineteenth century
onward as a sign of an illusory and deceptive world. The new consumer
capitalism, filling the world with goods, replicas, machines, and inhuman
technology, became the incarnation of our inauthentic, estranged,
and alienated modern being (Heidegger 1993; Young 2002). It also gave
12 Chapter 1 Introduction 13
rise to a powerful and persistent definition of freedom and emancipation
as that which escapes the material (Latour 1993:137-38, 2002). Things were
increasingly seen as a threat against authentic human and social values,
as tellingly manifested in the Marxist (and social-theorist) vocabulary of
"objectification," "reification," and "instrumental reason." "Materialism"
too soon became a self-explanatory term of abuse, embodying all negative
features of modern living. In other words, things ended up playing
the villain's role as humanism's "other," also giving their relegation from
disciplines studying genuine social and cultural practices an effective
moral justification (Olsen 2003, 2007). No wonder then that during the
twentieth century to study "just things" became a source of embarrassment
(cf. chapters 2 and 5).
THING THEORY AND BRICOLAGE
Outing these philosophical obstacles should not be confused with dismissing
the legacy of modern thinking or interpreted as a plea for a
nostalgic return to premodern conditions (Domaiiska and Olsen 2008).
There are of course many ontological and epistemological shades within
what we probably too conveniently tend to compartmentalize as the
modern episteme or "modern thinking" (cf. Thomas 2004). Although entailing
a somewhat ambiguous conception of things, Martin Heidegger's
work, for example, signals that there were attempts, successful or not,
that tried to oppose the dominant anthropocentric regime. The works of
philosophers and social theorists such as Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and
Merleau-Ponty are all of great relevance to the study of things, as are
those of a number of late-twentieth-century scholars including Michel
Foucault, Serres, and Latour. In this work, I shall draw on many of these
brave attempts. Even philosophies deeply embedded in the Cartesian
legacy raise issues important to the topic of this book and to the questions
posed at the outset.
Trying to deal with these questions has required some risky expeditions
into the vast terrain of philosophical thinking and social theory,
ranging from poststructuralism to actor-network theory (ANT). The aim
of these excursions has not been to prepare the ground for any tour de
force overview or to provide any deep insights into all fields and deep
valleys of this misty landscape. In compliance with my initial plea for an
archaeological difference, the goals of my theoretical hiking are far more
limited: What aspects of these philosophies and theories are of relevance
to our understanding of things? Do they help us to come to grips with
how things relate to us, and can they help in explaining the sad fate of
things in our talkative discourses? How do these philosophers and theorists
themselves approach the material world, things, objects, and artifacts?
In other words, what differences would an archaeological reading
of them bring forth?
Needless to say, even these more modest goals cannot be accomplished
in any exhaustive way, and some people will no doubt be searching
in vain for their theoretical loved ones. The actual body of theory approached
in this book is a reflection of a hard-to-untie knot of personal
theoretical dedications and commitments, the relevance and convenience
of former readings, and the likes and dislikes that much research is based
on (although rarely expressed). However, in my defense, the theories
actually dealt with have—with a few exceptions—all been important
to what has become known as "material culture studies" over the past
twenty to thirty years. I reapproach some of these theories to see if more
can be said about them—have we sensed the proper thing-lesson of, for
example, phenomenology?
Without denying the sympathies that undoubtedly shine through, I
have tried not to commit myself too much to any distinctive approach.
Rather, I have attempted to let myself be guided by a bricoleur attitude,
searching around for usable bits and pieces that may be reassembled
with other appropriate spare parts. Even if one approach as a whole may
be of limited interest to my topic, some nuts and bolts may still be very
useful—if by that term we mean that they inform, enlighten, nuance, or
challenge the way we conceive things. This eclectic attitude is, of course,
a vulnerable and risky approach. Risky in the sense that it confronts the
idea of compatibility—which in and of itself is not a bad idea, though it
is often grounded in an all-or-nothing model of commensurability. In this
model, programs and philosophies are labeled, united, and held together
by founding totemic scholars. Thus, phenomenology stands to ANT as
"Heidegger" to "Latour," and neuer shall they meet. Moreover, it confronts
the customized politeness of authorial obedience (phenomenology
cannot be fused with ANT—just look how many times Heidegger is ridiculed
by Latour; symmetry has no credibility as a concept due to Latour's
mocking of it, etc.).
Another version of this politeness is the respect of authorial maturing.
As many authors change their perspectives and become retrospectively
chronologized into early and late beings (e.g., Heidegger, Foucault,
Barthes), we are somehow expected to flow with the author, conducting
what Harman has termed "developmentalist readings" (2002:7), and to
have more trust in the late rather than the early. However, as Harman
notes in relation to his somewhat controversial reading of Heidegger:
I regard it as irrelevant the question of whether Heidegger meant to grant the
prominence to tool-being that it receives in this book. . . . A philosophy is
14 Chapter 1 Introduction 15
not a private introspective diary to which the philosopher has unique access.
Better to think of it as a thought experiment, a process of smashing fragments
of reality together to see what emerges. . . You and I have the right
to pursue the implications of tool-being in ways that Heidegger might not
have suspected, and evenin ways that he might have condemned. (2002:5-6)
Proposing theoretical bricolage requires that we allow for some "intraparadigmatic"
autonomy: that elements carry an importance by themselves
that may be activated and even increased when dislocated from
their original setting. In other words, it requires that we refrain from
thinking of theoretical fragments as adhesive either/ or representations,
which when sympathetically touched upon inevitably lead to the enrollment
in, and thus commitment to, an entire positioned corpus of thinking.
The only consistency test that such an eclectic approach can be put to is
whether it "works" and performs consistently in relation to my research
objectives. In other words, it enables a better understanding of things: of
their ontology, of their oblivion in academia, and of their contribution to
society and history.
However, some qualifications are still called for. Defending openminded
and risky theorizing is not a plea for the ignorance of strong
intellectual traditions and the hard work that has made them successful.
Avoiding swearing allegiance to this or that theoretical regime is not to
say that we should be unconcerned with their content and their integrity
or that any use or representation of them is acceptable. Thus, defending
eclecticism does not mean defending more versions of "anything goes."
There is obviously a lot that does not go, that cannot be mixed or should
not be presented under well-established intellectual brand names (cf.
chapter 2). Even if theoretical insights may be combined and used fruitfully
in ways different from those intended by the original authors, this
does not render them open to any uses or deprive them of their critical
potential. Theories also have objectives that object to uses that are too
liberal.
My own "soft" eclecticism has emerged as an attempt to pursue
the ways in which productive reasoning discovered in one body of
work can be enlightened, improved, or strengthened by joining it with
similar proposals observed in other bodies, while also trying to take
into consideration the possible tensions and contradictions that exist
between other parts of these bodies. Despite the internal controversies
and contradictions that may arise, such an eclectic approach seems far
more fitted to dealing with the complex mass we call "things." Things
themselves have repeatedly proved to be too complex, different, and
unruly to be captured by any single philosophy or social theory (cf.
Latour 1999b: 176).
WRITING THINGS, THEORIZING THINGS
Theorizing on and writing about things in their inconspicuous ready-tohand
mode, as well as trying to depict their tacit, thingly affordances and
importance, is obviously a task inflicted with its own contradictions and
problems. How can the reticent be expressed and still be considered tacit?
In what way can people's practical and everyday engagement with things
be properly dealt with in academic discourses prone to abstract categories
and theorizing? Are we doomed to the linguistic absolutism and pessimism
by which Ludwig Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus ("Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent")?
In a recent paper, Tim Ingold expresses some of these concerns in relation
to what he diagnoses as a susceptibility to abstraction in material culture
studies that threatens to alienate the thing theorists from the things
actually studied (2007a). Depressed by a conference he attended, Ingold
reflects about what this "academic perversion" is all about:
As anthropologists, I thought to myself, might we not learn more about the
material composition of the inhabited world by engaging quite directly with
the stuff we ward to understand: by sawing logs, building a wall, knapping
a stone or rowing a boat? Could not such engagement—working practically
with materials—offer a more powerful procedure of discovery than an
approach bent on the abstract analysis of things already made? (2007a:2-3,
emphasis in original)
One may easily sympathize with Ingold's frustration, which fortunately
did not take him in the suggested direction—he actually continues by
quite conventional academic means in discussing concepts developed by
psychologist James Gibson. teile much may be learned from the suggested
practical engagements, it seems based on a problematic conception
of both things and academics. The latter are "thinkers" dislocated
(and thus alienated) from the real (read: rural) world in which authentic
practices and proper things have their Heimat (cf. Miller 2007:25-26).
Although common Norwegian experiences, which include rowing, sawing
and chopping logs, skiing, snow shuffling, fishing, hunting, tenting,
gardening, house building, house cleaning, cooking, baking, and child
nursing may be less widely shared (at least from what I can observe in
my current Californian writing diaspora), Ingold seems to misrepresent
or underestimate our own modern habitual knowledge and involvement
with things. People from all over the globe and in all contexts intimately
engage with things. Our ready-to-hand involvement with things and materials
has probably never been greater and more diverse. Each academic
conducting an "abstract analysis of things already made" possesses an
16 Chapter 1 Introduction 17
enormous reservoir of tacit knowledge related to driving, biking, walking,
food preparation, IKEA furniture assembling, computer work, dressing,
writing, drinking, eating, teaching, book handling, shopping, and so
forth. All these experiences are material encounters involving constraints,
objecting objects and processes of "tuning in" (cf. Ingold 2000:352-54).
Academics also hunt, fish, garden, saih climb, and build, and even those
who do not still have their life much more grounded in a tacit mode of
"knowing how" than an intellectual "knowing what."
Thus, even if the idea of going back to a more direct encounter with
authentic raw materials may be useful for certain purposes (such as understanding
log building or flint knapping), it is not the lack of material
engagements or competences that explains the problems of abstraction
that Ingold addresses in his paper. The question is rather to ask why our
habitual knowledge about "the material composition of the inhabited
world" has been excluded to such an extent from our discourses. As
already hinted at, and as will be argued in more detail later (see chapter
5), I conceive this void as an outcome of a very effective history of thing
oblivion and displacement in Western thinking rather than a lack of material
experience änd engagement. In other words, the problem is not that
we lack practical knowledge. Quite the contrary, we have probably never
been more experienced in dealing with things and technology; never has
human life been more of a "meshwork," to use Ingold's own term (2007a,
2008). However, due to a dominant intellectual legacy, the material component
of this mess has mostly been treated with suspicion and rarely
allowed more than a provisional and derivative existence.
In building alterative approaches, it is also doubtful whether the strategy
of exiling certain concepts (such as materiality, material culture,
and artifacts) is very helpful (Ingold 2007a). Using language necessarily
involves transformations and abstractions—the word ax is by necessity
different from the concrete object. Academic exchange is primarily conceptual,
and although concepts may be ranked according to their relative
proximity to experience, they are nonetheless concepts. As concepts they
participate in another order, a linguistic discourse in which their rhetorical,
aesthetical, and allegorical values are also of importance. Favoring
materials over materiality, as Ingold (2007a, 2007b, 2008) prefers, may be
useful in addressing certain issues and making an argument convincing,
such as the one that dealing with things and authentic raw materials in
a concrete manner is better and nobler than abstracted concerns with
materiality.
However, attempts to ban, eliminate, and expel concepts from our vocabulary
are rarely effective and their voids are soon filled with equally
abstracted and generalized concepts. In the very same paper in which
Ingold has a go at the concept of materiality (which actually appears frequently
in his own writings), closely related age-old abstractions such as
the mental, the material, and matter proliferate, as do concepts that similarly
carry taken-for-granted disciplinary and cultural assumptions about
the order and division of the world. (And what about new abstractions
such as meshwork, network, agency, mediators, ANT, etc.?) This is not to
say that conceptual critique is redundant, as such exegeses may indeed
be useful and thought provoking—as exemplified by Heidegger's meticulous
language toil. However, it is questionable whether the attempted
campaign of conceptual policing helps very much in developing fruitful
approaches to things and materials. Rather than certifying proper concepts,
we should concentrate on sensible usages.
Moreover, despite the long-held tyranny of written texts and spoken
language, I am convinced that things can also be cared for in written
texts. I do not subscribe to the "abyss" doctrine grounding many social
constructivist approaches, arguing that things (and the "world") are separated
from language by some untraversable abyss, making any statement
just a linguistic construction. Siding with authors as varied as Benjamin
and Latour, I believe things also contain their own articulations that can
be translated to language as well as being mediated by other means of
expression (cf. Benjamin 1996:70; Latour 1999a:144).
WHAT THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT
Writing a book about thing theory easily leads to expectations of something
that can be immediately used to inform archaeological inquiries
about the past and even of being provided with instructions for proper
usage. In this book, however, theories are not played out in a "case
study," the compartmentalized applied field that constitutes such a
dominant trope in most archaeological and anthropological books of this
kind. Those who search for a methodology or an interpretive strategy will
therefore most likely be disappointed. A concern with things, however, is
found consistently throughout the entire book. Thus, before heading on, it
may be appropriate to end this first chapter by saying a few words about
what not to expect from this book and why.
A primary concern is with the ontology of things: what things are, how
their difference affects our life, how their being challenges our conceptions
of time and history, and why things, despite their importance, have
been dismissed and ignored to such an extent in social science studies.
Needless to say, in my opinion these are all issues that are important both
to archaeology and to the emerging number of scholars and artists concerned
with things. Even for the methodologically devoted archaeologist
there should be something to be achieved;the concern with things as data
18 Chapter 1 Introduction 19
or sources should not be kept separate from a concern with the nature
of their being. However, ontological issues are not easily played out in a
case study because, for a start, it is hard to envisage any exhaustive "case"
in which things' being can be put on trial. What seems more useful and
achievable is a stepwise argumentative approach that links theory and
things. Given the aims and scope of the book, I have thus tried to produce
a text that constantly engages with things in their varied manifestations.
These things include arthaeological entities but also ordinary things
embedded in our present everyday life. Since we all have such intimacy
and familiarity with things, and in this sense are all fellow archaeologists,
everyday objects and doings become an important heuristic device for
making the arguments familiar and sensible.
This "distributed" integration of things also serves another mission.
Despite its "theoretical" orientation, this book challenges the primacy of
theory and the separation of things from theory that often, if not necessarily,
grounds the urge for "application." I do not think things "speak" to us
because of theory or that things only become meaningful through theoretically
informed readings. Things are already meaningful and essential
to the world and—despite my minor objections—Ingold (2007a, 2008) is
clearly right that there is a lot to learn from our direct involvement with
them. Thus, what is needed is not necessarily recourse to more cases or
new things, but means by which to activate the implicit thing knowledge
we already possess, as well as means to become more sensitive to the
inherent qualities of things themselves.
Some readers may object that I have omitted central contributions or
debates within archaeology and material culture studies, such as the research
on cognition and material culture (e.g., Renfrew 2001, 2004). This is
mostly a deliberate choice based on a care for my own topic, interests, and
research questions. Rather than attempting the impossible task of being
all-inclusive, I have—and despite the unavoidable excess of compulsory
references—chosen to engage in more detail only with those works and
authors I consider directly relevant and important for my arguments..
There is, of course, always the risk of not being aware of works that
would have informed one's discussions. In this respect I am mostly worried
for contributions made outside the dominant languages and publishers,
a concern I am sure most of my British, French, and U.S. colleagues
also sincerely share. (See, however, Olsen 1991.) Still, as their enormous
production witnesses, this burden of concern does not prevent them from
writing. In other words, to write is also to be selective and to include what
one knows and, for various reasons, considers relevant.
Finally, this is not a book about things unusual, conspicuous monuments,
elaborately decorated artifacts, enigmatic figurines, or astounding
ritual deposits. It is even less about the ephemeral, the void, the momentary,
the transitory, and all other borderline phenomena that seem to have
such attraction in many theoretically oriented works in archaeology and
(material) culture studies more generally. Leafing through the titles and
keyword listings of books, papers, and conference sessions from the last
decade, it is rather astonishing to note how rarely we encounter ordinary
things as matters of concern: streets, tube stations, logs, chairs, sewer
pipes, bridges, cargo ships, meadows, fishing grounds, hearths, wells,
and cooking stones—in other words, stable materials, things in their
reliable everydayness. This is not at all to say that spectacular things,
grand monuments, and strange and momentary phenomena are without
interest, but taking into account their relative frequency and importance
in past and present life-worlds, they seem a little overemphasized and
probably a little overrated. Why do the growing cadres of thing-students
forget or avoid those things we normally mix with, rely on, or excavate?
Although probably less exciting and appealing to those constantly preoccupied
with the search for something behind the material, a "return to
things" can neuer be accomplished without also bringing in these missing
masses. Besides, the thingness of the thing is probably easier to grasp in
the less conspicuous, ordinary, and thus far more common objects.
2
Brothers in Arms?
Archaeology and Material Culture Studies
The whole productive idea of using artefacts to reconstruct the whole of ‘,.
an extinct society saw artifacts as leftovers, not as essential to the very fti
existence of social life.
—Mark Leone, "Beginning for a Postmodern Archaeology"
The outset of this book was devoted to the fact that things have been
imid in twentieth-century social science researenda. y, this—ör --
course is little more than a commonplace reminder. Throughout my research,
I have encountered this claim in quite an astonishing number of
works, which has provided me with an impressive list of fellow mourners.
Archaeologists are prominent, but quite a few sociologists, anthropologists,
and philosophers have also voiced this bias. Michel Serres, for
example, has noted the paradoxical situation that despite the fact that
thinaare seenas being„shamostic of humane ("Humanity begins with
things; animals do not have things"), theyFlay no rote in the study,of thismrt
humanity.Thus, "in the current state Of43 airs the so-called human or social
sciences seem at best to apply only to animals" (Serres 1995b:165-66,
199-200).
With such a critical awareness of things' exile from the human and
social sciences being exposed, actions taken to repatriate the object would
of course be expected, and this is what the buzz teils us. Thus,
a popular claim lately is to say that things have receptured much of their
lost territory„As voiced by historian Frank Trentmann, "Things are back.
Art;the turn to discourse and signs in the Tate 20th century, there is a
new fascination with the material stuff of life" (Trentmann 2009:283).
21
22 Chapter 2 Brothers in Arms? 23
While the 1970s and 1980s became known for the linguistic or textual
turn, we have for some time now envisaged a "turn to things" in the
sociocultural fields (cf. Andersson 2001; Bakker and Bridge 2006; Benso
2000; Brown 2003; Domanska 2006; Fahlander and Ostigerd 2004; Hahn
2004; Miller 1998a, 2005a; Nilsson 2003; Preda 1999).
In this chapter, I shall review some of these attempts at "(re)turning to
things." One obvious field of its manifestation is the growth of what is
often labeled as "material culture studies" in its various forms, such as
consumption studies. However, an even more pertinent field to explore
is the development within archaeology, the disci2line of things par excellence.
Despite being little but a "material culturestudy," which for several
Ses has also included analyses of contemporary societies (Rathje
1984, 1991, 1996; Schiffer 1991, 1999, 2003), it is for some reason rarely
placed at the forefront when the new material culture family (including
ancestors and fiance's) are presented (Miller 2002:240; cf. Appadurai
1986b; Miller 1987; Buchli 2002; Trentmann 2009). Its consistent devotion
notwithstanding, archaeology's relation to things still remains somewhat
ambiguous, as this chapter will try to outline. Willie itizbvio.uäly_doe.s.not
have toLigporreturri=.2tothingätoconfirmitäident4rarchaeology.has
been seriously affected by the shifting intellectual goncep_fliens cf.things
and materialitY-hillll-in kadeniie and society at large.
this-diep-ter is not at all intended as any exhaustive review of material
culture studies or the shifting role of things in archaeology and other
disciplines. For this purpose, the reader should look elsewhere (cf. Buchli
2002, 2004; Fahlander and Ostigärd 2004; Hahn 2004; Hodder and Hutson
2003; Julien and Rosselin 2005; Knappet 2005; Lucas 2001; Meskell
2004, 2005; Miller 1987, 2005a; Pearce 1997; Preucel 2006). Rather, it is an
attempt at diagnosing some trends and tendencies in this research. Although
theories, their use, and their application are commented on, they
are themselves not scrutinized in much detail. The purpose of this, and
the following chapter, is to prepare the scene for my more detailed plea
in defense of things in the chapters to follow.
ARCHAEOLOGY: THE DISCIPLINE OF THINGS
Saying that material culture has been ignored in the social and human
sciences is utterly unfair to one discipline that has stubbornly continued
to engage with things: archaeology. As already noted, archaeology is
the foremost discipline of things, and there was a time way back when
areheenTOgiiirroved Obreetsnone may even recall a certain obsession.
In fact, it was a passion shared by several disciplines such as an-thiöfhTogy,
ethnology,enire"wide-fleld orw-hativ.Väneesfiehoslieciiv-elY7iieeycall
cultural studies (cf. Fenton 1974:19-21; Klausen 1981; Stocking 1982;
Strathern 1990:38-39).
However, it is an equally well-known fact that most of our former allies
soon abandoned the world of things in favor of more social and human
concern, leaving archaeologists, ethnologists, and museum curators
rather alone in their concern for the object. When anthropology turned
social (or cultural), tlflwere no longer assigned any role in mediating
the relationship betweenTTeratifbreälegielärinheieLllie-thärwas
siudied. From now on, societies and the cultural contexts were to be accessed
"directly" through the new disciplinary imperative of dialogue
and participant observation (Miller 1987:111; cf. Kuper 1978). Increasingly
eoncärried wiihre'nlätivation of the native's otherness, the "social
framework' needed immediate and full dedication:
It led to the position that one should really be studying the framework itself
(the social context=society). The artefacts were merely Illustration For if one
sets up social context as the frame of reference in relation to which meanings
are to be elucidated, then explicating that frame of reference obviates
or renders the illustrations superfluous: they become reflections of meanings
produced elsewhere. (Strathern1990:38)
Complying with the justificatory habit associated with most ruptures and
revolutions, the well-proved tactic of self-definition through negation
also became generously applied by the newly converted anthropologists.
Thus, after becoming social (or cultural), they more than willingly testified
to things "objectifying" function, feasible only, we were told, within
outdated evolutionary and diffusionist conceptions of culture—or within
"eonjegureIthiSy.Throughout the first three quarters of the twentieth
century, anthropologists repeatedly launched cautionary tales to reaffirm
their vision of culture as social or cognitive. In his 1961 attempt to define
culture, Fredrik Barth thus still found it necessary to make a cautionary V;
tale: "It often seems that . . even artifacts are treated analytically as if
treTwere cultural elements. It ought to be clear that patterns of behavior
described as 'customs' or artifacts in a museum are not cultural elements.
...Culture consists of ideas" (Barth 1961:39, my translation and emphasis).
In this context, where the social (and soon the political and ethical)
increasingly became flagged as a categorical imperative within the social
and human sciences, to study "just things" became a task in need of justification.
It became a source of embarrassment, a reactionary heritage of
mindless antiquarianism surviving in dusty museum spaces—leaving, in
short, little honor to the discipline of things. ext,os
And gradually a change could also be discernacl in the archaeological
rhetoric: the material was only a means to reach sometrigJes, something
more imirdnen—ultures anrstererrlirlives of past peopine
24 Chapter 2 Brothers in Arms? 25
Indianbehind theartifact.The socialscientists remained rather unimpressed,
however, and even after the discipline had turned "new," Edmund Leach
continued to lecture us that "in the last analysis, archaeology must be
concerned with people rather than with things" (1973:768). Others recalled
an almost negative learning curve, claiming that throughout the twentieth
century' archaeology had become "ftictegsitigly obsesed_with oldests as_
such, and treating them as having independent behaviour in a mannerthat
seaTateTtham-if(inTaiy7To:crafeiseg jtftteä to a genuine
" (Millen1987:110-11, cf. 143; eMptaSis).artefact
Tribal songs notwithstanding, it is a fact that archaeologists during
the last century became increasingly concerned by their dubious reputation
as students of things. A small but growing number of theoretically
minded archaeologists started to question the rationale for the disciplinary
habit of collecting and classifying things. This concern was already
discernable in the writings of Vere Gordon Childe and Aarne Michael
Tallgren back in the 1930s (Childe 1933; Tallgren 1937) and is more fully
fleshed out by later "dissenters" such as Walter Taylor (1948) and the
postwar pessimists (cf. Gjessing 1951; Hawkes 1954; see even Piggott
1965). At the very heart of their concern was the pivotal issue of not
confusing culture with things: "Culture is unobservable, is non-material.
. Even behavior, though observable, is non-material.... Therefore, the
term material culture is a misnomer and the dichotomy between material
and non-material relates only to observable results of cultural behavior,
not to culture itself" (Taylor 1948:102). Culture.was a nontangible.tealm
which things related toonjxtea 917,1P4PQmenakwar-as was society.
The fallic-y of the archaeological project was that we had tozely„otudead
things providing,posTr and es£44epfesmQe(cince) living cultures.
The outcry a decade later that "archaeology isantfir'ebTelirit is
nothing" (Willey and Phillips 1958:2) grasped this new disciplinary
zeitgeist of yearning for a world behind the artifacts. However, it also
signaled a new optimism that cleared the way for a new, anthropological
archaeology that shrugged off the negative image of the archaeologists as
being hopelessly,victimizedby the,raccidental and.frainientary material
record (Binford 1962): Given that the right procedures and epistemology
were applied, things would speak loudly and convincingly about the cultural
dynamics that they originated from.
FUNCTIONAL ARTIFACTS OR TEXTUAL FRAGMENTS:
ACCESSING "THE BEHIND"
Throughout the ensuing decades of processual and postprocessual archaeology,
how and what to grasp beyond the artifact became the crucial
issue of debate. In this debate, at least as it unfolded up until the 1990s,
one may discern two main identities ascribed to material culture, simultaneously
designating two respective "spheres of behind" that things may
provide access to. On the one hand, we had theagcrai or "new"
archaeologists who were concerned with explaining things' functional,p
techiplogisekes1 ejeflye,LmRostance, while an the other hancT7eta
the postmcesseliststruggling to interpret their social and cultural
meaning (their role as signs, metaphors, symbols, etc.;cf. Bint6in962,
1.02,19-8-3; Gibbon1989; Hodder 1982b, 1986; Johnson1999; Preucel 1991;
Shanks and Tilley 1987; Thomas 2000).
Although their differences were considered to be very essential—as
the vague memories from the science war remind us—what was shared
in most processual and postprocessual approaches was a longing for
realms beyond the material itself jMaterial eyetre became an ambieous
term for reaching a culture that itself tarf,--r-wüst
processua ists provide us `Withä. less airy conception).
Thilts,vvsLestpetIErimaritas a means to reveal something els
somethipgiftore important---ihesocielteranratelATWMenana-rnenei
behind the e material was a source material ifeäted'ia-f6ritS'
tflingtgjä.prsogitatitV,:ibtif rith?:4 a -ffielitärirttwirtEfouwoiltariCknt
life" (Meskell 2004:14). The archaeotögic-aT;co-rä,pasithTng;'sMihep'kfe'SLent,
was conceived of as anincompIeamsentatjon of the aits
of an alaigefac4,e2MPrengee.P42Sini s
As pertinently remerked upon by Mark Leo-ne,' "tatc>ra'rtSsh„w-j,iDgicilive
of and not essential to culture.... The whole productive idea of
using artifacts to reconstruct the whole of an extinct society saw artifacts
as leftovers, not as essential to the very existence of social life" (2007:206).
The following quotation may be seen as representative (if not exhaustive)
of the general archaeological attitude toward material culture:
The,main aim in archaeology is to write culture history. Our primary data
for this reconstruction are the artifacts, or the material remains of past human
activity. This materiaTis the.,pregt,oLpepiemijes,rsulture). To
understand the relationship between the material remains and the cultural
processes which produced their distribution, is the critical problem in archaeology.
(Häland 1977:1)
Alus, things are primarily studied for methodological and epistemoloi
cal reasons: to reveal the extramaterial piltyral-processestialtIMiktirdgd
the (e.g., behavior, action,inip0.). OP as concisely summarized by Clive
Gamble: "Getting at people is the Göre activity in archaeology" (2001:73).
Some familiar memories: in the 1960s and 1970s, material culture
turned adaptive and functional. Variation in material culture reflected
differences in ecological adaptation and social status. In the early 1980s,
26 Chapter 2 Brothers in Arms? 27
we learned about material culture as active and communicative, as Symbols
in action. Later on, pots, megaliths, and rock carvings were written
into the limitless text of poststructuralism and (late) hermeneutics. Literary
analogies abounded: reading the past (Hodder 1986), reading material
culture (Tilley 1990a), material culture as text (Tilley 1991; see Preucel
2006:138-42). Concepts such as biography (Kopytoff 1986) and narrative
(Joyce 2002) added to the obvious impression that "things ain't what they
used to be" (Miller 1983). In fact, they were hardly things at all anymore
(cf. Ingold 2007a). One way of seeing this development is that the conception
of things became further and further removed from their own
intrinsic material qualities—in other words, that conceiving of things qua
things became far less attractive than conceiving of them as text, symbol,
and narrative.
Thus, contrary to the often voiced accusation of being "too concerned
with things" (pace Leach), we may rather claim that archaeology throughout
most of its processual and postprocessual career suffered from being
undermaterialized. Despite the claim of an "active" material culture,
actions continued to originate primarily from the human sphere. The
materiality of past societies, tellingly conceived of as traces or remnants,
eebmereplptenbnieneöffirStöTieällänelgöttät-PrikeigeSlEar fir
themselves material (cf. Soja 2000:7; Strathern 1990:37-38). As pertinently
observed by Daniel Miller, archaeologists are by and large considered
to be profound or good at their work "to the extent to which they are
able to transcend the merely manifest in the objects which they uncover
and see through these fragments to the reality of the social and cultural
lives of which they are mere remnants" (Miller 2005b:212). The division
between a material and a social world seems to be taken for granted (cf.
Richards 2008:206), and accessing the dematerialized latter should be the
primary goal of our inquiries. No wonder then that the material qualities
of things have increasingly been covered up by the piles of epistemologies
invented to make them as transparent and compliant as possible, in which
their role is never to be themselves "but always, always to represent
something eise" (Brown 2003:82).
PHENOMENOLOGIES OF LANDSCAPE
During the 1990s, however, we witnessed a gradual move away from
this somewhat one-sided focus on the symbolic/ communicative and
representational aspects of material culture. In particular, this shift was
reflected in studies of landscapes and monuments in compartments of
British archaeology. (Fni alternative ap-pirdaalers-ee Shanks 1995, 1998;
Boast 1997; Pearson and Shanks 2001; Meskell 1996, 2004; Meskell and
Joyce 2003.) Based partly on phenomenology and partly on a wide range
of social theory running from Pierre Bourdieu to Michel Foucault, several
archaeological studies from the mid-1990s onward seem to be founded
more on people's doings and their lived engagement with the world (e.g.,
Barret 1994; Bradley 1998, 2003; Edmonds 1999; Meskell and Joyce 2003;
Thomas 1996; Tilley 1994, 1999, 2004).
White the social theory mobiized can be seen as part of the postprocessual
legacy, phenomenology represented a new theoretical engagement that
became an importance source of inspiration for many archaeologists (cf.
Gosden 1994; Feldt and Basso 1996; Thomas 1996, 2000, 2004, 2006; Karlsson
1998; Ingold 2000; Meskell and Joyce 2003; Meskell 2004; Fuglestvedt
2005). This was a rather predictable move. After all, phenomenology was
launched as a way of 1,:rceragatg„Inolsattheag,l4UMerleau-Ponty
1962:xx), a return "to the thing_s themselvü,m1 taragigaljiggiezt,
perience" unobscured by abstract philosophical concepts and theories
(eirerittie experience of actually reading Edmund Husserl and Martin
Heidegger may appear as a continuous falsification of that statement).
Ihep_henomenological inspiration waaparticulaiilmtronginsuciles.,«
laridacaserdirilltlinen-trAtteigO13;14-rned toward how materials and
landscape, through active interaction wifFititnians( i;Verti3 Sba?)e'
i--- anumarmt
penences,,memosie is was c ear y an impor an an promising
although there was a tendency for lt to be overshadowed
by the constant urge to include individual experiences and the human
dimension of landscape. The effective history of postprocessual thinking
and the wider sociopolitical concern with individualism, human agency,
and intentionality (cf. Olsen 2006) probably made it difficult to take on the
potential radical consequences of a philosophical project claiming to challenge
the subjectivist and humanistireme of modern Wteggratbillea
(see chapter 4). The filteirerrjaiimesticifeTVeginriirphenomenofogy
that made its way into archaeology and landscape studies may be seen as
a negotiation of these conflicting objectives and interests.
Immensely influential was Christopher Tilley's A Phenomenology of
Landscape (1994), later described as "a path-breaking and highly praiseworthy
attempt to introduce phenomenology to archaeology" (Hodder
and Hutson 2003:119; cf. Smith 2003:64). In this work, Tilley attempted to
break away from disengaged approaches to landscape and monuments
by putting the active experiencing and embodied subject in place. It was
an approach, to use Julian Thomas's words (1996:20), which took into account
the fact that the body is not just something we live in, but a meens
by which we experience
Tilley's book hardly posed any chaitenge to the liu-m-aiiüt artetanthropocentric
legacy that postprocessual archaeology was so firmly embedded
in. Rather, it tried to accommodate (or add) phenomenology to this legacy
28 Chapter 2
(cf. Meskell 2004:10). Actually, its title notwithstanding, phenomenology
constitutes only one among a formidable lineup of theoretical candidates—itself
presented in less than three pages (Tilley 1994:11-14).
Despite Tilley's attempt to transfer a sharingof.experience from mind
to body, the experiencing
lititilätilndividual: the centrality of the human body becomes a takenfor-granted
universal (cf. Tilley 1994:16, 74). Tilley's initial definition of
phenomenology as "the understanding and description of things such as
they are experienced by a subject" (1994:12; see also Tilley 2004:1) confirms
some of this subjectivism and clearly conflicts with the phenomenological
maxim "to the things themselves" (although it must be pleaded in
Tilley's defense that even to the phenomenologists it proved hard to live
up to Husserl's slogan). In an attempt to elaborate his early conception of
phenomenology, Tilley provides the following descriptions:
[Phenomenology] is about the relationship between Being and Being-in-theworld.
Being-in-the-world resides in a process of objectification in which
people objectify the world in order to set them apart from it. This results in
the creation of a gap, a distance in space. To be human is both to create this
distance between the seif and that which is beyond and to attempt to bridge
this distance through a variety of means—through perception (seeing, hearing,
touching), bodily actions and movements, and intentionality, emotion
and awareness residing in systems of belief and decision-making, remembrance
and evaluation. (1994:12)
This may function well as a summary of a theory of objectification (and
"embodiment"; cf. Miller 1987), but it is hard to findlüstificaiionfor Most
ortliftilrffneirks of Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that are
claimed to be the pivotal sources. The objectifying "gap," the intentional
striving to overcome it, and a Being separated from Being-in-the-world,
just to mention some very problematic notions, are hardly conceptions in
compliance with the twentieth-century phenomenological project as laid
out by these philosophers. (See chapter 4 for a more thorough discussion
of phenomenology.)
Superficially, Tilley's phenomenology may seem to be just another
example of the theoretical bricolage defended at the outset of this book.
However, it is an intellectual problem when the phenomenology, which
is emblematically adhered to, is difficult to identify in the works of those
scholars it is said to originate from. Thus the problem is not so much
what is done, if one wants to 4adopt a humanist and idealist perspective,
but rather how a different and potentially challenging perspective
is abducted in order to do so. This is not to make phenomenology itself
immune to criticism. As will be shown later (chapters 4 and 5), there are
numerous problematic conceptions involved in this philosophy. This
Brothers in Arms? 29
also includes a lurking anthropocentric tendency that probably has fueled
some of the humanist readings. (Cf. the discussion of "desevering"
in chapter 4.)
Tilley's book is in many ways an admirable one, but it is firmly located
in the effective historical legacy of postprocessual thinking. Thus, the
struggle for a "humanized space" (as opposed to "spatial science") may
well have been fought without bringing in phenomenology as an emblematic
concept. It is somehow ironic that despite later works that suggested
more subtle and worked-through approaches (including Tilley's
subsequent works), it was this first "phenomenology" that proliferated in
material culture studies and archaeological textbooks in the years to come
(e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Jameson and Shaw 1999; Johnson 1999;
Edmonds 1999; Evans 2003; Scarre 2002; Hodder and Hutson 2003; Hamilton
et al. 2006; see however Meskell and Joyce 2003 and Meskell 2004 for
a somewhat different approach). Thus, when Ruth Van Dyke and Susan
Alcock (2003) summarize the strength of the phenomenological approach
in archaeology (i.e., that it "allows us to think about the ways in which
landscapes and built forms were experienced, perceived and represented
by ancient subjects" [7]), it is clearly Tilley's initial definition that informs
their view. Another irony of this was that it made phenomenology undeservedly
vulnerable to much recent ill-grounded critique (cf. Johnson
2006; Bintliff 2007).
The conception of landscape that came out of this phenomenology depicted
a subjective and supple sphere held together and made meaningful
by people's thoughtful engagement with it. The landscapes one encountered
were alwaympspannultlypgat anclndMlrafrlitäHrerefldidr
arWäTgTeTätive to the situated actors' conception of them. As noienär
in 1993 by Barbara Bender, elatCrsTätierare Jeireehrpeople—through
their experience and engagement with the world around them" (1). In a
more recent paper, we learn that a phenomenological approach "allows
us to consider how we move around, how we attechtnuapirtgto places,
entwining them with memof&, lustätt6s and stories, creating a sense of
hia-Ve Seentliai landscapes are e)iperitrientärdreaig;
negtelräiid. open ended" (Bender 2002:136-37, emphasis added). According
to Gabriel Cooney, we "perceive, understand, and create the landscape
around us through the filter of our social and cultural background and
milieu" (1999:46, emphasis added). Wendy Ashmore and A. Bernard
Knapp confirm that "today . . . the most prominent notions of landscape
emphasize its socio-symbolic dimensions: landscape is an entity that exists
by virtue of its being perceived, experienced, and contextualised by
people" (1999:1). And summarizing Bender and Tilley's conception, Ashmore
teils us that for these two scholars, "landscapes are primarily social
constructs" (2004:260).
30 Chapter 2 Brothers in Arms? 31
Two key terms, or tropes, seem to dominate the actual attempt of
capturing_this situated experiericej One is visuality—the description and
imaging rdtheJaysights anrvra'uarfields change with the location of the
viewer (Hamilton et al. 2006:33). The other is "adjectivity," wrapping up
the landscape in adjective-filled narratives that pertain to the phenomenological
sensibility of the archaeologist present (cf. Tilley 2004:27-28; Willams
2007:12; Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007:335-36). I am not saying
that all those advocating these conceptions of landscape saw themselves
as doing phenomenology. However, the concept was conspicuously present
in these discourses, and the difficulty of distinguishing those who
explicitly advocated phenomenology from those who confessed to "social
constructivist" and idealist perspectives, with some notable exceptions, is
probably rather telling. For example, the interpretations Tilley offers in
his 2004 book on landscape phenomenology are hardly distinguishable
from those emerging from other theories popular among postprocessual
archaeologists. Menhirs and rock art still are about structural oppositions,
symbolizing principles of social order, identity, spirits,• and ancestors.
Discussing the Brittany menhirs, for example, we learn that the individuality
of these primarily naturally shaped stones "would act to sustain a
sense of social identity for the people who erected them and subsequently
Figure 2.1. Landscapes—what differente do they make to the way we live, think, and
act? Integrated living, southern Iceland (photo: Bjornar Olsen).
lived with them.TeRplewould recognize themselves, where they were,
and who they were throUiiflie,material cpalities ancTejenti,
2064:95:
Phen-om'enOrOgical or not, what is missing in most of these stories is
what landscapes and places have to offer us. How do, they affect girr
being-in-the-wor ,fin the celebration of lang-Capes and matters as
p as ic an a ways constructed ("as something open-ended, polysemic,
untidy, contestational and almost infinitely variable" [Bender 2002:137]),
there seems to be little concern for the properties and competences possessed
by the landscape itself. Mountains and plains, rivers and Takes,
forests and fields, oceans and fjords—what differente do they make to the
way we live, think, and act? Are they all just open ended, receptive, and
polysemic, or do they have a say—also beyond suggesting metaphorical
and ritual associations (see Bradley 2000; Tilley 1999, 2004)?
One may speculate as to whether the old ecofunctionalist school perhaps
came closer to Heideggerian phenomenology than many of the selfproclaimed
archaeologies of phenomenology. The ecological aperoach
saw humans as an integrated hart of a systemic wharirereairrar
IlWrig in a particular landscape, in certain places, brought forth a certain
way of living—a way of living made possible by responding to the forms
and capacities "slumbering" in the environment. The new "phenomenological"
(and symbolic) human, however, seems less receptive; it took on
the role of ruler-creator, inventing ever-changing cognitive landscapes.
Maybe this creativity was related to "practice," as frequently told. However,
apart from the euer-present ritual toil, the people who are supposed
to have been creating these landscapes seem strangely alienated from the
everydayness of herding sheep, clearing fields, carrying water, building
fences, cooking, cutting wood, and so forth.
The experiential primacy assigned to the visual field adds to this bias.
Despite the acknowledgment that perception is also a soaengage:
nent„we are too often presented with actor-spectators who walk around
contemplating and gazing at landscapes and monuments from different
angles (cf. Tilley 1994:74-75). Though I cannot elaborate the relationship
in any depth here, the emphasis on vision and view angles (cf. Tilley,
Hamilton, and Bender 2000; Cummings and Whittle 2003; Bender, Hamilton,
and Tilley 2007) connects this archaeology in more than one sense
to the Cartesian perspectivalist tradition in landscape painting (cf. Jay
1998). Despite attempts to attach this as the stigma to the objectivist gaze
(associated with maps, plans, and aerial photography; Willams 2007:288),
perspectivalism is actually a very conspicuous trope in many phenomenologies
of landscape. (For criticism, see Thomas 1993; Hamilakis 2001,
2002; Frieman and Gillings 2007). It may not be accidental that this complies
well with Western metaphysics, in which the spoken resemblance
32 Chapter 2
between the "I" and the "eye" has always conveyed more than a phonetic
association (Andersson 2001:79; Jay 1998). Bender pertinently notes the
controlling power of this gaze as one that "skims the surface; surveys
the Land from an ego-centered viewpoint . . . the Western gaze is about
control" (Bender 1999:31; see also Tilley 2004:14-16). However, little of
this insight seems to be turned back an the "contemplative gaze" so often
found in landscape archaeology (cf. Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007).
RETURNING TO THINGS: CONSUMPTION STUDIES
As already noted, a (re)turn to things has been announced as a current
trend more widely in the social and human sciences (cf. Andersson 2001;
Bakker and Bridge 2006; Brown 2003;Domatiska 2006; Foster 1996; Miller
1998a, 2005a; Preda 1999; Trentmann 2009). The growing field of modern
material culture studies and the more general concern with design,
"visual culture," landscapes, and the body constitute some of the components
in what may be seen as a rehabilitation of things in contemporari
studies of society. The chionOlogY ärirre'Y .siteslortlüsrehaS are, of
course, a mäteredebate. One serious contestant would be the studies of
modern household refuse pioneered by processual archaeologists, which
in many ways was the first systematic attempt at challenging the subjective,
linguistic accounts grounding much social research (cf. Rathje and
McCarthy 1977; Rathje 1984, 1991, 1996;see Schiffer 1991, 1999).
Far more recognized, however, is what has become known as consumption
studies, probably the most influential brand of modern material culture
studies (cf. Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Appadurai 1986b; Miller
1987, 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2005a; Baudrillard 1998; Dant 1999; Attfield
2000; Buchli 2002; Mullins 2004). A main concern has been how artifacts,
primarily consumer goods, are actively used in social and individual selfcreation,
in which they become directly constitutive of our understanding
of ourselves and others, "a means by which we give form to, and come
to an understanding of, ourselves, others, or abstractions such as the nation
or the modern" (Miller 1994:397). Objects are turned into signs and
consumed as signs;their importance is their sign-value (Baudrillard 1998).
According to Miller, one of the leading advocates of this approach, people
appropriate objects from the manipulative forces of production and commerce
and turn them into potentially inalienable and creative cultural
products vital to their own identity Formation:
The key [criterion] for judging the utility of contemporary objects is the degree
to which they may ör may not be appropriated from the forces which
created them, which are mainly, of necessity, alienating. This appropriation
Brothers in Arms? 33
consists of the transmutation of goods, through consumption activities,
into potentially inalienable culture. (Miller 1987:215; cf. Miller 1998a:19,
2002:238-39)
This and related approaches to modern material culture within anthropology,
cultural studies, sociology, and other disciplines have produced
a wealth of studies of such things as_äjialL kitsch, surfboards, rugs,
greeting cards, and home decoration (cf. the vo1ume-s-5T'"J?YlI'/TPt'/"-irNFa"lr'riiirCijTTurepui;iisTie(ir;in2
in an illustrative segment). This has
increasingly been the case since the Tate 1990s, when consumption studies
became more and more narrowed toward shopping, the exchange of
goods, the desire for objects, their aesthetization, and the media image
of them (cf. Miller 1998b), rather than their uses and the ways material
objects are lived with (Dant 1999:37; cf. Attfield 2000:136ff.; Brown 2003:4;
Meskell 2004:33-38). As noted by Glassie (1999:77-84), within anthropology
and modern material culture studies, things are increasingly read as
Figure 2.2. "And it seems possible to say very little in these studies about the dull,
ordinary, and inconspicuous materiality that people constantly engage with.... How
do we 'sublate' a coal mine or a derelict town in the Russian North?" Apartment house,
Lovozero, Kola Peninsula, Russia (photo: Bjornar Olsen).
34 Chapter 2 Brothers in Arms? 35
goods-as commodities and possessions (cf. Douglas and Isherwood 1979;
Appadurai 1986a; Baudrillard 1998; Miller 1998b, 2001).
And it seems possible to say very little in these studies about the dull,
ordinary, and inconspicuous materiality that people constantly engage
with: walls, streets, fences, parking spaces, fishing grounds, and gas stations.
Hier do we consume a highway, a university campus, or a subway
system? HciwdöWe'gilibläfelliC6ä1 dhrelle USWfiji-1 the RuseatilNörth?t-ä-cfingdWatfedegree,
consumption studiesseem to have
beCiime' the study of the "domesticated" and staged materiality of the
private individual, the outfits and belongings of what Walter Benjamin
denoted as "Das Etui Mensch" (cf. Benjamin 2002:38). They rarely extend
beyond the domestic doorstep to include what Frank Trentmann calls the
"brutal materiality of iron, steel, or bullets" (2009:287). The critical comments
are still few, but in a brave-and early one-the Swedish ethnologist
Orvar Löfgren questioned the overwhelming focus on the particular,
the symbolic, and the visual in this field:
Inthese studies of teenagers, home-makers and shoppers you sometimes feel
that you are drifring through a symbolic forest or watching an exhibition of
signs and messages . And in this focus on the symbolic there is also a total
dominante of sight as the medium through which we experience the world.
Like flaneurs and tourists-we are not in the world, we are only looking or
gazing at it. (1997:102-3)
Pof Löfgren, it is a paradox that the return to material culture studies did
not to a greater extent bring back the material. At the same time that more
and more of our lives are caught up with materials, studies of material
culture have become increasingly focused on the mental and representational:
material culture as metaphor, symbol, icon, message, and text-in
shört,"'as alWays something other than itself (Löfgren 1997:103). Thisällso
ti-TäTcg-m—an-y'ofilit-e'se studies strangely vulnerable to the criticisms that
Georg Simmel raised more than a century ago against what he saw as
modernity's tendency to fragmentize, aestheticize, and
d
e
that
theInaterial
world. In SimmeIrs"dfagnösis-this was an atütilde 7place[s] us
läridigrafiCletrom the substance of things- they speak to us 'as from
reality is touched not with direct confidence but with fingertips that are
immediately withdrawn" (1978/1906:474; see chapter 5)..-„.
ARCHAEOLOGIES OF EMBODIMENT
There is a line of argument running deep through consumption studies
and social archaeologies of different types: that social relations are objectici
fied or embodied in practices, artifacts, moriiiinefits, or1andscapes., Taken
as it is widely used, embodiment has come to mean the act by whiclu29o212_
establish someikindloTZtiuggii-WielaircinseyireEglircirider to
Ii-VecYtrt a "real" material form their atistal spgarrTOTatkinstiis (liant
1999:2). Through PicivagTg-grem1321filentIlrev'ajue andambiguous become
concrete and the raw and physical are made meaningful. Emboditent
b2F(9e2PI2525t24-01egrieliAatignareaelelejesk,„,
c0s1/1219.gigAI.MDIMA114,59-9.Paggiiitfki4atiti;rhis has Proven
tobe a very flexible means indeed. Thus, Neolithic monuments are
conceived as "a visible embodiment of ideas about the world" (Bradley
1993:72), and urban monuments become "the emblematic embodiment of
power and memory" (Boyer 1994:321), while blouses and stockings are to
transvestites "the material embodiment of the cultural values they would
appropriate" (Suthrell 2004:136).
Despite the immense literature on embodiment in archaeology3 and
other disciplines, it is rarely debated whet embodiment-as an act, a
doing-actually implies in ontological terms (cf. Olsen 20t7). intynn
es elf andlerarfriresnillthelltdee&it study of the embodied
lives of ancient Mayas and Egyptians, the word embodiment is for obvious
reasons very generously used, but it is hard to find any precise definition
of the concept or a direct discussion of its ontological grounding. However,
through such statements as "[embodiment is] a critical site of both
social and personal investment" (2003:10, my emphasis) and "[the] social
ariajndiveaTwork of 222odimp . adopsibief2u4,,4,tecolialetapert
2Itrementesuin,,,,e, egte,,,,ets2,2e,culture' that
archaeologIstaayie„,„myse£ (10, my emphaa, s'eemurudirectional
process involving ltsmet-8 ,0.4Isiuse andinfiaterial etfect.
In her seminal book on object biographies, Meskell confirms thisUr;
Prlesgion when commenting on recent attempts to grant agency to objects:
Yet we should acknowledge that humans create their object world, no matter
how many different trajectories are possible or how subject-like objects
come. Materiality represents a presence of power in realizing the world,
crafting thing from non-thing, subject from non-subject. This affecting presence
is shaped through enactment with the physical world, projecting and
imprinting ourselves into the world. . . . Such originary crafting acicnowledges
that there are no a priori objects; they require human interventionsioWeterpraetaigareaKekTilar,Ser.Wtp,,,,,,i3 6
bring objects into existente. (2004:3)
'",.Q4,s2Queheere..akeatietavdedaärmeg
En passant, it should be noted that a ossible tht oes not rest
in objects becoming human/subject-like but rather in their capacities of
making a difference through the unique and complementary qualities
they have to offer our shared world (see chapter 8).
The immense popularity of the concept of embodiment (only rivaled by
agency in social archaeologies) and the confidence with which it is used
1/4
36 Chapter 2
seem grounded in a notion of embodiment as something given a priori,
as something "revealed" about human-thing relationships rather than
involving a particular ontology or way of thinking about this relationship
(see Rowlands 2005):MOneen,dition that seems to ground it is the idea
that withoutliiimadinterventio?t; that is, as beings beyond or outside our
cognition, thingstatistthe-wörld are intrinsically meaningless (cf. Holtorf
2008:266). Things only become meaningful by being inscribed with our
sociality and intentions, simultaneously preparing the ground for interpretation
as a rewinding of this very process of imbuement.
Introducing what is often referred to as a major breakthrough in the social
study of things, The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986b), the editor
sets the tone by telling us that "our own approach to things is conditioned
necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that
human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with"
(Appadurai 1986a:5, emphasis added). The fact that Arjun Appadurai
refers to his statement as a "formal truth" (1986a:5) reveals how "ontologized"
this aspect of the rationalist and Enlightenment legacy has become.
By casting matter as inert and meaningless, all qualities and ideas about
it have to be located in the thinking subject (cf. Matthews 2002; Thomas
2004). What is removed in these archaeologies of embodiment is things'
difference; their own voices are silenced, making their fate "always to live
out the social life of men" (Pinney 2005:259). Our embodied traces are, to
borrow Benjamin's phrase, clinging to things as private labels. Thus when
we encounter home decoration, cloths, megaliths, and landscapes, what
we are confronted with are really nothing but material mirror images of
ourselves and our social relations (Latour 1999b:197). Even in Tilley's discussion
of boat depiction in the Bronze Age rock art of southern Sweden
we learn that, "in depicting boats, people were thus making fundamental
statements about themselves to themselves and about the principles of
social and political and cosmological order" (2004:201)
Rather than seeing human-thing entanglements as a "thrown" condition
(in Heidegger's sense), embodiment as widely used seems to, presuppose
a rift, by implicitly suggesting the possible existence of a prior phase
of separation(432.gembodirne1ir,),$etting„humans...,(anctsociality),..apart
Mättetsuggesting, in other,worcie,,,,Matthings,„bodies, and nature
are not originAIly,partrae,soci41,,J;ut,may,:qveplually,,be Insluded and
endb-Wed with history and meaning by some hype3,eigt§psjal g„qtete
eifitiqdlinent reverberates with a common,
älbeit implicit, conception of humans (subjects, individuals, actors, etc.)
in the social sciences as at the outset pure, noncomposite entities; in their
"original constituency," they come unmixed and unequipped. From
this blank state they enter into relationships with things and each other.
Brothers in Arms? 37
Personhood, selves, or collective identities never emerge from mixtures
(Thomas 2000:148-52; see chapters 7 and 8).
CONCLUSION: RETURNING TO THINGS?
The recent debates on the meaning of material culture in archaeology and
anthropology have largely been framed within the pretext of the social
or cultural a priori. Cultural differences, social categories, and ethnic
divisions exist as the given but nonobjectified backdrop that explains
the circulation and consumption of things as well as their symbolic actions.
Things may express ideas, embody social categories, and negotiate
boundaries. However, the "social" and "cultural" is always the underlying
langue to which all such expressions must be returned for confirmation.
The key figure in this social and cultural primacy has traditionally
been the human agent, the subject or the individual. This subject seems
at the very outset devoid of things—a noncyborg whose nonobjectified
condition is regarded as crucial to explaining his subsequent involvement
with matter—and thus the never-ending transcendental imperative of
searching for the Indian behind the artifact.
The various approaches within the new material culture studies have
of course stimulated new thinldng about things. Consumption studies
deserve great credit for remembering things as a viable and necessary
element in the study of contemporary societies. Through the work of
Miller and others, things are increasingly acknowledged as a legitimate
social subject matter. However, despite increasingly becoming matters of
concern, things are still conceived mainly as alternative sources or intakes
to those forces, institutions, and relations that they are believed to be
epiphenomena of (Leone 2007:206). Despite the range of subject matter
covered by the new material culture studies (such as consumption, exchange,
style, and symbolism), and irrespective of mirroring, denying, or
negotiating the templates that they are supposed to embody, the social
derivative nature of things is rarely questioned. As pertinently observed
by Richard Sennett, "'Material culture' too often, at least in the social
sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of
regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things
as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—
the thing in itself is discounted" (2008:7). Meaning is something being
mapped onto things and landscapes, which themselves seem surprisingly
drained of all significance to facilitate their so-called cultural construction
(Ingold 2000:154). Little emphasis is placed on things qua things, and the
possibility that they themselves might be indispensable constituents of
38 Chapter 2
the social fabric that is studied. In this sense, material culture studies have
clearly succeeded in coming to terms with the old accusations of fetishism
and objectification, making Leach's old advice to the archaeologist
of becoming "concerned with people rather than with things" (1973:768)
rather superfluous.
There are, however, alternative tendencies reflected in a growing
number of studies in archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Inspired by "thing-friendly" theoretical positions and work done in other
fields such as science studies, these works try to shrug off some of the
effective historical burden that has reared us to accept self-sufficient and
tautological perspectives of social societies and cultural cultures mapping
themselves onto things (e.g., Boivin 2004; Boivin et al. 2007; Dant 2005;
Dolwick 2008; Edensor 2005; Gonzälez-Ruibal 2006, 2008; Hicks 2005;
Ingold 2000, 2007a, 2008; Jones 2007; Knappett 2005; Knappett and Malafouris
2008; Shanks 2007, 2010; Thomas 2007; Webmoor 2007; Webmoor
and Witmore 2008, Witmore 2006, 2007). In these and other contributions,
much more attention is paid to what things actually have to offer us and
how they act as indispensable mediators in constructing those entities
often thought of as self-sufficiently cultural and social. These approaches
have started to explore how the varied intrinsic qualities of things make
an immense difference to us. In other words, the materials of past (and
present) societies are not seen as an epiphenomenal outcome of historical
and social processes or as just an epistemological component through
which these processes can be grasped, but actually as constituent parts—
even explanatory parts—of these very processes. This also includes
the study of the disciplinary past, which is not just a reflection of great
minds, discourses, and sociopolitics, but also a history of engagement
with instruments, sites, and academic architectures that facilitate those
disciplinary practices and traditions we now take for granted (Olsen and
Svestad 1994).
This book sides with that body of work in terms of the general scope
and aims. We may disagree considerably in terms of theoretical orientation
and even about how to conceive of things and the role they play.
Still, what I find these studies amounting to—and I hope this work will
pay its share—is a care for things' properties and differences. As anyone
who has tried to walk a city, sail a boat, or assemble an IKEA bookshelf
has experienced, things are not just submissive and plastic beings ready
to embody our mental templates or the imperatives of our social wish
images. That they may have also served that role is not an excuse to pay
loyalty to the current regime.
3
Material Culture as Text
Scenes from a Troubled Engagement
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and
entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody and contestation, but
there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the
reader, not as hitherto was said, the author a text unity lies not in its
origin but in its destination.
—Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
rrhroughout the last three decades of the twentieth century, the term
poststructuralism came to be associated with a large number of topics
and approaches within philosophy, literary criticism, and feminist studies.
Poststructuralism also made its impact in studies of material culture.
In some respects, this influence may be conceived of as rather limited and
ambiguous, probably most conspicuously captured in the maxim "material
culture as text," which constituted an important trope, especially in
the so-called postprocessual archaeology during the Tate 1980s and early
1990s (Tilley 1990a; Preucel 2006:135-42, 255-58). Although the explicit
use of poststructuralist theory was quite limited and selective, it contributed
to setting a new agenda for thinking about things and landscapes,
one that is still effective. Moreover, the poststructuralist campaign against
everything firm and fixed led to a widespread suspicious attitude in cultural
studies that directly and indirectly also came to mold the conception
and interpretation of material culture.
Before exploring this connection in more detail, a few comments need
to be attached to the concept of poststructuralism, which has proved to
be an ambiguous one, and which has often been conflated with the even
39
40 Chapter 3 Material Culture as Text 41
more elusive concept of postmodernism. Although these two "posts" are
closely related, some identifyirig distinctions can nonetheless be noted.
Writ large, postmodernism has been conceived of as an epistemic rupture
that has shaken the foundational pillars on which modern life was built,
announcing a new condition tellingly signified by the numerous "ends"
it became associated with (of grand narratives, the nation-state, universal
reason, authenticity, history, etc.). Probably more conspicuously (and less
overstatedly), however, postmodernism has surfaced as a new aesthetic
or "style" characterized by a playful allusiveness that stresses irony,
genre mixing, eclecticism, and ambiguity (Connor 1997; Jameson 1984;
Lyotard 1984). Although clearly related to the wider orbit of postmodernism
(like fish to water, to paraphrase Michel Foucault), poststructuralism
is distinctive in being confined mainly to academic discourses and more
firmly located within a defined body of knowledge.
Poststructuralism can be associated with popular themes and topics in
material culture studies from the Tate 1980s and onward, such as object
biographies and narratives, and clearly contributed generously to the influential
social-constructivist conception of landscape that entered many
archaeological texts (although often under the guise of phenomenology).
These topics and conceptions may all be linked to the poststructuralist
mantra of "textualism," a term originally coined to characterize new
modes of reading and analyzing texts, which directly and indirectly
became the most important poststructuralist commodity in archaeology
and material culture studies. In this chapter, I shall present and discuss
features of this textual approach. In the first part, I explore some of its
theoretical grounding and how it "worked" when exported to nontextual
domains such as things and materialities at large. Next, I take a look at the
debate on writing things, that is, how things are transformed into written
discourse and, more generally, the relationship this establishes between
things and texts. These initial and largely sympathetic exposures lay the
groundwork for the concluding discussion of the severe problems associated
with poststructuralism and the textual approach to things.
STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM:
CHRONOLOGIES AND CONFUSIONS
As an intellectual project, poststructuralism became heavily marked by
its dose (although oppositional) relations with the structuralist program,
and the "post" added by a new generation of intellectuals should not be
understood in any antithetical or purely negative way. Poststructuralism
shares several basic conceptions with its "relational other": first, a nonessential
conception of how meaning is constituted—that it is a product of
the difference between entities rather than some inherent quality of the
entities themselves;second, the conception that language (or texts) constitute
a "model world" for any system of signification; and, third, a distaste
for a dominant aspect of Cartesian ontology, identifying being (and self)
with consciousness.
The poststructuralist revolt, however, was aiming at a much more farreaching
critique of Western metaphysics, a metaphysics that was still
supposed to infiltrate structuralism. As foreshadowed by the antiessentialist
philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, modern
thought was claimed to be dominated by a "metaphysics of presence" in
which truth, knowledge, and being were argued and secured by reference
to some foundational essence—a transcendent, originary center located
outside discourse and practice (Derrida 1977, 1978). This metaphysic was
argued to still be effective in the structuralist conception of language, giving
priority to a fixed underlying structure or grammar (langue) of which
the actual utterances (parole) were nothing but a precoded outcome. It
conditioned even the very Saussurian concept of the sign (also as reflected
in the signifier-signified split), in which the sign itself was always
reduced to something secondary, a representation of or for something
invariable and more "real" located outside discourse and difference (cf.
Derrida 1977:43-44, 1978: 18-24).
The emergence of structuralism and poststructuralism are set far apart
chronologically. Structuralism originates in the early-twentieth-century
work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and was later modified and formalized
by a number of scholars throughout the first half of the century,
notably Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev, and Vladimir Propp. Somewhat
ironically, at the point when structuralism began to gain academic
fame outside its normal site of linguistics, thanks largely to the work
of Claude L6vi-Strauss, it had simultaneously begun to come under
attack on its own home ground. During the 1960s, a group of French
philosophers and literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Foucault,
Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes launched the critique to which the label
"poststructuralism" was later added (cf. Sturrock 1979; Tilley 1990a;
Preucel 2006).
It would be a grave exaggeration to claim that this revolt produced
much of a stir within the disciplines devoted to the study of material culture.
This is understandable, to be sure, given that a decade would pass
before structuralism itself would begin to make its way into this field
(although see Leroi-Gourhan 1964, 1965; Deetz 1967). When this actually
happened, most notably in American ethnology and historical archaeology
(Glassie 1975; Deetz 1977; Leone 1977; Beaudry 1978) and British
42 Chapter 3 Material Culture as Text 43
"postprocessual" archaeology (Hodder 1982a, 1982b; Shanks and Tilley
1982), it was soon to be overtaken by scholars freshly familiar with the
poststructuralist critique. This compression is most evident in early postprocessual
archaeology (cf. Hodder 1985, 1986), in which both structuralist
and poststructuralist theories and approaches were advocated rather
simultaneously from the mid-1980s onward, sometimes even by the very
same authors (cf. Shanks and Tilley 1987; Olsen 1987; Tilley 1991).
Thus, while structuralism and its "post" are separated by dose to six
decades of research, their impact on material culture studies occurred
late and almost simultaneously. It is hardly surprising that this partly
overlapping chronology caused some confusion. What became known as
the "textual analogy," the idea that material culture could be conceived
of and "read" as text (cf. Patrik 1985; Hodder 1986; Moore 1986; Tilley
1990a, 1991; Buchli 1995) proved to be especially vulnerable. White the
concept of text clearly was attached to the poststructuralist repertoire, involving
a new, reader-centered epistemology, in material culture studies
it was often confused with the structuralist conception of language and
the idea of texts as structured and linear systems (cf. Patrik 1985; Hodder
1986; Parker Pearson 1995; Preucel and Bauer 2001). This confusion of
a textual (poststructuralist) analogy with a linguistic (structuralist) one
may well have provoked the feeling that the analogy was "fraught with
danger":
I can see that an artistic cycle, such as the glyphs on a Maya stele, or the
paintings in an Egyptian tomb, may be read as a text. I can even concede
that a building, the work of a single architect or designer, may be seen is this
light as the product of a single humanmind, the analogue of the "writer"
of the text. Even here, the analogue is not a strong one, for it is a feature of
written text that they are in essence linear: the words need to be in the right
order. One of the distinguishing features of the visual arts is that the lineal
order need not matter.... When we turn to an archaeological site consisting
of a palimpsest of structures and rubbish pits, constructed and deposited at
different periods, the analogy breaks down altogether. (Renfrew1989:35-36)
Even if this argument is relevant an the condition that texts are linear and
material culture is not, it remains somewhat enigmatic that those who
advocated it seem little concerned with its implications for the opposite
move: in other words, how this proclaimed palimpsest of structures and
fragments can be consistently and unproblematically transformed into
linear scientific texts (cf. Parker Pearson 1995:370; Olsen 1997:119-20).
However, to understand why Colin Renfrew's criticism is misplaced as an
attack on the poststructuralist textual approach—which it was intended
as—we need to consider this approach in more detail.
A ROUGH GUIDE TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Even if mostly a summarizing term of convenience, textualism can be
regarded as a key nominative for the early poststructuralist movement.
Despite the fact that it also carried serious ontological implications, it is
most commonly associated with a new epistemology of reading that radically
challenged existing interpretive premises. The transition to this new
epistemology was marked by two important sacrifices: that of the author
and that of structure.
In traditional literary criticism, as well as in the traditional hermeneutic
conception of understanding, the author and the world of the author were
regarded as the main entrance to a qualified interpretation of the text. Interpretation
largely rested on the ability to grasp the author's intentions,
to reveal the author and the author's world "beneath" the text: once the
author is found, the text is explained (Barthes 1977:147). As noted by
Barthes, "we try to establish what the author meant, and not at all what the
reader understands" (1986:30, emphasis in original).
Poststructuralism did away with the traditional notions of authors as
producers and readers as consumers of text. Interpretation or reading was
a creative and productive task that involved a redistribution of power and
responsibility from the author to the reader. This process of democratization,
however, conditioned that the orthodox idea of the author as the
father and owner of the work was dismantled. Thus, a new epistemology
of reading—and the birth of the reader—could happen only at the cost of
"the death of the author" (Barthes 1977:142-49).
Put in less absolute terms, this approach suggests that even the most
self-conscious author can only circumscribe some aspects of meaning.
Those who read the text—often in different historical and cultural
settings—bring to it other voices and other texts and create meanings
far beyond the author's intention. lt is inconceivable that a play by
Shakespeare, for example, should have a current meaning identical to
the one it had at the moment of production or should conform to the
author's intentions. We translate into the text the effective history of sociocultural
development, expose it to new conditions and new regimes
of meaning and truth, and transform it into a present product. Thus,
the reader becomes an actor as well as a producer of meaning (cf. Olsen
1990:181).
The decentering of the author, however, was not in itself an attack
on the structuralist approach; on the contrary, such a decentering may
be argued to be well in concordance with the structuralist antisubjective
agenda. The departure and "post" are evident in another operation
involved in this new epistemology of reading. In a famous introductory
44 Chapter 3
remark to his book S/Z (1975), Barthes launches a veritable attack on the
structuralist procedure, which, in his words, consisted in seeing
all the world's stories within a single structure: we shall, they thought,
extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a
great narrative structure, whichwe shall reapply (for verification) to any one
narrative: a task as exhaustive as it is ultimately undesirable, because the text
thereby loses its difference. (3)
Thus, the new epistemology of reading conditioned more than the assassination
of the author. The main act of the structuralist constitution,
proclaiming that the text is just a manifestation of an underlying structure
or grammar, also had to be sacrificed. The script of this act was sameness,
not difference. The latter concept—or chffeancel—became a major mantra
in poststructuralism, especially in Derrida's embrace of it. To put it in
very simple terms, in his version, difference denies the possibility that a
single element—a sign—can be present in and of itself, referring only to
itself. It always refers to some "other" outside itself, which is not present,
and which is itself constituted through this difference. Thus, every element
is constituted on the basis of the trace it carries of other members of
the signifying system, a "differential network, a fabric of traces referring
endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces" (Derrida
1979:84; cf. Derrida 1973:138-40, 1987:26; see Yates 1990:114ff. for a
more detailed discussion).
Difference is closely related to another key concept that emerged out
of the early poststructuralist work, that of "intertext" as introduced by
Kristeva. According to her, intertextuality refers to the transportation (or
transposition) of textual material within the matrix of all texts, including
nonwritten ones; the "transposition of one (or several) sign-system(s) into
another" (1986:111). A text, a signifying practice, is never single or complete
but always plural and scattered (Kristeva 1986:111). It should thus
be conceived of as the site of intersection of other texts, a "multidimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend
and clash" (Barthes 1977:146; cf. Derrida 1987:33). Thus, every text is a
work of translation, making the closure of any text impossible. As nicely
summarized by Barthes,
a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering
into mutual relations of dialogue, parody and contestation, but there is one
place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not as
hitherto was said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations
that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a
text unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (1977:148)
Material Culture as Text 45
It remains somewhat enigmatic, however, why the author could not also
be credited with such a role. If not assigned any role in creating the text's
difference and intertextuality, every notion of experimental and poetic
"writerly" writings also becomes futile.
This new epistemology of reading, or deconstructive reading, was aimed
at shaking up the text's unity and individuality to reveal its polyvalence
as a tissue of quotation from innumerable other texts (including the nonwritten
texts of the world). This transgression was more than an interpretative
turn: it clearly involved an ontological rupture, since any strict
division between the world and the text was denied. Or rather, it was a
denial of the possibility of living outside the infinite (inter)text. This inevitably
brings us to probably the most debated and ridiculed dictums of
poststructuralism, Derrida's "there is nothing outside the text."2
Contrary to the many vulgar and simplistic interpretations of Derrida's
claim, it does not assert that there is no world or being outside texts or
narratives. Rather, it opposes the idea of a strict divide between the world
(or reality) on one side and the textual representation of it on the other.
It proposes an ontology of the "limitless text," in which the meaningconstitutive
quality of the text—the play of difference—is as relevant (and
inevitable) to speech, thought, and the "world itself" as it is to writing.
There is no meaning or significance outside the play of difference. Both in
texts and in our lived experiences meanings are created within this web
of innumerable relations of differentiation, where signs refer to signs and
"where nothing is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only,
everywhere, differences and traces of traces" (Derrida 1987:26). With
special reference to the relationship between language and materiality,
Judith Butler has captured this argument in the following doctrinal way:
On the one hand, the process of signification is always material; signs work
by appearing (visibly, aurally), and appearing through material means,
although what appears only signifies by virtue of those non-phenomenal
relations, i.e., relations of differentiation, that tacitly structure and propel
signification itself . . what allows for a signifier to signify will never be its
materiality alone; that materiality will be at once an instrumentality and deployment
of a set of larger linguistic relations. (1993:68)
Thus, following Derrida, to write is not a parasitic act or a dangerous
and incidental supplement to a primordial unitary world. In fact, "there
have never been anything but supplements" (Derrida 1978:159). Writing,
interpretation, or science may be conceived of as replacing one signifying
chain with another. In this sense, the world has always-already been written;
difference as the meaning-constitutive quality has always existed—
hence the futility of craving for an origin and presence outside this play
46 Chapter 3
of difference, in other words, an authentic invariable world where things
have meaning without referring to other things and other systems of signification
(Derrida 1977:158-59, 1987:28-29; Norris 1982:32-41).
MATERIAL CULTURE AS TEXT
The brief sketch outlined above distills the state of poststructuralist
legacy as it started to influence material culture studies during the 1980s.
Clearly, there were other intellectual linkages and strands, and Foucault's
studies of power and disciplinary practices in particular, given their
concern with the materiality of discourse, might have been expected to
become more influential than they actually were. One of his important
contributions to social theory Was to show how systems of ideas and the
exercise of regulatory power can neuer become effective without a material
disciplinary and normalizing technology that ontologizes and fixes
the desired categories and norms (i.e., by making them "visible" within a
hierarchical and efficiently spatial organization; Foucault 1973, 1979; Tilley
1990b; Olsen and Svestad 1994; Svestad 1995).
This explicitly very material approach, however, received far less enthusiasm
among students of things than the textual approach did. Even if
it is beyond the scope of this chapter to elaborate on this in detail, I am inclined
to believe that the more pleasing appeal of the latter was grounded
in it being (mis)conceived as more "subjective" and "humanistic." The
general public and intellectual attraction for the symbolic, the aestheticized,
and the plastic, mixed with the late-twentieth-century obsession
with the active individual, clearly made the "free" reader-centered interpretative
approach more attractive than Foucault's somewhat dismal
analysis of alienating disciplinary technologies (cf. Olsen 2003:88-94).
Similar to the fate of phenomenology outlined in the previous chapter, it
was thus a very selective and watered-down tap of poststructuralism that
made its way to material culture studies.
To all this it must be added that, as with phenomenology, very few
material culture studies can be daimed to be grounded explicitly in
poststructuralist theory. (For exceptions, see Yates 1993.) Very often the
approaches were blending a number of positions but with some references
to aspects of poststructuralism, stressing multivocality, openness to
interpretation, small stories/ narratives, biographies, and so on (cf. Hodder
1989, 1999; Shanks 1992, 1999; Holtorf 1998; Bouquet 1991; Edmonds
1999). Thus, any compartmentalizing of them as "poststructuralist" must
be seen as a retrospective choice of convenience rather than as a suggestion
that there actually existed (or exists) a poststructuralist camp in
Material Culture as Text 47
archaeology or material culture studies, which clearly is not the case. It is
more appropriate to talk about different degrees of influence.
Probably the most conspicuous poststructuralist influence within this
field is well captured in the notion of "material culture as text." The claim
voiced by this slogan was that material culture could be seen as analogous
to text, or, rather, it could be read as text. Despite certain conceptual
confusions (as noted above), the textual analogy proper was based on the
disjunction between textual meaning and authorial intention. As a written
text becomes separated from its author, things also become detached
from their context of production and enter into dialogue with other texts
through the dynamic act of interpretation. Related interpretive ideas had
been presented in other theoretical camps such as among late hermeneuticans
(Gadamer 1975; Ricouer 1981) and reception theorists (cf. Iser 1974,
1978), and the sources of inspiration for the textual analogy were somewhat
mixed (cf. Johnsen and Olsen 1992).
Traditionally, material culture has been approached as carrying a final
signified, to be disclosed through the act of interpretation. What does
this awl mean? What is the significance of this design? Why is this pot
decorated this way? The intentional act of producing/ using endows the
object with a grounding layer of meaning that can be exposed with the
aid of proper methodological procedures. Central among these was the
contextual approach of bounding things within their appropriate context
(and / or to put oneself in the place of—or dose to—the producers/
users). As argued elsewhere (Johnsen and Olsen 1992), this approach,
both as conducted within different schools of archaeology (Müller 1884;
Hodder 1986) and in anthropology (participant observation; cf. Strathern
1990:37-40), is basically a legacy of the early (romantic) hermeneutic
conception of understanding. Actually, to some scholars, this procedure
was so imperative to interpretation that it legitimatized the claim that
"an object out of context is not readable" (Hodder 1986:141). Unsurprisingly,
this origin-centered contextualism became an easy target for the
poststructuralist counterclaims: How can we limit or dose off a text or
a context? How can it be bounded and shut off from readers and other
texts? What is "outside" context? Timothy Yates, for example, argued that
this traditional hermeneutics was totalizing and deterministic, a restrictive
approach that limited the signifying potential of material culture. It
was, he claimed, an attempt to endow things with a final signified outside
the play of difference (1990:270-72).
A poststructuralist approach was supposed to work rather differently:
it emphasizes how things mean and what thoughts they stimulate; it investigates
and affirms the plurality of meanings obtained by things being
reread by new people in new contexts. Such readings are claimed to be
48 Chapter 3 Material Culture as Text 49
more a matter of translation and negotiation than of recovering. Consider
the biography of a Neolithic megalith: this monument has continuously
meant (or been read) since it was created some six thousand years ago. In
the course of its career it has encountered Bronze Age warriors, Iron Age
farmers, medieval priests, and eighteenth-century antiquarians, who have
all established new intertextual connections and interpretations. Today the
megalith still means something to tourists, farmers, archaeologists, artists,
television producers, and advertising agents. Due to its veritable duration,
this material text has opened itself up to infinite readings by continuously
confronting new readers in altered historical situations. Rather than being
endowed with a pre-given signified to be disclosed (burial, ancestral house,
monument of power, etc.), its effective history of interpretation proves it to
be a receptive and open site to signification. This openness to signification
allows the megalith to establish ties to any historical moment and culture.
If so, this material text can be daimed to be more radically plural, carnivalesque,
and out of authorial control thän any written text. In this sense,
its origin was lost by its own creation. Only the material signifier remains
more or less constant; the signified are repeatedly created and lost through
the historical act of rereading (Olsen 1990:197-200; Holtorf 1998).
Figure 3.1. "Consider the biography of a Neolithic megalith." Megalith tomb of Dombate,
Galicia,Spain (photo: Alfredo Gonzälez-Ruibal).
Another example, if not poststructuralist by intention, may exemplify
this perspective further. In his rich book entitled Material Culture (1999),
Henry Glassie also discusses processes of material creation, communication,
and consumption in relation to handicrafts and local communities
in northern Turkey. Among other things, he is especially concerned with
how certain artifacts, the carpets produced by the weaver Aysel, assemble
history and contexts through their specific biographies. Although
"inalienable" in their domestic origin, carrying memories, aesthetics, and
tradition, Glassie depicts how the carpets made by Aysel, through processes
of economic exchange, escape the circle of the village, leaving her,
never to be seen again (45-58). The dose and infiltrated (but not univocal)
meanings attached to their cultural Heimat are replaced or extended as the
carpets embark on a new life. Hence, the beautiful biography:
A Gennan couple buy a carpet in the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul. It becomes
a souvenir of their trip to Turkey, a reminder of sun on the beach, and it
becomes one element in the dkor of their home, a part of the assembly that
signals their taste. Their son saves it as a family heirloom. To him it means
childhood. Germany replaces Turkey. The weaver's memories of village
life give way to memories of an aging psychiatrist in Munich for whom the
carpet recalls a quiet moment when he lay upon it and marshalled his bright
tin troops on a rainy aftemoon. Then his son, finding the carpet worn, wads
it into a bed for a dog, and his son, finding it tattered in his father's estate,
throws it out. It becomes a rag in a landfill, awaiting its archaeologists.
(Glassie 1999:58)
To decide what meaning is the right or proper one, what context of interpretation
is appropriate for interpretation, or even when the carpet
is "out of context" seems futile (cf. McGuckin 1997). Even if the carpet
stayed in Aysel's village, it would still be translated and intersected with
other texts.
The folklorist or anthropologist studying such carpets as a manifestation
of local material culture would bring to the analysis knowledge of
other motifs; he or she would compare them with design patterns from
other parts of the world, his or her former readings and studies would
intersect, networks of theoretical and methodological resources would be
activated, and so forth. Then, when this scholar's studies of the carpets
finally became processed into finished products (paper, books, or Web
pages), they would take on new and accumulated trajectories, enmeshing
the carpets into new networks of readings. Even if the interpreter never
traveled to the remote village, the carpets would still be intertextual
products, patchworks that interwove materials, memories, kinship, inspirations,
religious beliefs, and so on. Old carpets would be reread as the
transformation of society, and knowledge and the global/local interface
50 Chapter 3
would supply the readers with new links, making possible the transposition
of other signifying material. Thus, the imperative of an invariable
context, or an authentic object that escapes difference, seems impossible
to maintain. At this point there is clearly a connection between poststructuralism
and the actor-network theory discussed later in this book (cf.
Law 1999; see chapter 7).
MATERIALIZED TEXTS
Poststructuralism brought a new dimension to the epistemology of interpretation,
emphasizing the processes by which meaning is produced
rather than passively recovered. Interpretation was claimed to be a neverending
task, a creative act of production, not the disclosure of some fossilized
strata of meaning. Within material cultural studies, the criticism it
brought forward of narrow contextual hermeneutics was clearly an important
and liberating turn. However, the somewhat biased enthusiasm
for selected aspects of poststructuralist theory, especially those stressing
multivocality and the plurality of meanings, seems to have encouraged
a somewhat gamelike—even numerical—attitude toward interpretation:
How many ways can a thing come to mean? How many layers of meaning
can be accumulated? Furthermore, and despite the emphasis on the
relational foundation of meaning (as activated by the "free play of the
signifier"), the important sources of meaning always seem located outside
the signifier (the object, the text) in question: in the reader, in other readings,
or in other texts, who/ which donate to it these new dimensions of
meaning. And finally, even if the textual analogy was powerful and productive,
few asked about the difference in the way things and texts mean.
Do we experience a city, a house, or a landscape in the same manner as
we read a textual or spoken statement? What is the difference between the
somatic and nondiscursive experience of the former and the conscious
intellectual engagement with the latter? Can the textual analogy be broadened
to embrace the somatic experiences of matter?
Despite the obvious difficulties (and contradictions) involved, if material
culture is to be compared to—and analyzed as—text in a more
sophisticated and "material" manner, we need to complicate and extend
the conception of text—maybe to such a degree that the text is as much
an analogy of the material as vice versa. Trying to accomplish this within
the theoretical orbit of poststructuralism alone is probably an impossible
task. One productive step, however, may be to consider the (material)
text as "writerly" rather than "readerly." Barthes coined this distinction
to separate those texts that pretend (even if futilely) to have only representative
functions, leaving the reader with no choice but passive conMaterial
Culture as Text 51
sumption, from those texts that resist such simplistic mimesis and offer
some kind of active coauthorship (1977:155-64). While the readerly text
strives to erase itself in order to become as transparent and innocent as
possible, the writerly text insists on being something more than a medium
for communicating a preconceived meaning. Neither is it a mere blank
slate for inscription or an arena for the free play of our imagination; in
other words, it is not the case that we can read anything we like into—or
out of—it, as is often portrayed in critiques that claim this to be a fallacy
of poststructuralist interpretation (cf. Hall 1996:218). Rather, it implies a
necessary redistribution of power and "agency"—not to the author, but
to the text itself.
In striving toward symmetry, the writerly text neither admits any
smooth passage between signifier or signified, nor provides an empty
site where we may embody our own subjective and culturally dependent
meanings. Contrary to any normal conception of texts, it has no beginning
or linearity; it is a reversible structure offering numerous entrances, of
which none can be claimed to be the primary. When the text's materiality,
Figure 3.2. "This 'conversation' is not intellectual rhetoric; it can be activated only by
a 'physiognometic' dialogue that restores to things their own materiality, allowing them
to speak to us in their own language." Leftover machinery in the abandoned mining
town of Pyramiden, Svalbard, Norway (photo: 13jornar Olsen).
52 Chapter 3
nontransparency, and difference are acknowledged, it loses its status as a
passive medium and becomes a site of contestation and negotiation, something
to be worked upon, considered, and struggled with. To read such
text is more than a purely intellectual enterprise: it entails somatic experience,
a kind of wrestling in which the outcome is not given. It provides a
sensation that is not one of a pleasing experience, a "comforting stimulation
for weakened nervest' to use Georg Simmel's phrase (1978/1906:474),
but one that unsettles and distorts (Barthes 1976:14).
Thus, if there is a "pleasure of the text" in Barthes's subtle conception
of the term, it consists in materializing it, "to abolish the false opposition
of practical and contemplative life. The pleasure of the text is just that:
a claim lodged against the separation of the text" (Barthes 1976:58-59).
Reading a text does not take the reader to something or somewhere else,
a world beyond the text (be it the author's or the reader's). Rather, such
texts may be seen as operating in an undifferentiated space that unhinges
such oppositions, an intermediate rote that, in some aspects at least,
comes dose to Kristeva's notion of the chora —the in-between (Kristeva
1986:93ff.; cf. Grosz 2002).
This involvement with a text that resists domination and transparency
can be conceived of as based on a reversed analogy: on text as thing.
Barthes's notion of writerly text involves negotiation, a plea for symmetry,
something that resembles the reciprocity involved in Walter Benjamin's
mimetic (and auratic) relationship to things. This is a relationship
that cares for things' difference, and this otherness (or impenetrability)
is precisely what makes them "speak" to us. This "conversation" is not
intellectual rhetoric; it can be activated only by a "physiognometic" dialogue
that restores to things their own materiality, allowing them to speak
to us in their own language (Benjamin 2003:338).
WRITING THINGS
Poststructuralist textualism worked both ways; thus, it also triggered a
debate and a series of reflections on the ways in which material culture
waswritten and the formation processes involved as we move from things
to text (cf. Tilley 1989; Baker and Thomas 1990; Olsen 1990; Hodder et al.
1995, Joyce 1994, 2002; Preucel 2006). To engage in an academic study of
material culture is, by necessity, to also engage in textual activity. Things
receive much of their identity as anthropological or archaeological objects
by being realized as texts (field reports, catalogues, journal articles, and
books), even if often supported by visualizing devices such as drawings,
photographs, and exhibitions. Every description and analysis, ranging
from the labeling of artifacts (Bouquet 1991) to social and historical synMaterial
Culture as Text 53
thesis (White 1973, 1978), involves textualization and the use of (oral/
written) language. Even the photographed and exhibited item often gets
much of its identity from the metatext (the caption) that accompanies it
(Olsen 1990:192).
Writing academic texts is by convention to write about the subject matter.
Much as with the supposed processes of embodiment and materialization
discussed in the previous chapter, the transformation is smooth
and readerly; it is always supposed to move hierarchically and irreversibly
from signified to signifier, from content to form, and from idea to
text. This aspired-to ideal seems to be that of an erased or transparent
signifier that allows the content "to present itself as what it is, referring to
nothing other than its presence" (Derrida 1978:22). The common conception
of academic language has been that it is merely a neutral device, a
transparent instrument subjugated to a derivative hierarchy consisting of
"on one side and first of all, the contents of the scientific message which
are everything, and on the other and afterwards, the verbal form entrusted
with expressing these contents, which is nothing" (Barthes 1986:4, emphasis
in original).
One of the most profound poststructuralist contributions was to challenge
this transitive conception of language and writing in which the text
is believed unconditionally to mirror the world, constituting its simulacrum.
As discourse, for example, anthropological and archaeological texts
participate in the same structure as the epic, the novel, and the drama.
Thus, to write is to make ourselves subject to narrative formation processes,
to literary techniques and conventions (rhetoric, allegories, plots),
blurring the strict border between scientific text and fictional literature (cf.
Derrida 1977, 1978).
The concern with science and research as textual practices, as writing,
also had an impact on the theoretical debate in archaeology and
anthropology. This was also inspired by the metahistorical works of
Hayden White (1973, 1978) and caused a new awareness of how literary
form intervenes in the textual construction of the object. This was most
noticeable in anthropology, in which the recognition of the constitutive
character of ethnographical writing led to a debate on the representation
and construction of the "other" (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford
1988; Geertz 1988; Hastrup 1992; Hastrup and Hervik 1994; see
Baker and Thomas 1990; Solli 1996; Edmonds 1999). Poetry (or "poetic"
writing) and other experiments with literary forms were proposed as
alternative and more adequate representations of the complexities and
hybridities encountered in the field (cf. Prattis 1985; Fischer 1986; Giles
2001). According to George Marcus and Michael Fischer, the objective of
experimental writing was to produce a more authentic representation of
cultural differences (1986:42-43).
54 Chapter 3 Material Culture as Text 55
The sudden focus on autobiography, style, and aesthetics probably
made an amount of narcissism unavoidable. Both archaeology and anthropology
produced works where the concern for content sometimes
obviously became secondary to what James Clifford once referred to as
"our fetishizing of form" (Clifford 1986:21; for examples, cf. Campbell
and Hansson 2000; Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007). The new imperative
of creating polyphonic texts also caused some questionable (although
memorable) solutions. The devices applied to infusing dialogue and
multivocality into the text often boiled down to adding a section with
dialogue or conversation in an otherwise quite conventional narrative
(often featuring the author and one or more opponents as participants,
a solution probably inspired by Foucault's dialogic conclusion in The Archaeology
of Knowledge (Foucault 1970:199-211; cf. Tilley 1991; Hodder et
al. 1995; Hodder and Preucel 1996; Hodder 1999; Karlsson1998; see Joyce
2002; Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007). Even if encountering such a
dialogue in scientific texts may have provoked some reflections, it may
be read as another way of controlling reader's responses (producing both
questions and answers), and thus actually reinstalling the author as the
center of discourse. It is as if the author takes on the reader's and critic's
roles, producing texts that are already fragmented and ready-made deconstructed
(Shaw and Stewart 1994:22-23).
MIMESIS REGAINED?
The new emphasis on dialogue and plurality was clearly intended as a
liberating turn. In ethnography, it was partly a project of empowering
the "other" as more than an "informant," or, in Clifford's more modest
words, an attempt "to loosen at least somewhat the monological control
of the executive writer/ anthropologist and to open for discussion ethnography's
hierarchy and negotiation of discourses in power-charged,
unequal situations" (1997:23).
Things are maybe less likely to be cared about as complex, historical
agents or to be seen as in need of emancipation. However, their treatment
in scientific discourses is somehow analogous to Western blindness
toward the other (cf. Olsen 2003, 2004, 2007). This even includes a certain
ambiguity (cf. Young 1995), being at the same time objects of ignorance
(or contempt) and of desire. As noted by several commentators (e.g., Simmel,
Benjamin), the modern attitude to things embroils this ambiguity: a
fear of things in their thingly otherness and, simultaneously, a redempHve
for the warmth of the atomized and humanized artifact (Simmel
1978/1906:404, 478; Andersson 2001:47-51; see chapter 5). Things'
otherness and distinctiveness unsettle and distort us and urge means
for domestication and subordination. By introducing the imperative regime
of meaning, language and writings have clearly functioned as such
means and largely managed to counter the objects' disquieting material
obstinacy. One outcome of this labeling and narrativization is, of course,
a world less and less sensitive to the way things articulate themselves,
entombing the "material community of things in their communication"
(Benjamin 1996:73). Intellectually, we encounter things as (pre)labeled,
as enveloped by layers of linguistic meaning—what Benjamin termed
"overnaming," the outcome of which is the silencing of things themselves
(1996:73).
Accompanying things on display, a printed image, or a figure, the
texts—even an innocent catalog labet or figure caption ("Spear-thrower
from Mas d'Azil"; "The sorcerer of Trois-Fferes"; "The beautiful Bronze
Age warrior: chiefly Urnfield equipment from northern Italy"3)—load the
object with a preconceived signified, a culture and moral that clearly reduce
its possible signification (Olsen 1990:195). As noted by Barthes, "the
text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to
avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching,
it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance" (1977:40).
Against this background of sameness and uniformism, it is understandable
that the introduction of new ways of writing things, which are more
ambiguous and multilayered (such as double texts, experiments with
hypertext and hypermedia, poetics, irony, etc.), was conceived of (and
motivated) as acts of liberation. Such presentations clearly appear to be
a more appropriate means of securing, realizing, or making manifest (cf.
Shanks 1999) things' material diversity and polyphonie character. One (if
not the) raison d'etre behind all this seems to be that whereas the former,
realist writings misrepresented the world as simplistic and straightforward,
poststructuralist (and postmodern) writings and presentations let
the presumed complexity and hybridity shine through (cf. Marcus and
Fischer 1986:31, 42-43). This point of motivation is well expressed by
White in relation to historiography:
Since the second half of the nineteenth century, history has became increasingly
the refuge of all those "sane" men who excel at finding the simple in
the complex, the familiar in the strange....The historian serves no one well
by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that
which preceded it. On the contrary, we require a history that will educate
us to discontinuity, more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption and
chaos are our lot. (1978:50)
It is somewhat ironic that the plea for a more complex and diverse representation
can actually be read as advocacy of a new mimesis. Although
normally claimed to be the great fallacy of realism (which was accused
56 Chapter 3
of conflating literary form with epistemological stance), experimental
writings and presentations may actually be a new way of creating what
Johannes Fabian has termed "representations that are (or pretend to be)
isomorphic with that which is being represented" (1990:765). Even if the
aspiration of creating better (or more realistic) representations should not
be the cause of any embarrassment, it clearly seems odd in relation to a
theoretical legacy that precisely questions such mimicry and, as it seems,
any representationist stance altogether.
THE TYRANNY OF THE TEXT
There is also another, in my opinion far more serious, issue at stake here,
similarly submerged in the ongoing debate about things and texts. This
concerns how the textual approach campaigned for by poststructuralists
(and others) has reinforced the hegemony of the text, allowing (in a very
literal sense) no space outside it. Finally fully conquered, the materiality
of things ended up as little more than an arbitrary quality in a dematerialized
discourse (Beek 1991:359). In the wake of an idealist intellectual
tradition that has continuously devaluated, stigmatized, and demonized
the material (always bypassed, always made transcendental), to conceive
of any material experience that is outside of language becomes the subject
of suspicion.
One example of how poststructuralism came to campaign for a textual
(and linguistic) colonialism against things is provided by Butler, whose
work has been hailed by a number of archaeologists and anthropologists
as providing a new framework for understanding materiality (despite
rarely addressing nonhuman matters; e.g., Thomas 1996, 2000, 2004; Gosden
1999; Meskell and Joyce 2003; Joyce 2005; Fowler 2001; Hodder and
Hutson 2003; Buchli 2002). Discussing the differentiation between sex and
gender, Butler (1993) convincingly argues how the latter term (by being
conceived of as socially and culturally constructed) came to reinforce the
naturalness and "given" quality of the former. Sex constitutes the invariable
material bedrock on which gender is molded. Thus, by being conceived
of as matter, the biological (sexual)body escapes cultural construction.
According to Butler, however, this escape is precisely a product of
the metaphysics of presupposing a material first instance, an originary a
priori; in other words, it is based on a deceptive conception of materiality
as existing prior to, or outside of, language. Unmasked, this ontologized
matter (as opposed to the culturally constructed) is revealed as nothing
but a linguistic construct itself, something always discursively articulated.
Thus, there is no materiality existing outside of language: "We may
seek to return to matter as prior to discourse to ground our claims about
Material Culture as Text 57
sexual difference only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with
discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to
which that term can be put" (Butler 1993:28).
Following Butler, materiality is nothing given, be it a site or a substance,
but a "process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce
the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter" (Butler
1993:9). This interesting thought, however, is based on an inverted hierarchy
of opposition in which materialization is seen solely as a process in
service of (or an effect of) power. Thus, sex is a forcible materialization
of a "regulatory ideal" (heterosexuality); to materialize the body's sex is
"to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the
heterosexual imperative" (Butler 1993:2). Materialization and its byproduct
matter end up as epiphenomena of something more primary (power,
the heterosexual regulatory ideal, etc.). And, well in concordance with
the effective history of modern Western thought, materiality continues
to be viewed with suspicion and contempt, entailing the old vision of
freedom and emancipation as that which escapes the material (cf. Latour
1993:137-38). Hence the conspiracy theory claiming that '"materiality' appears
only when its status as contingently constituted through discourse
is erased, concealed or covered over. Materiality is the dissimulated effect
of power" (Butler 1993:35).
Despite Butler's promising introductory citation from Donna Haraway's
cyborg manifesto ("Why should our bodies end at the skin, or
include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" [Haraway 1991:178]),
her discussion and conception of materiality appear entirely anthropocentric,
leaving little room for other "carnal beings" not covered with
skin. Taking those nonhuman beings seriously should not be conflated
with any imperative or desire of subjugating oneself to materiality as a
"transcendental center" or "final signified" to which all discourse may be
anchored. Such either / or logic is of course utterly misplaced. Rather, it is
a claim to do away with such hierarchies or centers and to thus acknowledge
the otherness of things and of materiality as providing a distinct
sphere of experience—sometimes closely related to language, other times
very remote from it.
The impact of Butler's textualism reminds us that despite the emerging
somatic (and visual) frames of experience in material culture studies (cf.
chapter 2), there is still a very persistent conception of the absolutism of
language and text. Actually, how deeply this assumption is rooted can
be exemplified by a few fragments from two archaeological books written
well into the "posttextual" era. Countering the critique that recently
has been directed toward the textual analogy, Robert Preucel finds it
sufficient to simply posit a supposed a priori statement: "These critiques
are largely misguided since it can be argued that textualisation is the
58 Chapter 3 Material Culture as Text 59
central constitutive practice within social orders" (2006:141, see p. 256).
In another fairly recent book, Archaeology and Modernity, Julian Thomas
claims with equal conviction that "any notion of a pre-discursive materiality
is incomprehensible, since we cannot articulate the pre-discursive
other than in discursive concepts" (Thomas 2004:143; for related opinions,
cf. Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007:26). In an earlier paper, he is even
more explicit, claiming that "language is the means by which the material
world is revealed to us. We can recognize things because we have the
concepts at our disposal to comprehend them" (Thomas 2000:154). As
Gosewijn van Beek points out in his pertinent comment to the prophets
of linguistic absolutism:
Certainly, there is no escape from language when analysing and talking
about material culture, especially as language is the preferred medium of
scientific exchange. But this does not mean that the material aspect we necessarily
talk about in language has no locus in other media of experience. The
"hegemony of linguistic approaches to the object world" surely is a reification
of the dominant form of scientific discourse which then is constructed
as the substance of things we talk about. (1991:359)
Things of course are not experienced solely as linguistic signs or signifiers,
despite their capability of being transposed and represented in other
media. We may talk and write about New York as a concept or an idea, as
a mental wish image, or as something social, symbolic, or purely textual.
Still the concept of "New York" relates to, and emerges from, a complex
material infrastructure of land, rivers, streets, bridges, buildings, parking
lots, art, public transport, people, cars, and so on. As argued by Ian
Hacking, with a different point of reference (the material infrastructure
surrounding the idea of "women refugees"), you may want to call these
structures "social" because their meanings are what matter to us, "but
they are material, and in their sheer materiality make substantial differences
to people" (2001:10).
The hegemony of the text may be seen as related to a general asymmetry
in academia, and especially.in the humanities, in which material life
(technology, manual labor, dirt) has always been an object of contempt
and thus utterly marginalized. This regime of subordination may actually
be related to a central aspect of Derrida's deconstructionist theory:
the hierarchies of opposites (Derrida 1977). In Western culture, pairs of
opposites such as body/soul, matter/ mind, form/ content, and nature/
culture play a fundamental role in ordering discourses. As Derrida points
out, this is a hierarchy of value (even of violence) in which one side is always
given priority over the other (here, the left side), which is conceived
of as marginal, derivative, a supplement. His favorite example (even if a
questionable one) is the way speech is prioritized over writing—the latter
being conceived of as redundant, a "dangerous supplement" to speech
(and thus to thought). However, another opposition of subordination is
less talked about, that of writing (and speech) over things (cf. Benjamin
1996:72-73). This hierarchy of value in which matter is subordinate to
text and language is well in accordance with the logocentric tradition outlined
by Derrida—a tradition that has always privileged the human side
(thought, speech, writing) and rendered matter passive, meaningless, or
negative (cf. Olsen 2003;Thomas 2004:chap. 9). Thus, as noted by Graham
Harman, it is time to break loose from the textual and linguistic ghetto
that we have been constructing for ourselves "and return to the drama of
things themselves" (2002:17).
CONCLUSION: WHAT DID WE LEARN?
Some of the initial criticism directed at the textual analogy in material culture
studies was based on the traditional assumption of written texts as
linear (and irreversible) structures and thus their incompatibility with the
material world, with its chaotic palimpsest of things. Even if this criticism
clearly was based on a misunderstanding of the poststructuralist conception
of text, which was precisely palimpsestial in nature, one may still
question why students of material culture needed the textual detour to
discover their own subject matter's far more fragmented, reversible, and
polysemic nature. This is not to say that the textual turn was just an ideologically
enforced curve made in vain. By questioning the obviousness of
the traditional hermeneutic approach to interpretation, poststructuralist
textualism provoked reflection on how we interpret things, on what entities
are involved in the meaning/ creative process and on their mutual
relationship. The poststructuralist discourse on these issues constituted a
vital source of theoretical inspiration.
A major fallacy, however, was to conflate the textual and the material
as ontological entities. Many of us inspired by poststructuralism all too
easily came to ignore the differences between things and text—to ignore
that material culture is in the world in a fundamentally different constitutive
way from texts and language. Actually, only a minor part of the
material world is "read" or interpreted in the way we deal with linguistic
means of communication. Our dealings with most things take place in a
mode of "inconspicuous familiarity"; we live our lives as "thrown" into
the entanglement with ready-to-hand things. This entanglement fundamentally
orients our everyday life in a predominantly nondiscursive
manner (Heidegger 1962:85-105; see chapter 4). Thus, to conceive of our
60 Chapter 3 Material Culture as Text 61
Figure 3.3. "Many of us inspired by poststruduralism all too easily came to ignore
the differences between things and text." Stranded vessel, H6psnes, Iceland (photo:
Bjornar Olsen).
dealing with material culture as primarily an intellectual encounter, as
signs or texts to be consciously read, is to deprive things of their difference
and their ability to "talk back" in their own material way.
If our living with things is a predominantly somatic experience, a
dialogue between material entities, then we also have to envisage a poetics
that, although not untranslatable, is clearly of a very different kind
(cf. Benjamin 1996:69-70). If things were invested with the ability to use
ordinary language, they would talk to us in ways very banal, but also
very imperative and effective: walk here, sit there, eat there, use that entrance,
stop, move, turn, bow, lie down, gather, depart, and so forth. Our
habitual practices, memory, and what is spoken of as social and cultural
form, cannot be conceived of as separate from this "physiognometic"
rhetoric. At the same time, our dialogue with the material world is a sophisticated
discourse about closeness, familiarity, bodily belonging, and
remembering, and it is extremely rich and polysemic, involving all our
senses. Walking through a forest involves encountering the "numberless
vibration" (pace Bergson) of the material world. We hear and smell the
trees as much as we see them; we are touched by their branches, moistened
by the dewfall. Sounds, smells, and touches admit proximity with
the world; more than seeing, they mediate the corporeality and symmetry
of our being in the world (Heidegger 1971:25-26; cf. Welsch1997:158;
Ingold 2000:249ff.).
This cacophony of sensations involved in our material living is well
expressed in the writings of authors such as Proust, James, Benjamin,
and Borges, making manifest a nearness to things, a kind of topographical
mode of experience (cf. Andersson 2001; Brown 2003). Benjamin also
explored the possibilities offered by images and photographic collages
in order to emancipate historical representation from the constraints of
linear narrativity (2003). Today, the new media reality has equipped us
with far more tools to help this move beyond conventional forms of documentation
and inscription. In addition, a growing number of archaeologists
and artists are exploring the hybrid spaces between their respective
fields, in order to express (or make manifest) the "ineffable" experience
of place and materiality (see Coles and Dion 1999; Tilley, Hamilton, and
Bender 2000; Pearson and Shanks 2001; Renfrew 2003; Renfrew, Gosden,
and DeMarrais 2004; Witmore 2004; Gonzälez-Ruibal 2008).
Exploring such hybridized spaces where scholarship and art cohabit
creates a possible interface where things and bodily practices can be
articulated outside the realms of wordy languages. Experimental and
nonliterary ways of making manifest our engagement with material culture
are very important and to be encouraged (see Andreassen, Bjerck,
and Olsen 2010). This is not to claim, however, that the study of material
culture should become some type of art or handicraft in which the only
legitimate utterances are those performed, exhibited, or made manifest
in stone or wood. Although words and things are different, this is not
to say that they are separated by a yawning abyss (making any statement
a linguistic construction). If we conceive of things as being possible
to articulate, even to contain their own articulation, they may also be
transformed (and translated) into discursive knowledge, even if this may
take us through many links and to crossing many small gaps (Latour
1999b:67-79, 141-44). As argued by Benjamin, to move from the language
of things to human language is a translation "from one language into
another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes
through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and
similarity" (1996:70). Avoiding the absolutism of the "whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent" (Wittgenstein) or any other linguistic
(and material) idealism, the crucial point is rather to become sensitive to
62 Chapter 3
the way things articulate themselves —and to our own somatic competence
of listening to, and responding to, their call.
To what extent poststructuralism can help develop such sensitivity is
doubtful. A major obstacle to the development of a sensitive and symmetrical
approach to things is found in the limitations imposed by the
current territorial circumscription of knowledge and expressions ('see
chapter 5). Modeled an its essentialist ontology, the legacy of the modern
constitution was a rifted and polarized disciplinary landscape inhospitable
to the needs of things. At first sight, the role of poststructuralism
in countering this modernist legacy may seem heroic and promising, as
manifested by its programmatic tenets of blurring boundaries, investigating
spaces in-between, and exploring intertextual networks. However,
the primacy given to language as a "model world" and the unwillingness
to acknowledge nondiscursive realms of reality and experience (cf. Butler
1993) make poststructuralism an unreliable ally in the defense of things.
4
The Phenomenology
of Things
Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing?
—Martin Heidegger, The Thing
It is hardly an exaggeration to state that much of social and humanistic
research have been prone to what Ian Hacking has called linguistic idealism
(also known as the "Richard Nixon doctrine"), in which "only what
is talked about exists; nothing has reality until it is spoken of, or written
about" (Hacking 2001:24). Taking this doctrine literally, an entity exists—
and is thus rendered important to social analysis—only insofar as the
knowing subjects are consciously aware of it and are able to discursively
articulate this experience. Needless to say, our understanding of past and
present lifeworlds, cultures, and societies has suffered from being subjugated
to different versions of such idealism. One immediate consequence
is, as Henry Glassie remarked, that "we miss the wordless experience of
all people, rich and poor, near or far" (1999:44). Since this wordless experience
is mostly related to people's engagement with the material world
and with things, the materiality of human life has been left equally void
in most social studies. Taking into consideration how often things (and
tool making) are claimed to be diagnostic of humanity (rivaled only by
language), the risk is, as stated by Michael Schiffer, that social scientists
"may have ignored what might be the most distinctive and significant
about our species" (1999:2).
White this asymmetry is clearly an outcome of a dominant thing hostile
tendency in modern Western thinking (cf. chapter 5), it has not been
unchallenged. From the Tate nineteenth century onward, there have been
63
64 Chapter 4
sincere attempts at coming to grips with this hostility and avoidance.
Central among these is phenomenological philosophy, which from its
very beginning, although perhaps somewhat prematurely, recommended
a return "to the things themselves." Edmund Husserl's maybe too ambitious
slogan notwithstanding, phenomenology may nevertheless be seen
as conceptualizing the opposition against the idealist legacy in modern
thinking. Thus, the main focus of this chapter is the phenomenological
approach to things, especially the attempt to explore the ontology of
things and, moreover, how our engagement with things is fundamental
to our own being in the world.Drawing heavily upon Martin Heidegger's
phenomenology, this chapter also takes some initial steps toward exploring
the properties and "integrity" of things. First, however, I shall briefly
outline some of the intellectual heritage as it relates to our perception of
the material world.
PHENOMENAL PERCEPTION
Modern philosophical approaches to how we experience the world have
been heavily affected by idealist models of mental cognition (also basic
to its discursive representation). Our experience of things is by and large
conceived of as a cognitive perception in which sensory images, mainly
based on vision, are filtered and transformed by our mind and language.
Cartesian thinking left us with a notion of matter as passive and inert,
while the human mind was seen as active and creative. Matter and mind
belonged to separate realms, and the widening gulf between them became
a never-ending source for modern epistemological inquiries about
how (and if) our conception of the world could correspond with the
material reality "out there." The skeptical attitude that followed in the
wake of Rend Descartes's "methodological doubt" placed a seemingly irretrievable
wedge between the material world and the human mind. The
so-called external world of matter and nature had no necessarily given or
immanent existence; actually, it might all prove to be a construction in our
heads. If not unreal, matter was still mere surface without any power or
potential; all qualities and ideas about it had to be located in the thinking
subject (ct. Matthews 2002: 8-9, 24-26; Thomas 2004).
As for muck of modern thinking, Immanuel Kant's efforts to reveal the
a priori structures of experience had a great Impact on these issues. According
to Kant, the thing in itself (Das Ding an sich) could not be grasped
directly. Although things around us clearly exist, they are inaccessible to us
as objects of experience in their own essence. Only things as they appear, that
is, as phenomena, are knowable "objects of sense": "And we indeed, rightly
considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that
The Phenomenology of Things 65
they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing in its
internal constitution, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which
our senses are affected by this unknown something" (Kant 2001/1783:53).
Although phenomena are admittedly in some way related to things as they
are "in themselves" (the nomena), things in this "internal constitutive" state
are excluded from our experience because our concepts of intuition and
understanding cannot grasp them. These concepts extend only to appearances,
the transcendental object, and "consequently to mere things of sense;
and as soon as we leave this sphere, these concepts retain no meaning
whatever" (Kant 2001/1783:55; cf. Körner 1955:94-95).
Kant's denial of any face-to-face encounter with the material world
meant that we understand the thing, not "in itself," but only in the way it
is formed by ourselves, that is, by our own thinking or reason (Andersson
2001:81-93). Kant did not try to work out an ontology of things; his main
concern was how we conceived of things. As noted by Graham Harman,
"Kant's rift between thing in itself and thing as appearance resolves entirely
around the question of human relevance. Nowhere does he suggest
that two colliding bricks encounter each other as phenomena rather than
as nomena; indeed, he is never clear as to whether they encounter one
another at all" (2002:279, emphasis in original).
The phenomenological movement of the twentieth century can be seen
as a radical challenge to this notion of perception. However, phenomenology
started off as far less critical toward the Kantian (and Cartesian)
legacy. Husserl's early (transcendental) phenomenology may actually be
seen as a development of Kant's "transcendental" approach coupled with
the notion of intentionality (Matthews 2002:25). According to Husserl, our
conscious awareness of an object is always intentional; it exists for us as
a meaningful object of or for something (Husserl 1976). This intentional
object is, however, an ideal construction that does not need to correspond
to any real object. (It might be an invented object, e.g., a ghost.) To further
grasp the essential meaning of an object, its ordinary existence and
entanglements (the way it appears to us in our "natural attitude") must
be suspended. Thus, it must be "bracketed off" or reduced—what Husserl
denoted as the "phenomenological reduction" (or epoche).
His famous example is the thought of an apple tree: even if it clearly is
related to the actual tree, it is still different from the physical object growing
in the garden (Husserl 1982:214-15). To bring forth the intentional
apple tree, the real tree must be "put in parentheses." Whatever happens
to the real tree, regardless of whether it falls down or burns, the meaning
of the tree as an intentional object ("as something meant") remains.
However, it may be stated that some serious problems also remain. A real
tree can burn, fall over, be climbed, and grow apples. It also has branches,
leaves, and a stein. In short, it has a physiognomy, as well as mass and
66 Chapter 4
other properties. Contrary to Husserl's conception of the intentional object
as the essential entity, it may be claimed that it is rather in the tree's
material heterogeneity and ability to change that its meaning and truth reside
(Buck-Morss 1977:72). Thus, despite his slogan "zu den Sachen selbst"
("to the things themselves"), the materiality of the object seems trivial or
at least secondary to its transcendental existence as a "thought object,"
which was the true object of Husserl's "scientific" phenomenology. The
real world with its trivia and "noise" had to be "put in parentheses" in
order to reveal the true essence of things—that is, things as they appear
as ideal objects of our consciousness (Husserl 1976).
Husserl's later philosophy took a turn that at least partly brought it
closer to a very different and "engaged" approach to human perception,
mostly known through the phenomenology of Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (Husserl 1970). This "turn" implied a rethinking of his
phenomenology by introducing the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as
constitutive for human understanding. While his former phenomenological
reduction may be seen as yet another version of the methodological
doubt of Descartes—in the sense that consciousness was the only secure
basis for knowledge—Husserl now also emphasized the importance of
our ordinary life experience as constitutive for our understanding of the
world. What needs to be "put in parentheses" is not the real world, but
rather the abstract categories and concepts of science and philosophy.
Humans are not Cartesian egos bracketed off from experience, but instead
are engaged subjects who are actively involved in the world they experience.
Whereas Husserl (like Kant and Descartes) was previously preoccupied
with how the world existed "in us," it was now more a question
of "how we are in the world" (Matthews 2002:28-29).
This concept of being was already a starting point for Heidegger,
as it later became for Merleau-Ponty.1 Phenomenology was no longer
a method granting a secure knowledge of the hidden essence of ideal
things, or something to be performed by a detached subject contemplating
the world from outside. Heidegger conceptually emphasized the
latter point by substituting the term subject (or human) with Dasein (literally,
"being there"), a subject situated in the world. As also expressed by
the hyphens in his famous being-in-the-world, our being is an entangled
existence—we are tightly joined in the world we seek to understand. A
phenomenological understanding of this experience is to describe what
this entanglement consists of and to make manifest our relationship to
the world.
Phenomenology is thus concerned with the world as it manifests itself
to those who take part in it. It involves a "return to the world of active
experience," to "restore to things their concrete physiognomy . . . to rediscover
phenomena, the layer of living experience through which other
The Phenomenology of Things 67
people and things are first given to us, the system 'Self-others-things'
as it comes into being" (Merleau-Ponty 1962:57). In Heidegger's words,
phenomenology is to let "that which shows itself be seen from itself in
the very way in which it shows itself . expressing nothing eise than the
maxim . . . : 'To the things themselves'" (1962:58). Or, finally, as formulated
by Merleau-Ponty, "It is the things themselves, from the depth of
their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression" (1968:4).
This phenomenological approach to human perception implied two
important insights: First, our relatedness to the world. We are entangled
beings fundamentally involved in networks of human and nonhuman
beings. Second, we relate to the world not (only) as thinking subjects but
also as bodily objects—our "being-in" this world is a concrete existence
of involvement that unites us with the world. Although the latter point
may be claimed to be more explicit in Merleau-Ponty's work than in Heidegger's,
central to both philosophers was the attempt to break down the
subject-object distinction implied in previous approaches to perception.
As Merleau-Ponty's latest works suggest, the thingly aspect of our own
being (our common "fabric" as "flesh") is essential for our integration
with the world. The ability to touch and be touched, to see and be seen,
to act upon things while at the same time being acted upon by them,
can only happen if there is some kinship, "if my hand ...takes its place
among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them" (Merleau-Ponty
1968:133).
MATTER AND IMAGE: BERGSON
However, to give the phenomenologists "proper" all the credit for this
"tangible" turn leaves out one scholar for whom perception and matter
were so dose that their difference was claimed to be a matter of degree,
rather than kind (Bergson 2004:291, 299). Despite his somewhat confusing
and mysterious conception of matter, one basic premise of Henri
Bergson's philosophy is that our knowledge of this world is founded on
a practical competence acquired by constantly having to deal with things.
We recognize objects by using them and by being bodily engaged with
the material world. Our knowledge of place, and of how to familiarize
ourselves with new places, is based on this competence, this "habit
knowledge"—rather than mental representations (Bergson 2004:89ff., 112;
Mullarkey 2000:48-50).
How do we perceive the material world? Trying to escape the choice
between idealism and realism, Bergson introduced the concept of image,
described by one commentator as "something more than an idealist calls
a representation and something less than a realist calls a thing—image
68 Chapter 4
is situated between the two" (Pearson 2002:148).2 The concept may be
seen as denoting how we experience things or matter through our active
and direct engagement with them. This should not, however, be confused
with having a cognitive "image" of things as an ideal object of our
consciousness. Image denotes the way things appear to us in an intimate
bodily experience of them and is the product of a corporeal involvement
that stems from our relatedness and kinship—from the fact that our body
is an image among images (Bergson 2004:12-13). This body is capable of
finding its way among other images, coordinating or inhibiting actions
that are materially possible (Bergson 2004:12-13; Mullarkey 2000:152;
Pearson 2002:149-50). Thus, our being-in-the-world is a relational involvement;
I am a positioned and oriented image that acts upon and
reacts to other images.
Bergson also introduced an important "reductionist" notion in relation
to our experiencing of things. Faced with the "numberless vibrations" of
the material world, our perception of it has to be subtractive (Bergson
2004:276). This especially counts for our conscious representation of it. Although
far richer than cognitive representation, even our "image-based"
bodily involvement cannot embrace all aspects of this materiality—by
necessity, it also implies some reduction. To render the myriad of things
and possible links intelligible, we have to perform an act of simplification
or narrowing (see also Gibson 1986:134-35). A material object "in itself"
is bound up in endless networks with other images, "it is continued
in those which follow it, just as it prolonged those which preceded it"
(Bergson 2004:27). By necessity, representation involves a suppression of
those links, a reduction of the complexity. In other words, to "see" a thing
we have to loosen it somewhat from its relational web and subject it to a
"picturing." In Bergson's words, to obtain this transformation "it would
be necessary, not to throw more light on the object, but, to the contrary,
to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself,
so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surrounding as a
thing, should detach itself from them as a picture" (2004:28). I shall return
to Bergson's work in more detail in later chapters. This brief section hopefully
helps to expose some nodes of kinship with later phenomenological
approaches. This relationship is obvious in Merleau-Ponty's work (cf.
Casey 1984; Matthews 2002), but on several points, Bergson's notions of
seeing and picturing resonate in the work of Heidegger as well.
HEIDEGGER'S TOOLS
Although Heidegger's writings are generally described as dense and
abstract, they contain a long-standing concern with things (cf. Harman
The Phenomenology of Things 69
2002). Actually, this is true to such a degree that he once complained that
thingy trivia was all people read out of Being and Time: "For Heidegger,
the world consists only of cooking pots, pitchforks and lampshades; he
has nothing to say about 'higher culture' or about 'nature' (Heidegger
quoted in Inwood 2000:130). Challenging the Cartesian notion that our
relationship to the world is mediated and orchestrated by the mind,
Heidegger proposed that our being in the world involves an immediate
engagement and entanglement with things. Our everyday dealing with
things (Umgang) relates to a mode of being that is ontologically fundamental
and prior to any conscious (detached) cognition of the world
(Erkennen; Dreyfus 1991:60-61).
What does this everyday Umgang with things consist of? To start, we
relate to things by using them to accomplish something. The fork is there
for eating, the bike for biking, the bow and arrow for shooting and killing,
and so on. Heidegger applies the word Zeug—"equipment" or "gear"—to
emphasize this functionality (the "in-order-to"). Next, things are connected
in a chain of references, so that strictly speaking "there is no such
thing as an equipment"; it "always belong to a totality of equipment . . .
constituted by various ways of the 'in-order-to' such as serviceability,
conduciveness, usability, manipulability" (Heidegger 1962:97). The hammer
relates to the nail, the nail to the plank, the plank to the framework,
the framework to the house, the house to dwelling, the dwelling to the village,
and so forth. In our everydayness, we are always dealing with things
and beings in their relatedness as "an assignment or reference of something
to something" (Heidegger 1962:97).
In this mode of dealing with them, Heidegger calls things "ready-tohand"
(zuhanden). In this state, we do not "see" the thing but are practically
and skillfully involved with it: "The less we stare at the hammerthing
and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial
does our relationship to it become. . . If we just look at things 'theoretically,'
we can get along without understanding 'readiness-to-hand(Heidegger
1962:98). In other words, in order "to be ready-to-hand quite
authentically" (99), things have to "withdraw" from our conscious attention
to them, which only happens when they are properly working as
part of our everyday conduct. Umgang is not only utilitarian, but is also a
concernful dealing, involving care for the things we relate to.
At the same time we ourselves are immersed in the situational context
in which we find ourselves, we become "concernfully absorbed" in our
tasks and things (Heidegger 1962:103). Driving a car unites us with the
car; the driver and car act as a single unit. The functioning of the car,
the movements of our arms and Feet and our senses of touch, sight, and
hearing all work together in a relational whole without being the object
of individualized or thematic awareness. The car becomes an extension
70 Chapter 4 The Phenomenology of Things 71
Figure 4.1. "In this mode, we do not 'see' the thing, but are practically and skillfully
involved with it." Uniting with the kayak, West Greenland, ca. 1880 (photo: M. P.
Porsild).
of our body, and through the car we relate to roads, signs, other cars, and
so on. This also suggests, as Harman has argued in detail, that the readyto-hand
is not something reserved for tools but is a mode of being that is
also an aspect of human being (Harman 2002).
It can be argued that the ready-to-hand in Heidegger's conception is a
mode primarily relating to things' human relevance. The spear is readyto-hand
only insofar as it conducts its in-order-to task as intended by
the hunter. In other words, that this is not a mode of things' being per se
but an effect of the human purposes they serve. Harman has forcefully
argued against this objection. A knife does not become effective (and invisible)
only because people use it; it is rather an aspect of the tool's own
mode of being:
lt can only be used because it is capable of an effect, of inflicting some kind of
blow on reality. In short, the tool isn't used—it is. In each instant, entities
form a determinate landscape that offers a specific range of possibilities and
obstacles. Beings in themselves are ready-to-hand, not in the derivative sense
of 'manipulable,' but in the primary sense of 'in action.' (Harman 2002:21)
This is also an important argument in support of the "integrity" of things
(see chapter 8) and the ready-to-hand as an integral aspect of things' being.
However, it is questionable whether this complies with Heidegger's
original conception of this mode of being.
Readiness-to-hand, according to Heidegger, does not render us blind
to things we engage with. It involves a kind of sight which he refers to as
Umsicht—the "look around" something or the "view beyond" (Heidegger
1962:98-99). Thus, the involvement with any equipment brings about
a wider field of things related and united in an "equipmental totality."
Repairing the fishing gear brings forth not only the immediate pieces
of equipment (net, thread, net needle, floats, sinkers) but also the boat,
fish, water, deck, winches, fishing grounds, markers, and so on. This circumspection
is not a conscious observation of isolated objects, but rather
a "knowing how" awareness of how things are in their relatedness—in
other words, "our practical everyday orientation" (Heidegger 1982:163).
Apropos of what is often claimed to be a "phenomenological" dimension
of archaeological experiencing, circumspection is not to contemplate
what there is in sight, what can be seen from this or that point in the
landscape, or to be equated with the "shifting human visual experience
of place and landscape" encountered through a walk (Tilley 1994:74; cf.
Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender 2000; Hamilton et al. 2006:33). As suggested
by Hubert Dreyfus, if circumspection is to be conceived of as a form of
"vision," it is one implied by a skilled knowledge of how to "go on" in
routine action, how to cooperate with things and how to be interwoven
with them (1991:66-67). Our doings and movements are monitored by
this Umsicht—we "know" what to do next, where things are, what they
offer us, how to work with them, and so on. It does not imply a view or
a reflexive gaze at what there is in sight, nor is it an interpretative and
holistic knowledge held together and monitored by a (moving) human
subject alone. Circumspection is a "vision" emerging from the combined
impact of all the constituents, of their efficacy (individual and combined)
in sustaining and affording the accomplished tasks. In this sense, there is
probably a great difference between the "vision' of a Mesolithic hunter
stalking his prey, a Neolithic farmer working the fields, and a phenomenological
archaeologist looking for views and monuments (cf. Tilley
1994:74).
For things to remain in their mode of readiness-to-hand, their "unobtrusive
presence" must be secured. In our everydayness, we implicitly
expect that things will last, that they will work as they have done, and
INTERRUPTIONS: BECOMING AWARE OF THINGS
72 Chapter 4
that the world will continue in its current state. Any interruption of the
way we deal with and encounter things may, however, cause another
mode of awareness: the present-at-hand (Heidegger 1962:102ff.). Things in
this mode of being are objects of conscious concern; they "light up" and
become something that might be thought of in an abstract manner as well
(much in the same way assomething becomes an object of theoretical concern).
This also relates to Heidegger's distinction between the ontological
and the "ontic." The ontic mode of knowing is the "scientific" way of
grasping the specifics of things as they consciously "come to mind" rather
than circumspectively "come to hand."3
Ordinary things often become present-at-hand to us by some sort of
disturbance or interruption (see Dreyfus 1991:70-83). If the tire flattens,
the driver soon becomes consciously aware of it and its importance to the
functioning of the car;we realize, to quote Heidegger, "what it was readyto-hand
for" (1962:105). When there is an electricity blackout, we become
conscious of all the nonworking equipment the electricity normally powern.
If these things were there for us as usual—as functioning, ready-tohand
stoves, lights, and phones—we would not have paid attention to
them or paid attention to their powering from the electrical network. By
their malfunctioning, they become conspicuous to us. A similar awareness
arises when something is missing or is in the wrong place. If we
lose the key to our car, it becomes urgently "un-ready-to-hand" and thus
"present" to us. Its absence makes it "obtrusive." Another way things
announce themselves as being present-at-hand is by standing in our way
and preventing us from conducting our daily tasks. If a gate we pass
through every day is suddenly closed, we become aware of it due to this
"obstinacy" (Heidegger 1962:102-3). As noted by Heidegger, "If knowing
is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the present-at-hand
by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do
with the world concernfully" (1962:88).
Something more is also implied in Heidegger's exposition of the triggering
of the present-at-hand: we become aware of the relational assignment
and entanglement of the thing that is missing or malfunctioning
(Heidegger 1962:105). The wider field (the Umsicht) is "lit up," and it
makes us aware of how things and tasks are related. It is not only the
missing key, the flattened tire, and the broken pot that are "seen." Their
importance in relation to making other things perform is also revealed,
as well as the wider field of collective action in which they are combined.
The "in-order-to," which earlier was part of the nondiscursive circumspective
knowledge, is transformed into a conscious and causal relational
awareness: "The context of equipment is lit up, not as something never
seenbefore, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection"
(Heidegger 1962:105).4
The Phenomenology of Things 73
This may be an appropriate point to show some points of connection
between Heidegger's phenomenology and aspects of actor-network theory
discussed later (see chapter 7).5 Despite Bruno Latour's often-voiced antagonism
toward Heidegger's philosophy (cf. Latour 1993:65-67,1999b:176ff.),
there are some striking similarities between Latour's network approach
and Heidegger's world of relations. One particularly appropriate issue here
is the link between Latour's concept of "black-boxing" and the ready-tohand—and
the way both modes call attention to themselves by some sort
of breakdown or interruption. Black-boxing was initially used by Latour in
depicting a scientific proposition or concept that has moved from being
controversial and a matter of debate into something taken for granted, a
matter of fact in what Thomas Kuhn once termed "normal science." Its own
success has, so to say, made it "invisible." He later also used the concept in
relation to technology and things that have become so self-evident in our
everyday dealings with them that we no longer notice them unless there is
some sort of interruption or breakdown.Consider the following (somewhat
dated) example of the overhead projector provided by Latour:
It is a point in a sequence of action (in a lecture, say), a silent and mute intermediary,
taken for granted, completely determined by its function. Now
suppose the projector breaks down. The crisis reminds us of the projector's
existence. As the repairmen swarm around it, adjusting this lens, tightening
that bulb, we remember that the projector is made of several parts, each with
its role and function and its relatively independent goals. Whereas a moment
before the projector scarcely existed, now even its parts have individual existence.
.. In an instant our "projector" grew from being composed of zero
parts to one to many. How many actants are really there? (1999b:183)
As for Heidegger, a "breakdown" not only renders the thing in question
visible, but also lights up the relational web in which it is acting (being
"articulated"). Not only is its functional and mediating role in a greater
"equipmental totality" brought to mind; the breakdown also evokes an
awareness of the compositional complexity of the thing itself. This of
course is grounded in another central commonality between the two: the
shared emphasis an the relational character of things.
One differentiating aspect is that Latour's black-boxing, originally at
least, was much concerned with the process of becoming ready-to-hand
(the controversy preceding the black-boxing) in the specialist fields of
science and technology. Heidegger is more concerned with our tacit
everyday doings and ordinary things in which the entangled ready-tohandness
is something we are "thrown" into. This state of being-in-theworld
"is always in some way familiar [bekannt]" (Heidegger 1962:85),
and knowing is grounded beforehand in a "Being-already-alongsidethe-world"
(88). As our being is always an entangled being involved
74 Chapter 4
in concernful dealing with the ready-to-hand, the process of becoming
ready-to-hand is less interesting (see below).
AWARENESS: THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Those instances triggering the "coming to mind" in Heidegger's work may
all be categorized as related to some type of internal deficiency, and the
underlying assumption of "dosed" lifeworlds is hardly sufficient to account
for all such triggering instances. Our ready-to-hand dealings with the
world are not only disturbed by such accidents as things breaking down,
being in the wrong place, or missing. The introduction of new and unfamiliar
technology, such as metal implements in a stone-tool-using society,
may radically challenge established dealings not only with the affected old
things but also with the wider relational field in which they were entangled
(cf. Sharp 1952). Any encounter with the alien or unfamiliar may, depending
an the circumstances, bring to consciousness that which is taken for
granted.Arrows and bows may present themselves in ways never thought
of when confronted with firearms. New materials, designs, and functions
are also brought to awareness through exchange, trade, and travel and thus
challenge existing and taken-for-granted ones. Form, function, and materials
may be compared and evaluated, properties rejected or swapped, and
new technologies learned. In such contexts, things' ready-to-hand mode
may temporarily be "overdetermined" by their present-at-handness.
Heidegger's conception of present-at-handness seems to imply that
this is an accidental mode of things' being. Things just momentarily light
up due to some interruptions and soon return to their ready-at-hand
slumber. However, some objects are "always" seen or become conscious
to us in a primarily present-at-hand mode. The reasons why some things
constantly show up, are selected for special care, or become "inalienable,"
individualized, aestheticized, or otherwise removed from the everyday
taciturnity of their fellow beings are, of course, related to a number of
factors (cf. Kopytoff 1986; Miller 1998a). However, whatever the specific
reason may be for this attentive persistency, one should be cautious to
think of this only as an effect of the needs and/or aesthetics of those humans
who are involved with such things. Things also draw attention to
themselves by being peculiar, different, or conspicuous in their own various
ways. (See chapter 8 for a more detailed discussion.) In other words,
present-at-handness as a mode of things' being also entails more than the
inherent "capacity" of disturbance and breakdown.
Notwithstanding the composition of the items "consciously coming to
mind" and how they may be ranked according to their present-at-hand
persistency (e.g., a missing car key vs. an ancestral burial tomb), it is
The Phenomenology of Things 75
still the case that things in this mode will only surface as the tip of the
enormous iceberg of the ready-to-hand. Ready-to-handness is always the
dominant mode of things' being. Interruptions are mostly leveled out and
the unfamiliar in most cases becomes familiar. After some time, the steel ax
reenters the former "Stone Age" world as ready-to-hand equipment, "noticed"
only as an object of circumspect concern. The constant dominance
of the ready-to-hand is also a product of a certain "perceptive necessity" as
proposed by Bergson. Faced with the "numberless vibrations" of myriad
things and their networks, the conscious perception of the material world
must by necessity be "subtractive." As also implied by Heidegger, for
some things (or some aspects of a thing) to show up and become illuminated,
there must be a diminishing and darkening of others.
BRINGING TO HAND
A possible field of great interest and attractiveness to archaeologists
and anthropologists concerned with the phenomenology of landscape is
Heidegger's discussion of the spatiality and directedness of the ready-tohand
(1962:134ff.). Although rarely explicitly referred to, his explorations
of these topics clearly find resonance in various landscape archaeologies
(cf. Tilley 2004:24-26). Accidentally or not, this part of his phenomenology
is also among those in which the anthropocentric tendencies most
clearly shine through as Heidegger, occasionally at least, assigns Dasein a
too unprecedented position as master director.
According to Heidegger, space is not conceived of as measurable distances
but as modes of proximity or availability. To deal with something
ready-to-hand, it must be brought to hand.In our "inconspicuous familiarity,"
we relate to things in terms of their closeness (or remoteness), not in
terms of objective measured distances. Embedded in this being is a bringing-dose,
and Heidegger actually defines closeness as an essential human
tendency, as an "existential." He depicts this tendency conceptually by
using unfamiliar words as Entfernung, "deseverance"—meaning to abolish
a distance, the act of making something remote closer, "making the remoteness
of something disappear, bringing it dose" (1962:139). This is not
so much about overcoming a geographic distance, at least not in any strict
measurable sense but relates to a mode of becoming familiar with something.
It is part of our everyday dealing with things in their ready-to-hand
mode: "Bringing dose or deseverance is always a kind of concernful Being
towards what is brought dose and desevered" (Heidegger 1962:140).
Accepting new tools, techniques, and raw materials always involves this
circumspective process of desevering, of "putting it in readiness, having
it to hand" (140). Likewise, moving to new territories, encountering new
Chapter 4
peoples, and settling in all involve the process of bringing dose, becoming
familiar with.
Contained in our circumspective dealings with things is also a notion
of "belonging somewhere" (Heidegger 1962:136-37). Our routine dealings
with things presuppose a certain order of things, which also explains
why "obtrusiveness" and "obstinacy" appear as disturbances. In our
everyday dealings with things, we implicitly know that they belong to
certain places and tasks structured by their involvement, or the place they
occupy in the relational whole. Particular things belong somewhere and
are used to conduct certain tasks, which applies as much to my own daily
academic routines as to nomadic reindeer herders. The range of these related
"somewheres" of things "which we circumspectively keep in view
ahead of us in our concernful dealings, we call the 'region"' (Heidegger
1962:136). Again, this should not be thought of in strict geographical
terms, as Heidegger's "region" relates proximity and spatiality to concern.
Thus, that which is spatially dose to us, but not of circumspective
concern, does not belong to the region. Moreover, objective measured
distances rarely conform with "lived" spatiality (Heidegger 1962:141).
Something desired but objectively distant may feel closer and shorter to
travel to than something closer but less desired.
Heidegger's concepts of Umgang, Umsicht, and region (Gegend) are
closely related. Our everyday dealing with things is to.deal with things
ready-to-hand. As such, they are not "objects" for contemplation or scientific
gaze or something to be seen, but appear to us circumspectively
through our concernful engagement with them. Circumspection means
that they belong "somewhere" within our range and our region and that
we are directed toward them. Relating to things always involves directionality
(Ausrichtung). The human being (as Dasein) is always oriented
toward something, always itself spatial. This, however, is not a spatiality
that involves a positioning within an abstracted Euclidean space. It is not
an intellectual enterprise, but a spatiality that is fundamentally involved
in our being-in-the-world, which emerges from our circumspective
encountering of this world. Circumspective dealings "always-already"
imply a direction toward something:"Circumspective concern is desevering
which gives directionality" (Heidegger 1962:143). In short, it is our
circumspective dealings with things that orient us.
DIRECTIONALITY:
THINGS AND THE HUMAN SUBJECT
As already noted, Heidegger's writings on space and directionality, as
briefly outlined above, seem to go well with general tropes in phenomThe
Phenomenology of Things 77
enological landscape archaeologies. In particular, Christopher Tilley's
various notions of somatic, perceptual, and lived space all stress space
as something sensorily experienced through bodily action and daily
practices. However, and despite some evident anthropocentric tendencies,
Heidegger is far from seeing the "region" as a social construct or as
something being created by us. The difference may be spelled out by taking
a look at how spatiality and directionality are conceived. According to
Tilley, somatic or bodily space is experienced through a human-centered
directionality: "An understanding of this space takes as its starting point
the upright human body looking out on the world" (1994:16). Directionality
is thus claimed to always be relative to the position of the standing
human subject (right/left, front/back, above/below; Tilley 1994:16). Although
this is made explicit only for one of his various notions of space
(somatic space), the directionality of the body is still claimed as a universal
basis for comprehending the landscape and for our experience of
space. Outlining how walking the English landscape enables you to grasp
its full and perspectival richness, Tilley states, "Things in front or behind
you, within reach or without, things to the left and right of your body,
above and below, these most basic of personal spatial experiences, are
shared with prehistoric populations in our common biological humanity"
(1994:74). Ten years later, Tilley elaborates on his phenomenological
body doctrine, but only in order to reconfirm the centrality of the human
body for spatial experience (2004:4-10). The dimensions of the body are
claimed to be imperative for how we conceive the world, which always
becomes relative to the position and orientation of the body: things are
in front of me, to the right, at the back, and so on. Thus, "we order places
and their significance, through our bodies, through the articulation of the
basic distinctions between up/ down, front/back and left / right" (Tilley
2004:9, my emphasis).
The centrality of the body for our experience of space may seem obvious
and unquestionable, although the alternative option is just as conceivable—
in other words, that the directionality of our body and our experience of the
world is relative to landscape and things. This is not just an unsupported suggestion.
The common assumption that the body constitutes the universal
orienting principle for our conception of space is profoundly challenged by
anthropologists and cognitive linguistics (Dirven, Wolf, and Polzenhagen
2007:1212-13). For example, Balthasar Bickel's study of the Belhare community
living at the southern foothills of the Himalayas in eastern Nepal
provides a well-documented case of how the topography of the landscape
constitutes the organizing principle for how directions and orientation are
perceived and conceptualized (Bickel 2000).
Also for Heidegger, circumspective orientation does not start from
the subject's position, but takes into account the entire familiar "region"
78 Chapter 4
(the encountering context of things and task) in which we are beings and
which orientates us. In his criticism of Kant's proposition of left and right
as a foundation for every orientation, Heidegger points to how this (and
thus Tilley's) presumed a priori principle itself is based on the "a priori of
Being-in-the-world, which has nothing to do with any determinate character
restricted beforehand to a worldless subject" (Heidegger 1962:144).
Thus, for the landscape phenomenologist the individual looking out on
the world should not constitute a seif-evident starting point. Such an attitude
is more akin to Heidegger's late conception of the Horizont, which he
saw as typical of the representational stance, reducing the circumscribed
world of things to representing objects (Inwood 2000:100). This way of
conceiving the world is dependent on our own position, seeing only "the
side turned toward us," an embodied region filled with our own representational
view (Heidegger 1966:63-64).
The notion of habitual and lived space being constituted through routine
actions and bodily practices is frequently encountered in phenomenological
and social archaeologies. Although some of this may be informed,
even sometimes better informed, by Heidegger's phenomenology, it is the
philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, as primarily outlined in his Phenomenology
of Perception (1962), that constitutes the main source of inspiration (cf. Tilley
2004:4-30). Thus, this may be a timely place to leave Heidegger for a
while and have a look at Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body.
THINGS AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY
OF THE BODY: MERLEAU-PONTY
The central aspect of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is our everyday
practical experience of the world. Contrary to G. W. F. Hegel's maxim
of philosophy as "thinking thinking itself" and Ludwig Wittgenstein's
silencing of the unsaid, Merleau-Ponty wants to ground his phenomenology
precisely in this practical, nondiscursive experience: that which is
nearest in being, but furthest away in analysis (Macann 1993:164). Before
any conscious, present-at-hand reflections of the world, we are already
engaged in a practical, ready-to-hand dealing with it. According to Merleau-Ponty,
"perception is not a matter of intellectual contemplation, but
of active involvement with things" (Matthews 2002:133). Prior to the Cartesian
"I think," it is necessary to acknowledge an "I can" or "I do," that
is, a practical, nondiscursive consciousness that governs my relationship
with the world and that is expressed in routinized practices and actions
(Merleau-Ponty 1962:137ff.).
Following Bergson, Merleau-Ponty claims that the body is the site of
this experience. It is through our bodies that we as human beings are
The Phenomenology of Things 79
placed in a world, and this bodily being-in-the world must be understood
through tasks and actions that have to be carried out and through the
spatial and material possibilities that are open to the body. Developing
the notion of spatiality and "directedness," Merleau-Ponty introduces
his "phenomenological body" in order to depict our primordial involvement
with the world. The body is a matrix of habitual behavior. It acts out
a repertoire of motor skills that are mostly not determined or (even less)
coordinated by mindful thought (1962:102-6). This bodily knowledge of
"how to go on" contains a "primordial spatiality" (Macann 1993:176) that
monitors our actions and moves. As noted by Macann, "the relation of the
body to the world in which it finds itself is not to be understood in terms
of objective distances but in terms of a sort of primordial coincidence or
co-existence of the body with that towards which it enacts itself, mobilizes
itself, projects itself" (1993:176). Thus, the positioning of the body in the
world (Heidegger's "somewhere") has less to do with an exact position in
a Euclidian grid than with what Merleau-Ponty refers to as a "spatiality of
situation" and the "laying down of the first coordinates, the anchoring of
the active body in an object, the situation of the body in face of its tasks"
(Merleau-Ponty 1962:100).
In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty seems less concerned
with mundane things than does Heidegger. The primary entity is clearly
the human body and the way it lives, acts, and moves around the world.
("The body is our general medium for having a world" [Merleau-Ponty
1962:146].) Thus, in this respect and in this work, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology
seems more akin to the versions that have made its way into
archaeology and anthropology. Still, "that towards which it acts itself" is
clearly of concern, as exemplified by the following statement:
Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the
body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is,
when it has incorporated it into its 'world,' and to move one's body is to
aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is
made up independently of any representation. (Merleau-Ponty 1962:138-39, my
emphasis)
Merleau-Ponty's main concern with things relates to the way they orient
the body, particularly their role in motor habits and the way they relate
to, limit, or extend the body. I shall explore these issues in more detail
later on (in chapter 7), and here just briefly refer to his notion of motor
habits.
Merleau-Ponty maintains that our bodily existence is primordially
embedded in space. This space is not an infinite collection of points or
relations synthesized by my thinking, which then guide my movements
and acts. It is something combined and included in my bodily existence
80 Chapter 4
(Merleau-Ponty 1962:140): "It is already built into my bodily structure,
and is its inseparable corrective" (142). He exemplifies this by typing. We
know how to write using a typewriter (Merleau-Ponty's case) or a computer
keyboard even if most of us, retrospectively and divorcedfrom the
PC, are unable to describe the configuration of letters on it. Neither do we
(after the habitual skills are acquired) need to look at the keys to guide
our fingers. Sitting down to write, "a motor space opens up beneath my
hand," and a certain "physiognomy" comes forth that evokes a prescribed
type of motor responses (Merleau-Ponty1962:144). Needless to say, this is
equally relevant to all our engagement with things such as boat building,
flint knapping, weaving, and archaeological digging. It is a "knowledge
in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and
cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort" (Merleau-Ponty
1962:144).
Although we shall return to this later (see chapter 6), one should notice
how Merleau-Ponty in his major work—and distinct from Heidegger's
treatment of ready-to-hand equipment—does not give much credit to
things' capacities or competence. Thus, even if insisting that every action
is an interaction, things' share of the "inter" seems rather modest. Is it
really the case that the knowledge referred to only is "knowledge in the
hands"? Or should some credit also be granted to keyboards, axes and
woods, flint, weaves, soils and trowels—in short, to the properties and
capacities of the things? If you think such appreciation is superfluous or
even wrong, I would urge the reader to try out the cleverness of the hands
without keyboards, weaves, or textiles. And the experiment should not be
restricted to seeing if you can perform—which you clearly cannot—but it
should also explore whether you can remember in solitude, which seems
equally futile. (See chapter 6.)
GOOD THINGS, BAD THINGS:
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THINGS
What is the thing then in phenomenological terms? Heidegger uses different
notions (Ding, Zeug, Sache), although there is a change in the way
he uses them as well as in his attitude toward "things." In Being and Time,
the concept of thing (Ding—although still frequently used otherwise) is
depicted as a present-at-hand category. It is something that we are consciously
aware of, an "object" distinct from a "subject." Our everyday
dealing with "things," however, does not involve such "objectification"
or any conscious experiencing of them as separate or abstracted entities
of their own. Heidegger therefore applies the word "equipment" (Zeug)
to erase the objectifying conception implied in the notion of thing, that is,
The Phenomenology of Things 81
to render them ready-to-hand—"some-things" that are used and fundamentally
involved in our everyday existence. Equipmental things do not
appear to us as abstracted members of any "thinghood" distinct from our
"personhood," that is, as our negativities (or others;Heidegger 1962:96ff.).
In his later works, Heidegger assigns a much more affirmative role to
the concept of "thing." In a lecture later published as The Thing, he explores
the "thingness of the thing." The thing is no longer conflated with
the consciously perceived (present-at-hand) object, but rather contains its
own integrity or independence, a self-supporting capacity, that allows for
its existence regardless of being represented or not. He also argues that
(natural) science has annihilated the thing: "The thing as a thing remains
nil. The thingness of the thing remains concealed, forgotten. The nature of
the thing never comes to light, that is, it never gets a hearing" (Heidegger
1971:168). Going back to its etymological roots (such as the Old High German
Thing), he now explores the gathering or assembling function of the
thing and the derived verb, dingen, "to thing."
Heidegger explores this "thinging" function in relation to a somewhat
opaque and pretentious description of the assembling of the "fourfold"
(earth, sky, gods, and mortals). This partly ridiculed, partly ignored
theme in his writings (cf. Harman 2002:190ff.)6 can be read as a statement
on the nature of things "being." This being cannot be reduced to being
a product, something brought about by its making or (even less) as an
expression of an idea. The concept's semantics are used to manifest the
way in which a thing acts: its gathering and "staying" qualities, as something
evoking the "nearness" of (or embeddedness in) a world set apart,
something that unites, not as a property but as a work: the thinging of the
thing (Heidegger 1971:179).
In another of his later works, "The Question Concerning Technology,"
Heidegger emphasizes how this being-in-itself of things was cared for
in premodern technology and craft. When a Greek silversmith makes
a silver chalice, he "considers carefully and gathers together," first, its
material "cause" (the silver); second, the chalice's design or form cause
(its eidos-i.e., its idea, "appearance"); third, the socioreligious cause
constituted by the rituals in which the chalice is meant to function; and,
finally, its purpose or telos (1993:315). This way of making, which Heidegger
found preserved in the fine arts, is to bring forth what is already
in some way conveyed in the materials to "answer and respond" to the
forms and capacities "slumbering" within them. This Aristotelian poiesis
(bringing forth, making) manifests what already "dwells" in things (as
also reflected in the Greek terms techneI physis, i.e., aided / unaided bringing
forth [Heidegger 1993:317-19; Young 2002:39-41]).
This stands in stark contrast to the way Heidegger conceives of modern
technology, "a monster born in our midst" (Latour 1999b:176). While
82 Chapter 4
ancient technology was harmoniously interacting with humans and
nature, the modern Gestell' (enframing) violates this relationship. In our
modern inauthentic being, things are disclosed to us only as resources—
and our attitude to humans themselves mirrors this resourcelike way of
conceiving things. Everything appears to us as Bestand (standing-reserve
or supply), and the world "shows up" as instrumental and calculative,
which, in short, means that "to be is to be an item of resource" (Young
2002:45). Contrasting the old wooden bridge crossing the Rhine with the
hydroelectric plant set into its current, Heidegger illustrates how the river
is transformed into Bestand. While the old bridge was joining the banks
of the river, complying with its character, the modern plant changes the
river, dams it, and turn it into a standing-reserve, "a water-power supplier"
(Heidegger 1993:321). Although this is claimed to always have been
one aspect of things' being, what is new in the age of Gestell is that this
Bestand aspect becomes the dominant, even the only, mode of its disclosure:
"Where this ordering holds sway it drives out every other possibility
of revealing. Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in
the sense of poiEsis, lets what presences come forth into appearance" (Heidegger
1993:332). What is lost is things' "own-ness," their being-in-itself,
as only their manipulative being-for-us as a "standing-reserve" remains.
At this point, at least, some ambiguities become evident in Heidegger's
philosophy. In saying that technology has always embedded some aspects
of Gestell ("the hidden nature of all technology"), he comes dose to
saying that this attitude is part of (or even is) the ready-to-hand, although
it is only in modern times that "this nature begins to unfold as a destiny
of the truth of all beings as a whole" (Heidegger 1971:109). In his book
on Heidegger's later philosophy, Julian Young makes the claim that for
Heidegger "machines and tools, human artefacts in general" have no
being-in-itself (2002:51). They are only being-for-us. Heidegger himself
claimed that a chair only had the mode of the present-at-hand (Heidegger
1982: 166; ct. Harman 2002:34-35, 299). However, as shown by Harman
(2002), he is far from consistent on this point. After all, Heidegger's preferred
example in his discussion of how "things thing" (the gathering of
"the fourfold") is a mundane jug. It is probably more correct to say that
Heidegger, in some of his later attacks on inauthentic being, modern
technology, and Gestell, comes to condemn all practical utility and ends
up with a rude taxonomy of "good things" and "bad things" that clearly
is at odds with the way ready-at-hand equipment was conceived in Being
and Time (cf. Harman 2002).8
This contradiction seems to develop as Heidegger becomes increasingly
concerned with art and "gentle things" (and maybe also as a response
to the "mundane" readings of Being and Time referred to above). In his
famous essay "The Origins of the Work of Art," Heidegger argues how
The Phenomenology of Things 83
Figure 4.2. "Bad things, on the other hand, have no soul to lose. They never become
'homesick' since they have always been part of a serviceable Bestand." Harbor installations
in abandoned mining town of Pyramiden, svalbard, Norway (photo: Biornar
Olsen).
equipment is determined by its usefulness and serviceability;9 it "takes
into service that of which it consists: the matter" (1971:44). In fabricating
a stone ax, "stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness" (44).
By contrast, building a temple is a "world building":
The temple-work . . . does not cause the material to disappear, but rather
causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of
the work's world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock;
metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word
to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness
and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of the wood, into
the hardness and luster of metal, into the lighting and darkening of color,
into the dang of tone, and into the naming power of the world. (Heidegger
1971:44 45)
Good things are the work of poeisis; they allow for the gathering "function"
to come forth and are there for "caring-for." The Black Forest farmhouse,
the temple, the chalice, and the jug all manifest this being-in-itself
of the thing. They may of course be deprived of it by being turned into a
commodity on the antiques market, losing their "thingness" to the "trade
84 Chapter 4
of calculation" (Heidegger 1971:111). Bad things, on the other hand, have
no soul to lose. They never become "homesick"10 since they have always
been part of a serviceable Bestand. It still remains confusing as to why the
being-in-itself of the thing should "dwell" in a jug or a farmhouse and not
in a stone ax, if not based on a common-sense, prejudiced divide between
"artwork" (or at least "real authentic things") and "mere things" (so well
problematized by twentieth-century art itself).
WHAT IS THE RELEVANCE?
In coming dose to the end of this long and winding chapter, the reader
may be wondering about the relevance of all this. What does it mean in
terms of archaeology and material culture studies? As argued earlier,
things' ontology is not something easily fleshed out in a case study, due
to the concern with things' being. It is still possible, however, to indicate
how a Heideggerian position may alter the way we conceive and Interpret
landscape and what by convention is referred to as the archaeological
record.
The distinction Heidegger makes between "thinging things" and modern
Gestell provides a convenient starting point. Although it contains
some very problematic notions, as exposed above (see also chapter 5), it
still reveals some significant changes that modernity has brought about
in terms of both the conception of materials and the role humans have
played in altering the world. Modern production implied an emerging
disentanglement of the old interplay between material and form and
was strongly linked to the increasing confidence in humans' power to
work against the will of landscapes and material properties (Ingold
2000:341-51;Andersson 2001:32-39). This modern capacity to manipulate
and alter the world was itself, of course, thing dependent, although it also
rested in the modern way of thinking about things and the environment
(see chapter 5). This human-centered ontology casted the material world
as inert and passive, as something to be formed and made meaningful by
thoughtful human intervention.
As argued earlier, this ontology still grounds much thinking about
things in material culture studies (Olsen 2007; see chapters 2 and 5). To
be sure, things may indeed be social, even actors, as numerous of these
studies show. However, upon scrutiny, things and landscapes are rarely
ascribed more challenging roles than to provide societies or individuals
with a substantial medium in which they can embody and mirror themselves.
Meaning is always something being mapped onto things and landscapes,
which they themselves have seen drained of all significance to
facilitate their so-called cultural constructions (Ingold 2000:154). Contrary
The Phenomenology of Things 85
to the Split inherent in the notions of embodiment and representation, a
Heideggerian position would rather claim that we are "thrown" into and
engage with a world already meaningful. To create is to release or bring
forth what is already conveyed in the materials, to respond to the forms
and capacities "slumbering" within them (Heidegger 1993:317-19).
Interestingly, a number of studies have recently emphasized how
megaliths, monuments, and rock art actually resonate with the topographical
or geological capacities of the landscape. Megaliths are seen as
being "inspired" by, or mimicking, natural rock formations; rock carvings
are made and structured according to the microtopography of the rock
surface (e.g., Bradley 1998, 2003; Hauptman Wahlgren 2002; Helskog
2004; Helskog and Hogtun 2004; Keyser and Poetschat 2004; Tilley 2004;
Gjerde 2006; Jones 2007). This clearly represents a new and refreshing
symmetrical attitude. As pertinently pointed out by Tilley in relation
to earlier recordings of rock art in southern Sweden, "the rock surfaces
have been regarded as a kind of blank slate on which the carvings are
inscribed and their qualities effectively ignored" (2004:152). Scandinavian
rock art provides abundant examples of how cracks and lins in the
rock surface are incorporated into the designs, how depressions become
dens in a bear scene, how the edge of a stone constitutes the body outline
of an elk, and so forth (cf. Helskog 2004; Hesjedal 1994; Gjerde 2006, in
press; Arntzen 2007). Likewise, in Paleolithic Franco-Cantabrian cave art,
the interplay between figures, rock surface, cracks, and fissures is well
documented, sometimes producing three-dimensional images (cf. Clottes
2007; Hodgson 2008). Some particularly pertinent manifestations of this
"symmetrical" attitude are found at rock-art sites on the Columbia Plateau
in Oregon (Keyser and Poetschat 2004). For example, a cracked and
segmented stone column provides an already-made rattle of a rattlesnake,
and a curved ridge of basalt, the backbone of a lizard waiting to be carved
to completion (Keyser and Poetschat 2004:124-26).
lt might well be that the rock features "gave life" to these images, contextualized
them, and helped them—and the rock—in becoming meaningful.
However, a petrified backbone, a ready carved leg, or a sculptured
head already resting in the stone may also reveal a different way of
conceiving of the world. They were carvings already made, an initial figuring
slumbering in the stone. To work on the rock was not to embody
oneself in substantial material or to make the rocks meaningful, but to
bring forth or add to what already dwelled in them. Deep inside coastal
caves in northern Norway, red rock paintings mingle on the walls with
natural deposits of red iron oxide, often making the distinction between
them difficult (Hesjedal 1992;Bjerck1995). This suggests that to paint was
to add, continue, or complete something already painted, already meaningful.
This also manifests the contrast between this way of approaching
86 Chapter 4
Figure 4.3. Lakes, rivers, valleys, mountains, and sea: rock surface
as meaningful microtopography. Hjemmeluft, Alb, Arctic
Norway (photo: Karin Tansem).
landscapes and things and the one grounding various conceptions of
objectification and embodiment (see chapter 2). Human engagement with
the world is not emerging from some "outside" position; it is not about
embodiment, or domesticating and appropriating an alien or meaningless
world. Rather, to live with and work on the landscape is grounded
in an entangled ready-to-handness, a "thrown" condition. Being-in-theworld
"is always in some way familiar [bekannt]" (Heidegger 1962:85); it
is grounded beforehand in a "Being-already-alongside-the-world" (88).
This probably does not sound too exciting compared to the spectacular
interpretative perspectives that are offered in archaeology and anthropology.
Is Tilley thus right, claiming that a phenomenological approach is inadequate,
a descriptive exercise that has to be fleshed out by the "hermeneutics
of interpretation" involving "the exploitation of metaphoric and
metonymic linkages between things" (2004:224)? Phenomenology may
well be insufficient, though not necessarily on those terms. What strikes
me after reading many recent books and papers on rock art is the neverending
urge to intellectualize the past: a constant search for a deeper
meaning, something beyond what can be sensed. According to this
unveiling mode a boat, an elk, or a reindeer can be claimed to represent
almost everything—ancestors, rites of transitions, borders, supernatural
powers, and so on—apart, it seems, only from themselves. A boat is never
a boat; a reindeer is never a reindeer; a river is always a "cosmic" river.
This is not at all to dismiss the images' potential symbolic significance.
However, may it not be plausible that—sometimes at least—it was actually
the depicted being that mattered?
The Phenomenology of Things 87
Modern Sämi reindeer herders have hundreds of terms that relate
to reindeer. This attention is not so much a symbolic attention as it is
a circumspective one. It reflects a care and concern for the reindeer in
its different states of being, as well as the profound significance of the
reindeer to Sämi life (Demant-Hatt 1913; Turi 1987). A reindeer has value
and significance in its own right, as has the herd; it should not be offended
by derogatory comments or abusive attitudes but instead cared
for, respected, and honored (Oskal 1995:136-38). The significance and
care for these animals may not have been very different in the prehistoric
past. Thus, maybe it was just the world as it circumspectively appeared
to the prehistoric carver through his or her own concerned engagement
with it that northern rock art "is about." This was a "meaning" that in
some sense was already given, and to carve was to add to, to work on, or
to supplement this latent circumspective significance. In this world, the
reindeer was sufficiently meaningful by "just" being a reindeer.
CONCLUSION: HEIDEGGER'S LEGACY
Phenomenology was launched as a way of "relearning to look at the
world," a return to "the things themselves," that is, to a lived experience
unobscured by abstract philosophical concepts and theories. Even
if the toil of actually reading Heidegger may raise serious doubts about
the implementation of that thesis, his works reveal a persistent concern
with things that is hardly matched by any other philosophical life projects.
Serious objections may be raised against bis work, but no other
Western philosopher or social theorist—with the possible exception of
Walter Benjamin—has been more consistently concerned with things
than Heidegger. Although much credit should also be given to the other
two philosophers dealt with in this chapter, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty,
Heidegger differs by his genuine concern with actual things—ordinary
things—and their being.
Contrary to some of the recent interest in Heidegger's thing theories (cf.
Karlsson 1998), I do not consider his later works on technology, art, and
"the thing" as his most important. To an archaeologist or any student of
material culture, the single work of most profound significance is clearly
Being and Time. Far from being a trivial moment to be rushed past "towards
all points further south" (Harman 2002:7), the tool analysis provided here
is indispensable to any phenomenology of things. The crucial question,
therefore, is why it received so little attention in phenomenological archaeology
and material culture studies. Given the preoccupation with the social,
symbolic, and ritual in these studies, my guess is that Heidegger's detailed
concern with mundane things in their everyday uses, with equipment and
88 Chapter 4
their referential assignment, most likely seemed irrelevant. Actually, his
thing vocabulary, such as the "in-order-to," "serviceability," "usability,"
and so on probably sounded embarrassingly functional to scholars who
had spent most of their career telling us exactly the opposite about things.
The fleeing from the everyday and the ordinary constitutes another irony
of the phenomenological project in archaeology. Almost all energy was
spent on studying ritual monuments and contemplations of landscapes,
leaving us with a phenomenological archaeology strangely alienated from
the everydayness of herding sheep, clearing fields, cutting woods, building
houses, or cooking and feeding.
Having said this, it should also be pointed out that there is an important
turn in Heidegger's later philosophy that is very valuable for any
future discussion of the ontology of things. This turn is expressed in his
Tate emphasis on the "thingness of the thing." While Heidegger's previous
concern with things to a large extent was grounded in their human
relevance (Karlsson 1998), he became increasingly more concerned with
the integrity of things in their own being (see chapter 8). This insight,
however, was somewhat undermined by the fact that in his later works
he became less concerned with mundane, everyday artifacts and increasingly
more preoccupied with the distinction between real "authentic
things" and mere objects (commodities, technology). As will be shown
in the next chapter, this was a distinction that grew to become extremely
influential in philosophy and social theory from the nineteenth century
onward, which has also left its mark on material culture studies.
This distinction between authentic/ inalienable and inauthentic/
alienable things has also been widely read as a reflection of, or at least accentuated
by, the traditional-modern distinction and transition in which
our immediate relations to things (and even things themselves) have fundamentally
changed in the wake of industrialism, consumerism, and capitalism.
Although some of the changes accounted for clearly took place,
increasingly turning things into Bestand, I think the most fundamental
change is located in our intellectual attitude toward things and in the
way we consciously conceive of them. While it should be commonplace
to attest to the fact that most of our dealing with things still takes place
in a circumspective way and a ready-to-hand mode, what modernity has
brought is a new way of "thinking things," making their present-at-hand
mode of more concern than previously. This new and distancing awareness
probably also accounts for the modern Janus-faced attitude toward
things as both objects of fear and objects of desire. These concerns bring
us to the next chapter.
5
sze
Tacit Matter
The Silencing of Things
The present vividly felt charm for the fragment, the mere allusion, the
aphorism, the Symbol, places us at a distance from the substance of
things; they speak to us "as from afar"; reality is touched not with direct
confidence but with fingertips that are immediately withdrawn. . In
all this we discover an emotional trait . . . the fear of coming into too
dose a contact with objects.
—Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
The previous chapter outlined how our dealings with things largely
take place in a mode of inconspicuous familiarity—how, unless broken,
interrupted, or missing, things often pertain to a kind of shyness.
Being at the same time "the most obvious and the best hidden" (Lefebvre
1987:9), they largely escape our attention. It is tempting to see a causal
connection between this humbleness and things' marginal position in
twentieth-century social science research. In other words, since people's
dealing with material culture mostly takes place in an implicit and nondiscursive
manner, it also escapes the attention of the "second-order observer,"
that is, those studying human societies.
However, what people are consciously aware of in their daily life does
not normally determine the concerns of research. If so, it becomes difficult
to explain why phenomena such as the unconscious, chromosomes,
grammar, social structures, or germs have all become matters of great
scientific or philosophical attraction. Thus, things' everyday reticence
is hardly a good explanation of their exile from modern social analyses.
This is not to say that the two levels of taciturnity are unrelated—the
89
järeeNjwavx „knnerrenn!
90 Chapter 5
point is rather not to confuse them. Despite the fact that both modes can
be conceived of as ontologically grounded, there is still a significant difference
between the way things escape our everyday attention and the
way they are kept at arm's length in social studies. While things' everyday
reticence stems from their embeddedness—the fact that they are "too
dose" to draw explicit attention—their exile from the social sciences is
caused more by exclusion, an enforced boundary that dislocates things
out of reach.
In the previous chapter, I dealt explicitly with the first level of taciturnity
and also took some initial steps toward explaining why things
seem to have vanished from the fields studied by social scientists (cf.
Olsen 2007). In this chapter, I shall go into more detail an the issue of
why things have been forgotten or ignored in contemporary socialscience
research. Another concern is to explore how modernity implied
a changed consciousness or awareness of things which in and of itself—
somewhat paradoxically—may have come to influence their fate in this
research.
TECHNOLOGY AND EVIL THINGS
As previously argued, modern humanist and social thinking have been
deeply affected by a conception of being in which things are seen as
redundant and obscure. Beginning with Immanuel Kant if not earlier,
this ontology denied any direct access to things, and it later surfaced
as a skeptical attitude in which the material was treated with suspicion
and rarely allowed more than a provisional or transcendental existence.
Things-in-themselves were largely out of reach, shut off from our immediate
experience and thus dispelled from the knowable world. Only in
their abstracted condition, as objects of science, could they still be admitted
(Andersson 2001:130; Olsen 2007).
The curious fact that things became conspicuously present in the
mundane world a short century after Kant did not do much to help their
reputation. To the contrary, to most philosophers and social theorists, the
mass-produced, mass-distributed, and mass-consumed objects of the Tate
nineteenth century were a sign of an illusory world, a Schein conveying
the deceptive image of the world as thing-made (Brown 2003). Proliferating
in the ruin landscapes left by the onslaught of capitalism and
industrialism, things, consumer goods, machines—the cold and inhuman
technology—became the incarnation of our inauthentic, estranged, and
alienated modern being. Things were dangerous in their deceptive appearance;
they were a threat against authentic human and social values.
Tacit Matter 91
Thus, whether it was intentional or not, things ended up assuming the
villain's role as humanism's other, also giving their relegation from disciplines
studying genuine social and cultural practices a powerful moral
justification (Olsen 2003, 2007).
Heidegger's conception of modern technology and mass culture, dealt
with above, clearly complies with much of the nostalgia and pessimism
that modernity has given rise to. The desertion of the countryside, the
vanishing of village communities, family bonds, and traditional customs
and values created a sense of loss and death—also fostering historicism
and projects of conservation. Losing the "nearness" of being, authentic
dwelling became a nostalgic project—the caring for the heritage of Heimat
(Heidegger 1993; Young 2002).
Philosophers, social theorists, artists, and writers of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries grew increasingly concerned with this process
of withering and change: how mass production, factories, and machines
replaced craftsmanship and manual labor and how social relationships,
including labor and exchange, become increasingly mediated by the
"emptiness" of money and commodities. The firmly rooted and reassuring
lifeworlds—by and large conceived as isomorphic with the rural
worlds of the peasants—were vanishing. In the words of Heidegger, the
"monstrous" being of modern technology turned the world into a "gigantic
petrol station." In place of things' social or "worldly" content, "the
object-character of technological domination spreads itself over the earth
ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely" (Heidegger 1971:112).
Similar concerns were raised throughout the early and middle years
of the twentieth century by thinkers as varied as Horkheimer, Adorno,
Popper, and Sartre. They all shared the conviction that the technology
that was supposed to be our servant and improve our lives had instead
become our master, depriving us of all freedom. Science and engineering
were treated with suspicion or contempt, as things that threatened
humanity, and this caused social scientists and philosophers to increasingly
define creativity, emancipation, and authentic being as that which
escapes the material, as in Sir Karl Popper's "nightmare of physical
determinism": "It is a nightmare because it asserts that the whole world
with everything in it is a large automaton, and that we are nothing but
little cogwheels, or at best sub-automata within it. It thus destroys, in
particular, the idea of creativity" (1972:222). Paired with this technological
menace was the distaste for the inauthentic and the artificial, the
supposedly natural offsprings of industrialism and mass production.
Mass-produced replicas and consumer goods replaced "good things";
evil things were substituted for things with "soul." This "age of mechanical
reproduction" gave rise to a new and ambiguous awareness of things
92 Chapter 5
in European thinking, well captured in this quote from a letter by the
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1925):
To our grandparents, a "house," a "well," a familiar steeple, even their own
Bothes, their doak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—
almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already
there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America,
empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life. . . . A house, as the
Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there,
have nothing in comrnon with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the
hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered. (quoted in Heidegger
1971:110-11, emphasis in original)
The mass-produced goodsswarming the mundane world, providing people
with affordable replicas of objects and materials otherwise reserved
for the few and the rich, were read as signs of cultural decline. The new
and scandalous "preference for the unreal" became diagnostic of what
the Austrian culture historian Egon Friedell (1937) termed "the common
and principal era of material fraud." This preference manifested itself in
a wide range of fakes: "Whitewashed tin presents itself as marble, papiermächd
as rosewood, plaster as shiny alabaster.... A splendid Gutenberg
Bible is revealed as a sewing box ... the butter knife is a Turkish dagger,
the ashtray a Prussian helmet . . the thermometer a pistol" (quoted in
Christensen 1993:27, my translation). Another symptom of this concern
for the vanishing real was the aversion against new materials'and designs
that started to make their impact on the built environment. Iron, for
example, was distrusted by nineteenth-century architects because it was
not immediately present in nature; thus, when used for scaffolding, it was
given a stone covering. New styles and materials became associated with
the "vulgar" works of engineers, expressed in the Gestell of machines,
arcades, exhibition halls, bridges, hangars, and Silos (Benjamin 2002:33;
Buck-Morss 1999:127-29).
ALIENATION AND THE "PROBLEM OF THE FETISH"
It can be forcefully argued that the modern social and humanist turn
against consumer goods and technology seriously contributed to things'
"nonsocial" status. Although directed at the "evil things," that is, the
inauthentic, this movement fueled an implicit suspicion toward the material
and toward things more generally. A very influential—although
somewhat paradoxical—expression of this modernist aversion against
"evil things" originates from Karl Marx's writings on alienation and
Tacit Matter 93
Figure 5.1. "New styles and materials became associated with the 'vulgar' works of
engineers." Class meets iron and stone, Palace of the National Bank, Bucharest, Romania
(photo: Ihn Myrvoll).
reification, especially as developed in the notion of "commodity fetish-
ism."
Fetishism is a concept that emerged in Western discourse primarily as
a way of describing "primitive" religious practices in which stones and
statues were worshipped and treated as "real" gods. This phenomenon,
which Western travelers and anthropologists saw as a "fallacious substitution,"
was developed by Marxist and psychoanalytical thinking into a
more general conception of fetishism as misrepresentation or displacement,
a "misunderstanding" by which qualities that can properly be ascribed
only to the realm of humans are attributed to things (Christensen
1993:39-41, Pels 1998).
A consistent issue in Marx's writings was how the capitalist economy
fetishized the commodity by ascribing it an abstract intrinsic value (or an
94 Chapter 5
"exchange value"). Operating in support of a wider bourgeois ideology,
this fetishism masked the "real" value of goods stemming from the social
labor invested in their production. Things (as commodities) appeared to
have a value of their own—purely resulting from their circulation in a
market. Thus, they were alienated from their producers, divorced from
human toil and the social relations involved in their production. In the
capitalist economy, the social relations of productions themselves became
misrepresented as a thinglike relation: "In the sphere of political economy
this realisation of labour appears as a lass of reality for the worker,
objectification as a loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as
estrangement, as alienation" (Marx 1975:324, emphases in original). According
to Marxism (also as developed by later theorists such as Lukalcs,
Horkheimer, and Adorno), the "commodity fetishism" is symptomatic of
a more general process of reification or objectification in capitalist society,
in which human relations and cultural forms increasingly appear in the
form of object relations. This fetishism was claimed to work in a dual
way, by which social phenomena took on the appearance of things, as
well as inanimate things being treated as if they had social qualities (Held
1980:220).
Thus, despite the notion of (historical) materialism attributed to Marxism,
and the immense importance it assigned to ready-to-hand technology
(as forces of production) for social change and progress, it also came
to fuel the aversion for things in modern social theory (cf. Kopytoff
1986:84-85). Although intended more as a critique of how things lost their
social value and human involvement in the capitalist mode of production,
Marxism ended up providing social theory with a vocabulary--abjectification,
reifteanan, instrumental reason—that strongly contributed to their
stigmatization. Through these metaphors, things became symbols of the
destructive and humiliating physicalism of modern society, providing
their social dismissal with a powerful moral justification.
Much as a consequence, as observed by Daniel Miller, most later critics
of mass culture and technology have tended "to assume that the relation
of persons to objects is in some way vicarious, fetishistic or wrong; that
primary concern should lie with direct social relations and 'real people"
(1987:11). Ironically, this critique joined forces with a long-held bourgeois
contempt in academia (especially in the humanities) for dirt, manual labor,
and working-class life in general. Academia was an arena for pure
thought to be kept apart and distinct from any repugnant triviä of labor
and production. Only the aestheticized material—such as fine art, the
exotic, and the book—was allowed access, keeping the oily, smelly object
at arm's length (cf. Beek 1989:95). The long-held aversion against technological
disciplines and engineering as "real" academic disciplines is
another aspect of this story.
Tacit Matter 95
THE LOSS OF THE "MIMETIC CAPACITY"
As already noted, the contempt that intellectuals such as Rilke and
Friedell expressed toward the "unreal" hinted at a new and ambiguous
consciousness of things in Western thinking. In The Philosophy of Money,
Georg Simmel sharply identified this ambiguity by pointing at a seemingly
paradoxical tendency in the modern attitude toward things: at the
same time that things were losing their embedded social and ready-tohand
meaning, there was a simultaneously growing interest in and fascination
for the peculiar things, the genuine object. As somehow parallel to
the case of historicism, to be discussed in the next chapter, Simmel argues
that it was because things became deprived of their implicit meaning that
a substitute was consciously sought:
Since so many objects continuously detached by money lose their directiongiven
significance for us, there develops . a deep yearning to give things
a new importance, a deeper meaning, a value of their own . the lively
motions in the arts, the search for new styles, for style as such, symbolism
and even theosophy are all symptoms of the longing for a new and more
perceptible significance of things . modern man . . . now seeks (often in
problematical vacillations) in the objects themselves that vigor, stability and
inner unity which he has lost because of the changed money-conditioned
relationship that he has with them. (1978/1906:404)
Simmel saw this new interest in things as superficial and fragmentary, a
means to escape the pestering of the present material world ("The flight
from the present is mute easier"). Thus the modern interest in exotic art,
in antiquities, in "turning objects into art" is an act of redemption. The new
obsession with the fragment, with the atomized and aestheticized thing,
becomes little more than "comforting stimulation for weakened nerves":
The present vividly fett charm for the fragment, the mere allusion, the aphorism,
the symbol, the underdeveloped artistic style ... placds1 us at a distance
from the substance of things; they speak to us "as from afar"; reality is
touched not with direct confidence but with fingertips that are immediately
withdrawn. The most extreme refinement of our literary style avoids the direct
characterization of objects; it only touches a remote corner of them with
the word, and grasps not the thing but only the veil that envelops them....
In all this we discover an emotional trait whose pathological deformation is
the so-called "agoraphobia": the fear of coming into too dose a contact with
objects. (Simmel 1978/1906:474)
Although in disagreement with Simmel on many other issues, Walter
Benjamin developed a similar perspective in his writings.1 To Benjamin,
modernity also involved a change in the conception of things. His main
111/14.412edazgrimergy,
96 Chapter 5 Tacit Matter 97
concern was how a "mimetic" and "auratic" capacity was giving way to a
sublimated and intimate attitude. While the mimetic attitude implied a respect
for things in their otherness and their auratic own-ness, the modern
gaze was isomorphic, subjecting them to intimacy and sameness (Benjamin
2003:255-56). While this in some respects is akin to Heidegger's criticism,
Benjamin saw this change not so much located in the things themselves
as in our attitude toward them. Things' capacity to affect and speak
to us, Benjamin argued, rests precisely in their difference. By embodying
them with human privacy and imbuing them with our own personality,
things are brought to silence. If they speak, it is only our own voices that
are heard (Andersson 2001:30-36). The dominant premodern attitude was
to respect this otherness and be attentive to "the material community of
things in their communication" (Benjamin1996:73, cf. Benjamin 2003:338).
The attentiveness to the way things express themselves was crucial to the
experience of a thing's "aura." This mimetic faculty, Benjamin speculated,
was perhaps the explanation of the oeuvre expressed in northern hunters'
rock art:"Perhaps Stone Age man produced such incomparable drawings
of elk only because the hand guiding the implement still remembered the
bow with which it had felled the beast" (2002:253).
Modernity, in Benjamin's analyses, was Janus-faced. Contrary to
Heidegger's mostly negative depiction, he saw it as also containing the
salvaging means to destroy its own tradition. New techniques such as
film and photography, as well as materials and styles such as steel and
glass architecture, could bring about a disruption, a Verstörung that
challenged the prevailing tendency of (false) aesthetization, intimacy,
and the sublimation of tradition. His critical writings of the 1930s were
targeting this dominant trope in the modern conception of materiality,
as displayed in the intarieur of the Tate-nineteenth-century bourgeois
home. Staged as inventory in this domesticated setting, things had completely
lost their otherness and individuality. They were sentenced to
serfdom and became nothing but labels of privacy, faithfully mirroring
their owner, "das Etui Mensch." Controlled inside the homely theater,
the intffieur provides the etui-man with self-confirming comfort: "The
inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted an the
world" (Benjamin 1999a:502, 1999b:8-9; cf. Benjamin 2003:38; cf. Andersson
2001:47-48).
While things' otherness originally was the source of communication
and interaction, the loss of the mimetic capacity made things' difference
problematic and fearsome. Their material integrity became a threat and
thus a subject for domestication through processes of privatization and
intimization. In a wonderful (and Simmel-like) fragment, Benjamin expressed
how modern man, "chilled in a chilly environment" (1999a:779),
tries to overcome his material estrangement:
Warmth is ebbing from things. Objects of daily use gently but insistently repel
us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances we have
an immense labor to perform. We must compensate for their coldness with
our warmthif they are not to freeze us to death, and handle their spiny forms
with infinite dexterity if we are not to bleed to death." (1996:453)
FORGETTING THINGS
At the same time that philosophers, writers, and intellectuals at large increasingly
began to express their concern with an "objectified," monetaryand
technology-driven modern society, we began witnessing the exiling
of things as a significant source material from anthropology and the social
sciences. Although the correspondence, of course, needs to be explored
and explained in far more detail, there is a suggestive coincidence in
time between the general intellectual reaction to the "evil and alienating
machines" and the first cry against things as meaningful sources of social
inquiry (see chapter 2).
One powerful trajectory of this "turn against things" is seen in the development
of British anthropology. By the 1920s, it had reinvented itself
as "social anthropology," a discipline concerned with "processes and
structures" conceived of as being impossible to be accessed by things (Kuper
1978). A very different development, but with similar consequences,
took place slightly earlier in American cultural anthropology. As a key
figure of the latter, Franz Boaz himself came to manifest this new distrust
in things. Whereas he had previously been deeply involved in collections
and museum anthropology, he began to abandon these projects by 1905.
One reason given by Bill Brown is that "he had become increasingly convinced
that the most important elements of culture were irreducible to
artefacts, that anthropological facts could never become artifactual—that
the cultural Thing, let us say, was too intangible to be found in things"
(2003:118).
The outcome has already been addressed (see chapter 2): during the
twentieth century, to study "just things" became a source of embarrassment,
a reactionary heritage of a mindless antiquarianism. Even if there
may have been a certain tendency to grant "too much independence to
the empirical world" over which "idealism had a nice polemical virtue"
(Latour 1999b:147; "In the past we were presented with lithic industries
which, to judge by their descriptions, were copulating, hybridizing, evolving,
adapting and producing offspring" [DeVore 1968:346]), the trump card
of fetishism always seemed to be very dose at hand. Thus, when Miller in
1987 found it necessary to express his moral contempt for approaches to
modern material culture in American processual archaeology, fetishism
98 Chapter 5 Tacit Matter 99
became an argument beyond verification or explanation: "Such studies
exemplify the kind of fetishism to which material culture studies are always
prone, when people are superseded as the subject of investigation by
objects, and become essentially labels for their movement or pattern" (143).
"SIMPLE COUNTRY PEOPLE HAVE A KIND OF FETISHISM"
The described intellectual turn against "evil things" is of importance in
understanding why fetishist theories were so smoothly accepted within
modern thinking and why things, more generally, could be treated with
such instant distrust. However, the reaction caused by the changing
political economy of things itself is hardly sufficient to fully understand
the fate of things in modern social research. To take further steps toward
a more comprehensive explanation, we have to respond to a few basic
questions: Why is it a priori "wrong" to blur the boundary between humans
and things or to ascribe personality and identity to things? What is
the ontological justification for the persistent idea that action, influence,
and power are capacities of which only humans hold possession?
The answers to these questions are intimately linked to a wider effective
history of thing oblivion and displacement in Western thinking since
the seventeenth century. As noted in the previous chapter, the skeptical
attitude that followed in the wake of Descartes's "methodological doubt"
gave rise to an all too significant difference between the material world
and the human mind and thus between nonhumans and humans. This
"significant difference" somehow predestined things to their subsequent
intellectual dismissal and silencing. However, as taken for granted as the
opposition (not to be confused with the difference) between humans and
nonhumans might seem to a Western intellectual, it is nonetheless far
from a universally held dichotomy. The conception of a strictly divided
world was dearly not shared by those many "others" for whom the Opposition
culture-nature remained unfamiliar and to whom the affection
for things was quite natural. Such, according to Bill Brown, is also the
case for the "simple country people" portrayed in Sarah Orne Jewett's
late-nineteenth-century novel Deephaven. Here, "the narrator's friend Kate
speculates about the 'simple country people' who 'have a kind of fetichism"
because "they believe there is a 'personality' in 'what we call inanimate
things'" (Brown 2003:115, Brown's emphasis). A closer look at this
fetishism, and also the sort of animism referred to by earlier anthropologists,
may reveal some convictions that contribute to explaining things'
faith in modern social research.
More than any other discipline, anthropology has provided overwhelming
evidence of societies that blur or do not recognize this boundary
that modern thinking—and seemingly the discipline itself—mostly
takes for granted. As discussed in detail by Tim Ingold in relation to
hunter-gatherer societies, their being-in-the-world rarely involves absolute
distinctions such as mind/matter or culture /nature. Neither does
one find much evidence that they relate to landscape or nature as an external,
"natural" world to be domesticated or embodied. In other words,
most of them do not see themselves as spiritual, cultural subjects struggling
with an alien object world of nature simply because a strict division
between spirit and matter, culture and nature, does not have a place in
their thought or praxis (Ingold 2000:42-43). A wide range of examples illustrates
how peoples in different settings refer to animals as kindred or
as beings with whom they can have dose social relationships. Again, this
is not to erase their difference, but rather to emphasize points of linkage
and the possibility of interaction.
Among the Sämi of northern Scandinavia (as with most other circumpolar
peoples), the brown bear was treated as a personalized being who
well understood human discourse and dispositions. Conceptually, it
was sometimes addressed as a relative or in human terms, and the killing
and consumption of the bear involved elaborate rituals terminating
with a humanlike burial (Fjellström 1981/1755; Myrstad 1996). To the
SAmi reindeer herders, the reindeer was a fellow creature. Both man and
animal contained their own will and shared the capacity to teach each
other. Mountains, pastures, trees, and dwelling places were greeted and
cOnceived of as communicable (Turf 1987:41, 75-76). Returning from the
mountains to the winter pastures in the northern Swedish forest, the
ethnographer Emilie Demant Haft observed a young Sämi girl hugging
a big tree trunk, saying, "Good day pine, I greet you from the mountain
willow" (Demant Hatt 1913:84, my translation). As also exemplified by
their drums (which were assigned life-cycle rituals) and their "fetishized"
stone "gods" (sieidis; Kalstad 1997; Price 2002; Hansen and Olsen 2004),
personality, identity, and the capacity to act were not conceived as characteristics
reserved only for people. Although clearly different, humans
and nonhumans were not considered to occupy two oppositional spheres.
Numerous examples from other contexts provide more evidence of
this "fallacious" blurring. Investigating Viking Age burials in Iceland,
P6ra Pätursdöttir shows how horses are both included in human graves
and given separate, even elaborate, burials. Without excluding the possible
symbolic significance of the horse as a means of traveling to the
world of the dead, the fact that these horses were buried as humans, she
argues, is also due to the fact that "they were considered as fellow social
beings—not as humans in disguise but as different but still equally potential
subjects of a less compartmentalized cosmos than we are used to
today" (2007:75). This complies well with how the Vikings also ascribed
100 Chapter 5 Tacit Matter 101
Figure 5.2. Already blurred? Sämi sacred site, Seitjaur, Kola Peninsula, Russia (photo:
Bjornar Olsen).
personality, intention, and "being" to things such as their boats and
weaponry. Swords, for example, could have reputations and were given
names, such as Tyrving, Kvernbit, Gram, and Skrep (Gansum and Hansen
2002:16-17). Such attitudes were not only reserved for pagans. In medieval
Europe, church bells were named and treated as individuals—possessing
their own will of how to be rung (Berger 1992:28).
Anthropologists, historians, and social scientists of course acknowledge
these attitudes as expressions of native beliefs and affirm this cultural
"otherness." Interpreting this otherness, however, nearly always
implies the application of some sort of "hermeneutics of suspicion" by
bringing it to court against a preconceived (modern) ontology of how
the world "really is"—that is, divided. Analysis thus becomes an act of
"purification" (Latour 1993), a sorting of the muddled worlds into the
appropriate categories. The Icelandic Viking Age habit of burying horses
in humanlike fashion must be due to their symbolic or economic significance,
not because the horses themselves were conceived of as deserving
a burial on par with those of humans. Statements involving the blurring
or crossing of the dividing line are interpreted as "metaphorical," as symbolic
appropriations of nature. Rock art depicting elks, bears, boats, and
humans in compositions that blur the divide are read as the embodiment
and negotiation of human social relations (Tilley 1991; see chapter 4).
Following 1ngold, these demystifying analyses usually involve arguments
such as the following: "primitive people" make sense of their relation
with things and the natural world by drawing on metaphors from
their social life and their capacity as humans (cf. Godelier 1977). They
use their social experience to "model" their relation with the nonhuman
world, whereby ecological or "thingly" relations "appear" as social ones
(Ingold 2000). Simple people themselves are unaware of this and have
not realized that their social relationship to nature is based on an illusion.
However, as noted by Ingold,
the entire argument is predicated upon an initial ontological dualism between
the intentional worlds of human subjects, and the object world of
material things—or in brief, between society and nature. It is only by virtue
of holding these to be separate that the one can be said to furnish the model
for the other. The implication, however, is that the claim of the people themselves
to inhabit but one world, encompassing relations with both human
and non-human components of the environment on a similar footing, is
founded upon an illusion—one that stems from their inability to recognise
where the reality ends and its schematic representation begins. (2000:44)
Anthropologists hence have to draw the line, start purifying, and sort
out the categories for them. On the other hand, no suspicion arises when
people establish intimate relations among themselves. These are "only"
social (or subsocial, e.g., economic, sexual, political). So we have one set
of relations that are taken for granted as real, authentic, and honest, and
another set that are false.This falseness seemsto arise when we transgress
a certain border between the "us" and the "it," projecting relations prescribed
for one realm onto another. This raises the question of why this
boundary has become so obvious and ontologically secure that analyses
can be grounded on it a priori.
THE GREAT DIVIDE:
BECOMING MODERN BY DISTINCTION
In his book We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues how modernity
institutionalized a "Great Divide," two completely distinct ontological
zones that became constitutive of its social and philosophical
conduct. By this split, the power, interests, and politics of humans came to
be placed at one pole, while knowledge about objects and the nonhuman
102 Chapter 5
was placed at the other. While modernity has been celebrated as both the
origin and the triumph of humanism, as well as the birth of the human
being and the subject (cf. Foucault 1989), there is less talk about its less
desired offspring: the simultaneous birth of "things" and "nature." The
construction of the human thus presupposed the construction of—and
simultaneous separation from—the nonhuman. From this moment on,
the human and nonhuman were delegated to different ontological and
disciplinary zones—on the one hand, those concerned with the humansamong-themselves,
and on the other, those studying the things-in-themselves
(Latour 1993:13ff.; cf. Kopytoff 1986:84ff.).
According to Latour, this first great divide caused another significant
distinction, namely, that between us (i.e., the modern) and the others
(i.e., the nonmoderns or premoderns). The premoderns did not understand
the first distinction but mixed everything together in an appalling
stew of people and things, culture and nature. It is because we are able to
distinguish between people and things, culture and nature that we differ
from them (Latour 1993:97-103). Or do we? Following Latour, our entire
existence is founded on overlapping relations and translations between
the human and nonhuman and on hybrids that preserve and mediate
these relations (Latour 1993, 1999b, 2005). Our society is based on such
mixings of culture/ nature. If truth be told, the mess has never been
greater! Despite all curses and denouncement of things among Western
intellectuals, their own writing, teaching, and living have become evermore
enmeshed with the very beings they denounce: more and more of
their actions are delegated to things. Thus—and this is the very paradox
of this trope—we have never been modern (Latour 1993:46-48).
Still, the distinction between nature and society persists, not because it
"dwells" as an ontological constant according to which knowledge or the
sciences are differentiated, but because modernity and the various sciences
continually create, maintain, and defend the opposition. Scientific
practice is thus also a "purifying practice" in which everything that exists
has to be placed within two distinct ontological spheres, categorized
either as culture or nature, subjects or objects. As noted by Latour (2003),
the true originality of the modern was not a doing away with things and
hybrids, but rather their estrangement from their own practices—which
allowed them to do the exact opposite of what they were saying: it is only
when you are so convinced that nature and society do not mix that you
can mix them so thoroughly as to produce the mess that we are stewing
in today. This "discrepancy between self-representation and practice"
(Latour 2003:38) was only possible by applying the same acts of purification
that social scientists have used to cleanse the illusions of those "others"
who claim to inhabit but one world—encompassing relations among
humans, animals, and things on an equal footing. In other words, the
Tacit Matter 103
modern attitude consists of splitting the mixtures apart in order to extract
from them what came from culture (the social, the episteme, the Geist)
and what came from nature (Latour 1993:78).
This desire for a divided world emptied of its mediators assigned
things an ambiguous position within the modern constitution. They are
located outside the human sphere of power, interest, and politics—and
still are not properly nature. Although prescribed for the nonhuman
side, material culture ended up occupying neither of the two positions
prescribed by the modern constitution (culture and nature). Although
this is a somewhat speculative suggestion, I think it brings us to the core
of things' exile from the social sciences: being a mixture of culture and
nature, a work of translation and itself increasingly mediating such relations,
material culture, quite literally, became "matter out of place"—in
other words, part of the "excluded middle" (see Grosz 2002:91-94). In this
sense, we may also relate this exclusion—and the associated "dangers of
fetishism"—to the concept of the "abject" (Kristeva 1982). The abject is
associated with the ambiguous border zone between the "me" and the
"not-me," a sign of ourselves as composite beings (or cyborgs), and thus
something that the subject seeks to expel in order to achieve an independent
identity (Brooker 1999:1; Butler 1993:243, 3). Things may be seen as
typifying this conception of the abject, although not in a literal sense, and
only as indicative of a very localized and historically situated discourse
rather than one psychologically given.
"ANTHROPOLOGY" VERSUS "PHILOSOPHY"?
There is a defensive argument often used to counter the line of reasoning
put forth here. Reviewing recent approaches to materiality, Daniel Miller
(2005a) argues against the claim that the dualism witnessed in many anthropological
analyses should be seen as an outcome of their ontological
grounding or as resulting from any processes of "purification." Rather,
such claims are indicative of the opposition between an abstracted philosophy
("doomed to reinvent a particular philosophical wheel") and
down-to-earth anthropological research that just reflects vulgar reality
as it truly is (Miller 2005a:14-15, 43-44). In contrast to "philosophers,"2
Miller argues that anthropologists are concerned with practice and with
real people to whom any talk about transcending the dualism of subjects
and objects must seem "mystificatory and obfuscating":
Anthropology always incorporates an engagement that starts from the opposite
position to that of philosophy—a position taken from its empathetic
encounter with the least abstracted and most fully engaged practices of the
104 Chapter 5 Tacit Matter 105
various peoples of the world. In this encounter we come down from the philosophical
heights and strive for the very vulgarity that philosophy necessarily
eschews. We may oben find ourselves conducting research among people
for whom "common sense" consists of a clear distinction between subjects
and objects, defined by their opposition.... As part of our own engagement
we will necessarily attempt to empathize with these views. Furthermore, we
will strive to include within our analysis the social consequences of conceptualizing
the world as divided in this way. (2005a:14)
What Miller seems to be saying is that the empathy embedded in the
anthropological approach ensures a harmony between analytical representations
and everyday experience. In short, anthropology reflects what
people are doing. The generality of this sympathetic argument however
is hard to sustain. If true, how should we explain the remarkably heterogeneous
portfolio of analytical positions proposed in anthropology over
the last eighty to ninety years? Are all these "paradigms" grounded in the
sensitivity to the way people act and think? Moreover, is it the "empathetic
encounter with the least abstracted and most fully engaged practices"
that has led anthropology to dismiss and ignore things for so long?
Miller takes his argument even further. He claims that anthropology's
empathetic sensitivity also involves an ethical concern not shared
by "those who strive for more abstract resolutions" and who tend to
"denigrate others as deluded, vulgar, or simplistic in their preference
for more pragmatic and less abstracted perspectives" (2005a:114-15). For
some reason Miller does not mention those numerous groups of people
studied by anthropology whose "common sense" does not inform them
about a clear distinction between subjects and objects and especially not
as something defined by their opposition. One may rather ask how many
people have been mystified and obfuscated by persistent anthropological
attempts to draw the dividing line, to purify the entangled mess, and
to reassemble the entities by placing them in their "proper" places. It is
hard to see that these skills of suspicious hermeneutics are achieved only
through empathetic encounters. Maybe it is not just philosophy that can
become "simply a tool for describing others as false or stupid" (Miller
2005a:15)?
CONCLUSION: ALLOWANCE AND DIASPORA
In the last two chapters I have conducted a long and somewhat rhizomatic
travel from things' taciturnity in their "everydayness" to their ontological
diaspora within the modern intellectual constitution. This chapter
has largely been devoted to understanding things' bad reputation and
why they have been omitted to such an extent from studies of social and
cultural practices.
Some qualifications are however needed. It is not true that academia—
and public discourse in general—have forgotten things altogether. Some
objects have always been allowed to dwell and perform well within these
discursive formations. With some notable exceptions, however, they
only accept allowance for objects of a certain kind, which are usually
objects that are emancipated from the networks of everyday trivia, dirt,
and work. Thus, and although the opinions on their capacity to inform
social science and humanistic discourses may vary greatly, objects of
art—conspicuous objects—have always been welcomed, talked about,
and discussed. En passant, it is curious to notice how this effective history
of "selective object allowance" continues to influence not only public
discourses but even the core of material cultural studies. Even though
that realm is clearly more liberal and inclusive, also allowing space for
the trivial and mass-produced, the conspicuous object, the singularized
artifact, and the unusual still seem to be greatly preferred over the bulk
of the materials we live with.
Simmel's diagnosis, that the attraction for these decontextualized and
aestheticized objects reflected a fear of coming into too dose contact
with our (common) things, might be too harsh. Still, there is little doubt
that the "materialist" changes brought about by modern technology, by
mass-produced goods ("empty indifferent things") swarming the mundane
world, and by cityscapes more and more formed by iron, glass,
and concrete provided little relief to intellectuals and "etui men" alike.
Being perceived as Gestell—as the monstrous Being of alienation and estrangement,
modern material culture came to assume the villain's role in
academic and public discourses from the Tate nineteenth century onward.
Stigmatized as humanism's other, things seemed utterly unfit to inform
the disciplines studying genuine social and cultural practices.
Their exiling, however, was based on a more profound and grounding
othering of things and nature. The "Great Divide" launched by the
modern thought regime created an abyss that things were assumed never
to cross. Social relations were, per definition, relations among human
subjects, and any attempts at including things, animals, and nature were
seen as highly suspicious. Such inappropriate attitudes were either condemned
as an expression of fetishism or were to be purified as primitive
metaphorical statements and symbolic appropriations of nature. Despite
the proliferation of hybrids in its midst and all nonhumans being enrolled
into the very fabric of society, the modern regime came to properly
acknowledge only those entities that could be firmly situated—in other
words: as dwelling either in culture or in nature (Latour 1993). Things
Chapter 5
thus became an utterly problematic and ambiguous entity within modern
thinking, an abject category that blurred the boundary. Not properly situated
either in nature or culture, they became matter out of place, doomed
to their exile. This prescribed the fate for an entity that was given the
unfortunate but pertinent hybrid labet: material culture.
106
6
Temporality and Memory
How Things Remember
To write history means giving dates their physiognomy.
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
l
n his essay "The Temporality of the Landscape," Tim Ingold writes
about the landscape as a network of, Mterrelated. times ancl_tinzm
rhythms. It cannot be ascribed any particular age or subsumed to any---
single rhythm (such as the seasonal cycle), but instead is a complex composition
of concurrent cycles and chronotopes. Ingold illustrates this differentiated
temporality by discussing a Renaissance painting by the Flemish
artist Pieter Bruegel, known as The Harvesters. Drawing our attention
to selected components of the painted landscape, Ingold effectively brings
out the various interweaving temporalities and historical references simult—an—eoushriresenfiniEjthetielaVeWerrientenTro
rirof
ffitgriraleys; the cyclesornaönirlifiractivi les an arriva s an
departures associated with paths and tracks crisscrossing the landscape;
the growth life and annual cycles of the old pear tree under which the
harvesters rest; the coevalness of the wheat field depicted in the process
of being cut (thus also marking a seasonal rhythm); the "pastness" and biography
of the stone church (also scheduled to announce calendrical and
human cycles by its bell); and, finally, the rhythms and cycles of people
of different ages (not only the harvesters), engaged in different tasks and
relations (2000:201-7).
Far more entities contained in the painting contribute to the complex
network of interweaving durations and time references, such as the village
houses, distant churches, harvest tools, cloths, sea, drifting skies, and
107
108 Chapter 6 Temporality and Memory 109
so on, and we do not need to consult a Renaissance painting to let this
"mixing" of times and time rhythms occur to us. A quick view around
us anytime, anywhere will suffice. Our material and temporal being-inthe-world
is always-already a hybnflxperience of different temffälreTeiences.
Kt every modentitle Materials
a great patcnwork of coexistingTemporal horizonsThat create neyorks
and connAlions between different times,Iiierent pasts: It is not only a
network that' interweav'es-ind diawstoieffierdifi&arit pasts and presents,
but one that, by its very "nature" and its durability, is also projected
ahead of itself toward the future.
This is as much an inescapable truth for past lifeworlds as for those we
are currently dwelling in. Still, as archaeologists and culture historians,,
we often tend to think of the past as a series of enclosed temporal hori- ty,
zons tope3-entified7-ncl—puffirerteötirgergtegraTefirsrefütTE.
ing. Laurent Olivier has made a well-founded point about this encapsulation
of time and how he himself for a long time imagined that Iron Age
people lived in some kind of hon Age environment, in Iron Age buildings,
working with Iron Age tools, and burying their dead according to
Iron Age funeral practices: that seems obvious, all of that seems natural:
all archaeological chronologies, all archaeological reconstructions of
the paat, arebased on that basic assumptiön, äeePidihrtcreüdh any age
of theAastbam in:11aTratqeeinigraTaSeafle"'(200164):EUt, as he
ädds, "things do not work like that" (64). Reflecting on the time when his
writing takes place (1999), he notes the "invisibility" of the 1990s in what
he sees from his window. What he sees are houses and constructions dating
back to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The Tate
twentieth century seems reduced to details in the material surroundings.
Thus, the present is not comprised of things belonging to the same age,
but takes the form of a multitem2gral field in which the past has accumulated
itself (Olivier 2001:66-67). Drawing orrnenri Bergson's concept of
duration, Olivier's general argument is thaTapyseserits_agesonceived,
of as "The current state of the present
basically consists of apalimpsest of all durations of the past that have X
become recorded in mittervedirArStelltritier2038r
These initial remarks set the agenda for this chapter. It is written as
a critical commentary to the prevailing disciplinary and popular conceptions
of history as inevitably successive, of the past as gone and of
memory as only a recollective capacity that might be activated in search
of this lost time. My most important objective, however, is to highlight the
crucial role that things plag in upholding the past, thus enabling various
forms of memory. Things are not just firmes or residues of absent presents;
they are effectively engaged in assembling and hybridizing periods and
epochs. As durable matter, things make the past present and tangible;
they constantly resist the regime that has subjugated time to the prevailing
image of it as instantaneous and irreversible.
The very etymology of the word "thing" precisely suggests such a
transcending or gathering function. As noted by several authors (cf. Heidegger
1971:172; Glassie 1999:67-68; Serres 1987), the Old Norse and Old
English word fring meant "assembly," as did the Old High German Thing.
However, it is less widely known that a possibly older etymological root
(tenku) suggests an additional temporal dimension: "duration," or, literally,
"extended" or "stretched time" (Falk and Torp 1994/1906:903; Bjorvand
and Lindeman 2000:939ff.).
ARCHAEOLOGIES OF MEMORY
We have recently witnessed a considerable interest also in archaeology
in regard to memory and the enduring past (cf. Rowlands 1993; Olivier
2001, 2008; Alcock 2002; Bradley 2002; Williams 2003; Van Dyke and
Alcock 2003; Meskell 2004; Lucas 2005; Jones 2007; Naum 2008). One
widely shared assumption in these studies, if not an uncontested one
(e.g., Olivier 2001, 2008), is of memory ass a lirecollective" faarTsBy this
I mean that memory is seen as a conscious and willful hinnan `process of
recalling or reconstructing the past, most eagerly emphasized in relation
to the creation of selective and hegemonic accounts. For example, in the
important volume Archaeologies of Memory, all contributors are said to engage
"with the twin, inter-related themes of authority and identity, and
the role memory plays in their creation, defence and possible transformation"
(Van Dyke and Alcock 2003:7). Moreover, when the editors present
their four "materially accessible media" through which social menaories.are construaeraridölgaerfet:MitifaTI5graYIPE(ri-a7ralivea2rePiesefitatio'
arid' cipjfcts and places [Van Dykeand
ffi-ey seemlifire-corrEer-ned with what memory-preserving qualities things
qua things have to offer. Objects are pertireementiorted only as repre--"—;sentative
expressions (paintings,rgurines, rock ar , e c. thatpossess commemorative
functions, while places "are spaces that haV6-fieeitiriaCribel
with meaning, usually as a result of some pAst event or attachxnent" (4-5,
my emphasis).
This resonates well with a general concern in historical and cultural
studies with how memory crystallizes into siesA.;places ofmcruory, >,
locales of collectiye remembering (Nora 1984; Assman 1992). Despite the
eYerittial pre's'enceöf inserlbad Monuments or memorials, the materiality
of the Heu de me'moire itself is normally not considered to be decisive. Thew X
crucial issue is the past event, a gone pag.apclithealiktmemember rtyyt rough site-erribedimen In reläted studies in archaeology, things also
110 Chapter 6
primarily achieve their mnemonic significance from being a medium,
something that allows memory and meaning to be recorded and codified
for later recollection (Bradley 2003:222; Joyce 2003:108). Andrew Jones
rightly asserts that collective remembrance is not so much a social interplay
between people as it is an "interplay or dynamic between people
and things" (Jones 2003:84). However, also to him the "social" has the
final say:
Although the material world provides a framework for remembrance, it is
the social practices in which artefacts are engaged which determines how
remembrance is socially experienced and mapped out. In this sense we can
consider the material world as a kind of "distributed mind," not only spatially
distributed, but also temporally distributed. (Jones 2007:225)
The studies referred to all expose relevant and important aspects of social
memory. However, to different degrees they seem to underrate the role
things themselves play in enabling remembering and in upholding the
past, a role that is not primarily consciously driven but also relates to the
intrinsic gathering and enduring capacities of materials. For example,
when Richard Bradley writes that more than ever it is important "to
understand why particular versions of the past were captured in a permanent
form" (Bradley 2003:223), he seems to suggest that the endurance
of the past is mainly a result of the willful processes of human selection.
There are clearly processes of selection involved, with many of them
related to human choices and ideological interests. However, the past still
evidently present is at any moment far too varied, complex, and comprehensive
to be seen as representing particular "captured versions" or as an
edited or censored text. The past also sediments in unpredictable ways
and according to material trajectories that are beyond, or unrelated to,
human control and intervention. This present past constitutes a reservoir
for different memories and mnemonic pi4tices and also brings about
fi
THE PAST AS GONE
Despite the inevitable presence of the past in our lives—and the seemingly
obvious fact that things and entities can exist at different times, and
thus what is past can also be present—it is still common to claim that
the past is "gone," leaving us with a void that only can be filled by our
historical reconstructions and imaginations: "The actual past has gone.
...The presence of the past is manifested only in its historicized traces....
Such traces signify an absent presence" (White 1990:174). This conception
of the past as gone, that we are living in a new time that radically breaks
Temporality and Memory 111
with the past (accessible only through the fragmentary traces it has left
behind), rests an several partly (but not necessarily) interrelated premises.
Some of these are well known, others deserve more careful attention.
The first is the common conception of time and history as something
that passes as an irreversible series of discrete moments, a line of instants
(cf. Lucas 2005). For this to be true, as argued by Latour (1993:72-73),
history has to be made up of a series]orpreseptsin,,which,aLelementiet
each point artafigneräb-crliaae "contemporary." These elements raust
fdriher be eACeiVed-ötänktkiliettreerätirbeing replaced by other
systems of things equally aligned. "Then, and only then, time forms a
continuous and progressive flow" (Latour 1993:73). Despite the massive
criticism raised against this conception of "instantaneous" and spatialized
firne, it has proved remarkably persistent, which of course is an effect of
its constitutive role for modernity and all notions of evolution, progress,
and historicism (Fabian 1983). Our historical and archaeological divisions
of the past into clear-cut periods and epochs were made possible
by this epistemic imperative. In fact, this synchronization of the past also
contributed to the spatial image of time as exemplified by the alignment
of artifact and monument types made "present-at-hand" in museums
and textbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Figures, tables,
and showcases located artifacts and monuments in a hierarchical and efficiently
visible spatial organization of continuities and discontinuities—
that is, in a matrix of finely gradated and measurable intervals that revealed
their typological and chronological identity (Foucault 1979; Olsen
and Svestad 1994). The "order of things" created by this regulatory ideal
thus gave reality to ttie serial iniage of bine aS inoving between discrete
irfiebire rSläte' ="1
This way o ciphmng things into clients and servants of spatial, divided,
and linear ever more evident. The modern feeling
of living in a temporally labile time, of time as shifting—actually as moving
faster and faster—is to a large extent orchestrated by things, mainly
ephemeral consumer ohjectsmobiltzetiksuppetsikes,Tegalatpur,iikal
of PrögresSiVetine Attfield 2000:76-84). This is perhaps most consPfaititStranriii
ilruSively seen in the fashion industry, where segments
of our material life are prescribed to be renewed in what Roland Barthes
once termed "an anrtual potlatch" (1985:xii; cf. Appadurai 1986a:32). This
"instant" conception of firne was strongly linked to the new capitalist
consumer society that emerged during the nineteenth century. In his
unfulfilled Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin depicts how the once-modern
nineteenth-century Parisian shopping arcades were becoming ruins,
ending up as the stranded relics of the consumer capitalism that soon
made them extinct (Benjamin 1999b). The rapid cycle of modern material
replacement made even the novelties of one's parents' youth outdated
112 Chapter 6 Temporality and Memory 113
(Benjamin 1999b:461-62): "For the first time, the most recent past becomes
distant" (Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss 1999:65). Today, Benjamin's
observation is becoming ever truer: new retrospective visual media help
to create this image of time as moving irreversibly, of the past as black
and white, outdated and replaced—by depicting the velocity of changes,
revealing how ridiculously old-fashioned our clothing and haircut were
far back in the 1990s.
A second premise for conceiving the past as gone isthe„cpazgarkat,
titude of associating society and culture with the nonmaterial, with_the,
tiföteirsariraTclionLoSilving,people;The Aast is gone since the human
sub`ect is gone leavmg us only 147.4A ti:acerörnapipheadMenaTriFigif --
itifigira-rida7cloinr,t'srifirs-bring-anYwatäbg8itieriggrfäridägt15676ndIfie
Altinitliniati.) that allows for no partial or relative existence of
the past, letting it exist "somewhat" through its surviving material constituents
(cf. Latour 1999b:156). Thus, the Renaissance is an absent past,
a time to be recovered, despite the abundance of paintings, texts, music,
buildings, and dead bodies still present. Likewise with other pasts, since
the minds, relations, and actions of the living subjects are vanished;"what
we simply have left are their things, the physical reminders and instantiations
of the greatness that was Egypt" (Meskell 2004:219). According
to this premise, history and historicity are limited to thinking and living
subjects and banned for nonhumans and dead bodies.
The third premise is subtler, as it claims that an absent past—the
conception of the past as gone—constitutes a necessary epistemological
and ontological foundation of the modern historical inquiry—that
historical remembering is possible only as a mode of forgetting. The
past becomes a challenging problem, a mystery to be solved because it
is hidden to us in the present. As Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley
have remarked, "the distance, the other-ness, the absence of the past is
postulated as a condition of the challenge" (1987:9-10). Thus, it can be
argued that the modern concern with the past requested a certain attitude
of "forgetting"—a "blindness" toward the temporality and "pastness" of
the "present" material world (cf. Casey 1987:2-7). As an outcome of this
attitude, which Friedrich Nietzsche once denounced as the "illness of
historicism," the past becomes something to be restored only because it is
lost (Latour 1993:69). This point, however, needs to be explored further.
THE FORGOTTEN PAST:
HEIDEGGER ON TEMPORALITY AND HISTORICITY
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault made the seemingly paradoxical
claim that the rise of modern historicism in the early nineteenth century
emerged as an outcome of a "break" in which humankind found itself
in a dehistoricized condition: "The imaginative values then assumed by
the past, ... the consciousness of history of that period, the lively curiosity
shown for documents and for traces left behind by this is a
surface expression of the simple fact that man found himself emptied of
history" (1989:369). This curiosity and historical consciousness was in fact
a sign that "he was already beginning to recover" (369), and the new interest
in monuments and antiquities in the early nineteenth century may
be seen as directly related to this recovery. Materltrernes,,Izecame.both
witnesses of,a.lost Rast and the promises of its reconstruction (Olsen and
Svestad 1994; Svestaci1595TÖ1seif2ile.Ägiidigaifilhe-pTACnischapter,
there is a dose connection between this loss and recovery of history and
the changing attitude toward things (cf. Andersson 2001:17).
Foucault's claim that our modern historical consciousness was conditioned
by our "emptiness of history" may be traced to Martin Heidegger's
notion of "forgetting" (1962:388-89; Macann 1993:102; Inwood 2000:155-
56). Heidegger coined this term to describe a certain attitude toward the
past, characteristic of our modern being. He contrasts this "ontic" mode of
beingwith "rcetition"„,.(Wiederhplung), which refers,toan_audientic "re
fivineZiKepasTin—w-hicn'tit-e-Pasi on in our present inin our careiul
cOrarrirarirre2dfliii:hand7diallingWith thingsrBeing-akingside what
fsr-eä'cryLtölhand tenrpörälity reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care"
[Heidegger 1962:374, emphasis in original]).The past is not an "ob ect" of
conscious consideraüori,,.scauething,Elasein explicitly Temembered but is. embedded
m our yery beingän-the-world,
Färgettine (Vergessen, Vergessenheit) is an inauthentic way of relating
to the past (and present). We forget that the Aast is part of our present
being and, by doingso, open up the past as a field of recollectables or
as something t6 be consciously reenacted (Inwood 2000:156; AndeA86n
2001:17). It inake-g the 15'dst very condition for remembering it:
"Only on.the basis afstich 0)1-gei-ling can anything be Yetained. Just***
expecting is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible
only on that of forgetting" (Heidegger 1962:389, emphasis in original). As
noted by Macann: "What Heidegger intends by this seemingly strange
conjoining of forgetting and remembering is the insight that, when we
'remember' the past, in the typical mode of 'gone forever,' we are 'forgetting'
that we are our past, that we are haunted by our past, that our past
lives on in our present" (1993:102).
So far, so good. However, when Heidegger more explicitly discusses
time and historicity, the past still present is primarily argued to be a mode
of human temporality and historicality. The ontological basis for this "his`hffdZinrsihelitiiriärfgif5fgEtgleinporal
"connectedness of life"—"that
is to say, the stretching-along, the movement, and the persistence which
114 Chapter 6 Temporality and Memory 115
are specific for Dasein" (Heidegger 1962:427). As mortal beings, our lives
are essentially temporal, stretched between birth and death, also grounding
the concern or care that defines Dasein's being._ It is this temporality,
mediating past, present, and future, which makesDasein historical')Thus,
the past "itself" is not constitutive of our wetifitieS-d6 not become
more historical by being moved off into a past ...so that the oldest
of them would be the most authentically historical" (Heidegger 1962:433).
It is an effect of our existence as temporal beings (unifying the future and
past in the present).
Contrary to what was argued by theorists such as Benjamin, Heidegger
did not conceive of things as historical or as making any contribution to
human "historicality." According to Heidegger, things are at best "secondarily
historical," as revealed in his discussion of museum objects:
The "antiquities" preserved in museums (household gear, for example)
belong to a "time which is past"; yet they are still present-at-hand in the
"Present." How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it
historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historical interest,
of antiquarian study or national lore? (1962:431, emphasis in original)
According to Heidegger, to be proper historical objects the things themselves
must be historical and must "in themselves" have "something
past" (1962:431). He indeed acknowledges that museum objects do show
the wear and tear of time, that some of them become fragile, worm-eaten,
and so on. This Vergänglichkeit (transience), however, is not part of the
past, but something that goes on in the present:
What, then, is the past in this equipment? What were these "Things" which
today they are no longer? They are still definite items of equipment for use;
but they are out of use. Suppose, however, that they were still in use today,
like many household heirlooms; would they then be not yet historical? All
the same, whether they are in use or out of use, they are not longer what
they were. What is "past"? Nothing else than that world within which they
belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand
and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no
longer. (Heidegger 1962:432, emphasis original)
Thus, for Heidegger that past world is gone. The only being that can
transcend this pastness is Dasein itself. Things receive their historicality
by being the concern of the only being that is primarily historical: Dasein,
which is rendered historical by its own temporal mode of being. Things
thus become epiphenomena or "derivatives" of the world and of Dasein's
historical being? In Heidegger's argument about past things (or equipment),
there is a strange and constraining dichotomy: they are either past
and ready-to-hand or present and present-at-hand. Even if the past object
is used in the present, it consciously occurs to us as past, for example as a
present-at-hand heirloom. Consider how this point is explained by one of
his commentators, using an ancient dinner plate as an illustration:
The dinner plate belongs to the past because it belongs to a past world. It
constitutes a trace of a particular conceptual and cultural framework within
which it fitted as one element in a totality of equipment.... It remains present
to us as an object within our world, and—whether used to serve food or
displayed in a cabinet2 ... it is still an heirloom, still an historical object, because
it is marked by the world for which it was originally created and within
which it was originally used. Even for the family for which it is an heirloom,
it is not used for serving food in just the same way their contemporary dinner
service is used—the heirloom is for special occasions. (Mulhall 1996:168)
There are several problems with this argument. First, there is no recognition
of the multitudes of degrees of duration in the material world,
ranging from the momentary piece of bread to a stone ax or a city. White
some objects must be replaced many times during a work task, a season,
or a human life cycle, others can slumber as contemporary ready-to-hand
items for several human generations without ever drawing attention to
themselves as present-at-hand historical objects. In fact, it may be argued
that what turns them into historical objects is a "forgetting" of them as
present items of use. Second, and using Heidegger's later philosophy
against himself (cf. Heidegger 1971; Young 2002), a house treated with
care, for example a Black Forest farmhouse, will live on, offering "dwelling"
for repeated generations, helping to create their Heimat. Thus, the life
history of the house may help disclose the fall "thingness" of it (that which
"gathers"), which has been threatened or obstructed by the calculative tendency
to see it only as useful and utilitarian (as Gestell; Young 2002:44ff.;
see chapter 4). Last and most seriously, Heidegger (and Stephen Mulhall)
seem to fall back on a conception of history as a series of synchronous and
homogenous states of lifeworlds. To each such state there corresponds a
unique "equipmental totality," which is replaced by another "world" (or
Umwelt) equally well united and close-knit. No entity can exist at different
"times"; overlapping and enduring durations are ruled out. The web
of relational assignments so constitutive of Dasein's being-in-the-world
(Heidegger 1962:91-148; cf. chapter 4) seems operational an a purely synchronous,
spatial level, rendering the human subject as the only temporal
being able to transcend its confined momentary historical location. It may
rather be argued that this network of assignments or references creating
links between things, and between people and things, also enables a historical
linking (or "gathering") of different historical horizons.
116 Chapter 6
BERGSON AND HABIT MEMORY
Heidegger's initial distinction between "repetition" and "forgetting" (and
"remembering") can be further illuminated by taking into account Bergson's
work on Urne and memory (Bergson 2004; Mullarkey 2000; Pearson
2002). As did Heidegger, Bergson conceived of our day-to-day dealings
with objects as referential assignments—the isolated object is a fictional
assumption (Pearson 2002:145). They also shared a conception of human
involvement with things as nonrepresentational, a relation Bergson ex- j
plicitly stated as a bodily relationship (Bergson 2004:86-87, 111-13).
Crucial to Bergson was that the difference between matter and perception
should be erased: "Let us place ourselves face-to-face with immediate
reality: at once we will find that there is no impassable barrier,
no essential difference, no real distinction even, between perception and
the things perceived" (2004:291). This relation should be conceived of as
one between part and whole—we are part of what we perceive, an image
among images (Pearson 2002:160; see chapter 4). Our perception of
matter (or aggregates of things), Bergson further asserted, is intimately
related to the potential of actions (and reactions) created by the Lfiterface
between bodies and things. Things act on us, they "indicate at each
moment, like a compass that is being moved about, the position of a
certain image, my body, in relation to the surrounding images" (Bergson
2004:10). Herein also lies the potential for a different kind of memory, not
related to mental representations and conscious recalling. In our "average
everydayness," we repeat certain actions by habit or by prescribed
"instructions" for motor skills provided by the things themselves: "Our
daily life is spent among objects whose very presence invites us to play a
part" (Bergson 2004:113). This enmeshment produces a material habitual
competence and spatial knowledge, a "knowing-your-way-aroundsomewhere"
(Casey 1984:283). It is this competence acquired by iterative
practices, rather than mental representation, that helps us navigate; in
other words, it produces knowledge for "how to go on" in a landscape,
a city, or a house: "In fact, we commonly act our recognition before we
think it" (Bergson 2004:113).
The outcome is habitual schemes of bodily practices that constitute the
basis for a particular kind of memory, a habit memory (Bergson 2004). In
contrast to recollective memory, which involves a conscious gaze at a particular
past (the searching for unique, dated recollectables), habit memory
is a bodily memory preserved by repetitious practice. The past continues
by being relived in our routines and ways of dealing with things so that
"it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it" (Bergson 2004:93, emphasis
in original). Our referential involvement with objects, organizing variTemporality
and Memory 117
ous bodily movements into relational wholes, makes us "remember" sequences
of bodily practices when encountering one (Mullarkey 2000:49).
Opposing idealist conceptions, Bergson maintained that this memory
did not consist of a regression from the present to the past, "but, on the
contrary in a progress from the past to the present" (2004:319). The past
was not recalled; instead it lived on, making itself present. In Bergson's
formative conception of habit memory, this prolongation was a function
of adaptive value: only those aspects of the past that were useful or compatible
with our present conduct were "remembered" in habit memory.
It is a memory that is not concerned with origin (such as our nutritional
system remembering our pre-Neolithic past) but can rather be seen to be
directed ahead of itself, committing itself to becoming (i.e., as something
to be actualized, accomplished), whereas recollection by definition is
exclusively directed toward the past (a "looking back"; Casey 1984:281).
This relates to another characteristic of habit memory, which is the
difference between its actual and "virtual" level. As exposed earlier, our
perception of things by necessity is subtractive. Faced with the "numberless
vibrations" of the material world, we need to subtract or shadow
substantial parts in order to make some of it appear - (see chapter 4;
Bergson 2004:27-28, 276). Actual memory involves such a reduction or
suppression of the vast virtual level, bringing forth what is situationally
relevant. According to Edward Casey, the virtual is a kind of potential or
hidden reservoir of action, a Parathaltung (holding-in-readiness), which
may be activated spontaneously: "It is precisely because of this marginalyet-available
position that so many of these memories arise in an unrehearsed
way; we simply snatch them out of the Pool of our immediate
accessible resources for being-in-the-world in a fully functional way"
(1984:283). This larger field is also related to Bergson's somewhat ambiguous
conception of a "pure memory" and a "pure past," which condition
both recollection and habitual memory (Mullarkey 2000:52). This "pure"
past may be regarded as an all-embracing past, the real reservoir for the
selective fragments consciously recollected or living on in our practical
comportment. These fragments constitute "the tip of an enormous pyramid
whose total bulk is the past itself" (Casey 1984:293). Despite the fact
that much of it may have ceased to be useful, and Maybe never will be
actualized as recollections or in habits, it has not ceased to be (Pearson
2002:158, 173-74).
INVOLUNTARY MEMORIES
Another term used by Bergson to describe and define habit memory is
"inattentive" recognition, as opposed to the attentive recognition related
118 Chapter 6
to "recollective," representational memory (Bergson 2004:89ff.). In much
the same way as things withdraw from our attention in the ready-to-hand
mode, we are not aware of this memory because it is so embedded in our
habitual practices. Habit makes us inattentive to the common world that
is simultaneously stored up (cf. Benjamin 1996:468). However, and in
a manner similar to Heidegger's description of how the ready-to-hand
becomes present-at-hand (cf. chapter 4), attentive memory can be evoked
when our routinely based involvement with things is disturbed (Edensor
2005:143ff.; Jones 2007:56-61; Bergson 2004:113). In other words, these are
not exclusive forms of memory, but possible modes of remembering (see
Joyce 2003:107-8). The memory filling the gap caused by our interrupted
programs of action may be conceived of as the virtual or "pure" past actualizing
itself (Mullarkey 2000:50-52), reconquering "the influence it has
lost" (Bergson 2004:169).
Such interruptions make us aware of experiences forgotten; they accidentally
bring back elements of past habitual living. The smell, sound,
or touch of a thing may trigger an abrupt flash of memory, a ddjä vu,
in which the past is revealed to us (cf. Benjamin 1999b:473-76). The difference
between this kind of actualization and conscious recollection is
its "involuntary" character. It occurs when our habitual, ready-to-hand
routines are disrupted, as opposed to willful "voluntary" remembering
(the conscious recalling of the past). Such incidences, in which the virtual
is made actual, are unpredictable and always involve elements of
chance and surprise: "The past is situated somewhere beyond the reach
of the intellect and its field of operations, in some material object.... And
whether we come upon this object before we die, or whether we never
encounter it, depends entirely on chance" (Marcel Proust, quoted in Benjamin
2003:315).
This kind of Smoire involontaire is masterfully narrated in Proust's
work In Search of Lost Time, described by Benjamin as the one that puts
Bergson's theory "to the test" (2003:315). In the famous madeleine scene,
a piece of cake (a petite madeleine) and a cup of tea suddenly bring to the
present the narrator's childhood in the village of Combray (of which he
consciously held only very indistinct memories): "No sooner had the
warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran
through me"(Proust 2003:60). Unable to locate the origin of the sensation
felt, the narrator strains his senses recalling it (and also repeating the act),
and suddenly the memory reveals itself: his Aunt L6onie offering him
tea-soaked madeleine on Sunday mornings. In that very moment all of his
childhood's Combray is revealed to him: "The good folk of the village and
their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray
and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town
and gardens alike, from my cup of tea" (64). Later the narrator recalls how
Temporality and Memory 119
Figure 6.1. "Despite the fast that much of it may have ceased to be useful, and maybe
never will be actualized as recollections or in habits, it has not ceased to be." Window
ledge assemblage in the abandoned mining town of Pyramiden, Svalbard, Norway
(photo: Bijornar Olsen).
two uneven paving stones trigger the memory of Venice, a napkin reminiscent
of Balbec: "I experienced them at the present moment and at the
same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to
encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in one
or the other . . because they had in them something that was common to
a day long past and to the present" (Proust 1999:262).
DURATION AND HABIT MEMORY:
RE-MEMBERING THINGS
Central to this theme, of course, is Bergson's conception of time as duration
(dur6e). Opposing the dominant view of time as the succession of
instants, he asserts that the past (and time) appears to us as duration—as
sediments constantly piling up (and gradually eroding): "Duration is not
merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be
anything but the present—no prolonging of the past into the actual, no
120 Chapter 6
evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of
the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances"
(Bergson1998:4). Duration may be seen as the material, physical, expression
of memory (Olivier 2001:61). The past endures, it accumulates in
every becoming "now," making these presents polychronical by definition.
As noted by Gilles Deleuze in his Bergsonism: "The past and the
present do not denote two successive moments, but hvo elements which
coexist: one is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is
the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass"
(1991:59).
In Bergson's exposition of duration, the past is "pressing against" the
present, "gnawing" and "swelling" into the future. As noted, this layering
of the past in the present is hard to conceive of without things. In the
same way as habit memory must be conceived of as a material memory,
the duration of the past and the "physiognomy" and reality it thereby
acquires in the present is a function of material duration. Duration is the
material expression of habit memory. Strangely, though, with the notable
exceptions of Proust and the closely kindred project of Benjamin, things
themselves seem to be of little explicit interest to those concerned with
habit memory. In his discussion of how an organist encounters a new
instrument, Maurice Merleau-Ponty relates such memory entirely to the
"instantaneous" power of the body, a habitual cultivated potential for
movement and actions that can also be rapidly modified to accommodate
new (but related) situations (1962:145-47). Even to Bergson, most honor
seems ascribed to the motor skills of the human body, thus enabling it to
"store up the action of the past" (2004:87).
The body as a matrix of habitual action is clearly decisive for habit
memory—in other words, for making the past immanent in the present.
However, the whole point is that habitual action would be impossible
without things and their facilitating capacities and arrangements. Despite
Marcel Mauss's insistence on the pure "techniques of the body"
(1979:104), very few techniques or habitual actions unfold or are learned
and remembered outside an active engagement with things. Things are
fundamentally involved, not only as a means for the action to be completed,
but also in making the action and material experience familiar and
predictable. Things themselves also assign or "instruct" a certain bodily
behavior. They require certain formalized skills to actualize their competences
(cf. Johansen 1992:112-19). A spear, whether a javelin or hunting
spear, sets up its own rules for successful use, although in cooperation
with the spear thrower, the prey or target, the ground, the weather, and
so on. In Merleau-Ponty's example with the organ player (1962:145-47),
it is, of course, not only the trained and clever hands and feet of the organist
that matter. His skill can only be implemented by interacting with
Temporality and Memory 121
an organ that is actually there and possesses the same familiar qualities
as those on which he obtained his skills, to make his actualization and
remembering possible.
Neither can the tacit, existential assurance of the past as "incontestable"
(cf. Merleau-Ponty 1962:19 and below) be facilitated through bodily
dispositions alone. The enduring past is anchored in the accumulating
bedrock of materials, in artifacts, streets, and monuments, and in
architecture—what Benjamin called "the most binding part of the communal
rhythm" (1996:418). This bedrock constitutes a fundamental condition
for the repetition and continuation involved in habit memory and
is of vital importance to the ontological security that any social being is
based on. Contrary to actions, performances, and speech, things last (cf.
Olivier 2001:65). There are, of course, differences in their duration, but
the past still present cannot be accounted for without the lasting and
gathering quality of things. Despite temporary discontinuities in human
involvement, things are and can be approached again and again to be
constitutive of new actions and memories (cf. Edensor 2005:150-59). Due
to their persistence, the (past) material world is always directed ahead of
itself into our present and future. Thus, every becoming present receives
a greater share of the past. Also in this sense things are historical.
HOW SOCIETIES REMEMBER
In his book on social memory, Paul Connerton (1989) has convincingly
demonstrated how habit memory is an essential aspect of "social memory."
Connerton's book became immensely popular in archaeological and
anthropological studies of memory and commemorative practices, in part
because his notion of incorporating practices fitted well into the emerging
discourses an the body and somatic experiencing. Still, as argued
throughout this book, the reinstallment of the body in social discourses
did not necessarily attest to a more material approach, and the question
is if Connerton makes an exception.
Connerton bravely criticizes what he terms a "cognitive imperialism,"
which has had the dual effect of, an the one hand, privileging inscription
and text over habitual memory and, an the other, reducing habitual
bodily practices to language and signs (1989:94-104). In historical interpretation,
"inscribing practices have always formed the privileged story,
incorporating practices the neglected story. . . . The primary objects are
canonic texts, and the life of human beings, as a historical life, is understood
as a life reported on and narrated, not life as physical existence"
(Connerton 1989:100-101). Connerton asserts the importance of bodily
practices for memory: "Habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the
122 Chapter 6
hands and in the body;and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which
'understands' (95).
Connerton coins a distinction between two "fundamentally different"
ways in which societies "rernember," inscribing and incorporating practices,
which are clearly related (but not identical) to the duality of habit
memory and recollective (or representational) memory. Inscribing practices
are mostly intentional and consist of storing (inscribing) Information
in a lasting medium such as text, images, and other memory-storing
devices from which the past may be recalled. Incorporating practices
are both intentional and nonintentional and consist of bodily practices
in which cultural norms are acted rather than inscribed. This memory
is related to bodily performances (he also uses the term "performative"
memory), in which "the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body"
(Connerton 1989:72). He briefly acknowledges that objects and material
structures are also involved in incorporating bodily practices, asserting
that "patterns of body use become ingrained through our interaction
with objects" (94).
In Connerton's own analysis, things and materials mostly become
epiphenomenal to bodily practices (which themselves seem subsumed to
cultural norms). In fact, there is an ironic similarity between the way Connerton
treats things and the way he claims historical interpretation has
treated habit memory. Consider his argument on how the natural sciences
have "abducted" the body from hermeneutics and the social sciences:
The mechanisation of physical reality inthe exact natural sciences meant that
the body was conceptualised as one object among others in an object-domain
made up of moving bodies which obey lawful processes. The body was regarded
as a material thing: it was materialised. Bodily practices as such are
here lost from view. (1989:101)
Although there may be some truth to this (see chapter 5), Connerton does
not extend his concern to the "material thing," which obviously is properly
located where he ascribes it (in the "natural" world) and is thus in
no need of repatriation. Objects may contribute to the physical scene and
setting, but are not "incorporated" themselves into the act of remembering.
Connerton continues by arguing the well-established case that habit
memory is largely inattentive and based on repetitive (mnemonic) and
persistent practices. By contrasting this to inscribing practices, which
"by the fact of being inscribed" demonstrate "a will to be remembered,"
he states, "It is equally true that incorporating practices, by contrast, are
largely traceless and that, as such, they are incapable of providing a means by
which any evidence of a will to be remembered can be 'Jeff behind."' (102, my
emphasis). Neither properly inscribed nor properly incorporated, things
become insignificant for "how societies remember."
Temporality and Memory 123
Figure 6.2. "Things themselves also assign or 'instruct' a certain bodily behavior. They
require certain formalized skills to actualize their competences." Music studio M the
abandoned mining town of Pyramiden, Svalhard, Norway (photo: Biornar Olsen).
Of course, Connerton is right in that habit memory needs to be actualized,
practiced, or performed by acting bodies. It is, however, as much a
fact that without material spaces, objects, and equipments, the possibility
of repetitious action will be erased. It is quite remarkable how little
attention archaeologists have paid to this material aspect of memory
since, as noted by Lynn Meskell, "this ideally should be our sphere of
expertise" (2004:62). Instead, Connerton's utterly problematic notion of
incorporation practices (and thus habit memory) as "traceless" seems
widely accepted. Ruth Van Dyke and Susan Alcock, for example, claim
that "it is easiest for archaeologists to access the inscribed, material end of
the spectrum of memory practices" (2003:4), while incorporated practices
"are more difficult," leaving at best only "footprints" (4). This acceptance
clearly hinges partly on how memory is conceived but also on the common
conception of bodily practices, including "techniques of the body,"
as somehow self-governed and self-sufficient (Connerton 1989:101).
Chapter 6
As outlined in this chapter, this asymmetrical conception is hard
to sustain. This does not only relate to "simple" techniques and habit
memories such as biking, in which the body needs a bike as much as
the bike needs a biker. Elaborate political and ritual performances are
also always enmeshed with materials enabling the performed conducts,
their organization and their (eventual) public reception (see Connerton
1989:86-87;Meskell 2004). Without such "mnemonic" devices, it is hardly
conceivable how any incorporating habitual memories could be actualized
and remembered. Moreover, the persistency of the material world
during periods of discontinuity of human bodily action is also a holdingin-readiness,
a material Parathaltung for recovering or reenacting bodily
memories and the "communal rhythm" (pace Benjamin). In other words,
incorporating practices are actually as "trace-producing" as inscribing
practices—or rather, the "traces" are the material constituents of the
bodily remembered.
MATERIALIZING MEMORY
Compared with a conscious recollection of the past, habit memory has
formed the neglected story, thus sharing a fate with things, one of its
primary constituents. For our day-to-day lived experience, habit memory
is probably far more "effective" and often more significant than recollective,
attentive memory (cf. Ingold 2000:147-48). Of particular importance
is the ontological or existential security that emerges from this memory.
As pertinently observed by Merleau-Ponty:
If the past were available to us only in the form of express recollections, we
should be continually tempted to recall it in order to verify its existence; and
thus resemble the patient mentioned by Scheler, who was constantly turning
round in order to reassure himself that things were really there—whereas in
fact we feel it behind us as an incontestable acquisition. (1962:418-19)
This "incontestable acquisition" is manifest in the layers of pastness that
make up the present: the landscapes, streets, buildings, interiors, artifacts,
and all material surroundings that we encounter every day in a circumspective
way. To live with this past and to enact the habit memories it
facilitates is an inescapable part of our existence. It is actually a materially
"thrown" condition shared by all people throughout history.
The way in which habit memory actualizes the past as something combined
and included in my present being-in-the-world may in some sense
be compared to Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of how tradition and "effective
history" influence our present horizon and our interpretation of
Temporality and Memory 125
the past (cf. Johnsen and Olsen 1992). In much the same way as the "effective
historical" has been of little concern to historians and archaeologists,
habit memory also appears to most as "more an obstacle than a resource"
(Casey 1984:283)—perhaps obviously, since by resettling the past into the
present, it challenges or bypasses the epistemological (and ontological)
foundation of historicism and the modern historical inquiry: that of an
absent past, the past as gone (Olivier 2008:86).
Defending memory as habit memory is, of course, not a denouncement
of other forms of memory. Neither should habit memory be conceptualized
as the antithesis of recollective memory, with one excluding the
other. As with the relationship between inscribing and incorporating
practices, this relationship is intricate and interactive. Moreover, and despite
their constitutive role for habit memory, things are also essential to
other—conscious—memory practices. The differentiated qualities offered
by things are always mediating between customary habits and conscious
recollection. In other words, acknowledging the incorporating, habitual
significance of things in social remembering by no means denies them a
role in aiding cognitive memory. In all societies, there has probably been
an ongoing tension or resonance between the inattentive material totality
and those features of it that "occur" or "light up" as historical symbols
(while simultaneously being a present past). Old buildings, cities,
monuments, and rock art may form part of our inattentive, ready-to-hand
"world" but may also more or less occasionally call attention to themselves
as "signs" of the past—as symbols of ancestors, cultural origins,
mythical heroes, and so forth—in short, as "heritage." There is always a
potential for attentive recognition in that which is ready-to-hand (cf. Joyce
2003; Edensor 2005:148).
The opposite process is also possible, though far less common. Certain
objects or monuments (such as burials and memorials) may have been
consciously intended as inscriptions of memory from their very creation,
at least as part of their rationale. However, even being a product of such
inscribing practices does not exclude these things from having or achieving
an incorporating role. War memorials are clearly the results of conscious
inscribing practices, manifesting a "will to remember," while at the
same time clearly facilitating ritualized behavior and repetitious, incorporating
practices. Furthermore, the role that things serve in inscribing
practices is not entirely prescribed by human purposes and intentions.
By their very solidity and enduring nature, materials such as stones call
attention to their own potential as an aide-Stnaire—they "afford" inscribing
practices and have throughout history offered their competence as a
memory storing device to humans. This mnemonic importance of things
is also recognized in classical rhetoric (Yates 1966) and in cabinets of
curiosity, as well as in modern museums—which probably represent the
124
126 Chapter 6
utmost technology for such inscribing practices (while increasingly—and
in different ways—also acting as instruments of incorporation; cf. Crane
2000).
The materiality of memory is well understood among ordinary peoples
as reflected in their care and passion for objects, places, and monuments.
It is also evident in the deliberate "care" devoted to destroying and erasing
materials associated with "the other" in war and ethnic conflicts
(Layton, Stone, and Thomas 2001; Rowlands 2002). This importance of
materials for individual and communal memories is clearly recollective
in character, although this recollection is mostly (if not always) grounded
in a lived, habitual engagement with them. Among modern and "critical"
anthropologists, archaeologists, and political scientists, this passion for
materials and places is poorly understood (Rowlands 2002:126-31). It is
mostly doomed and ridiculed as a reactionary view of culture, at odds
with their taken-for-granted celebration of it as extramaterial, fluid, and
situational. Within the new master doctrine, such attachments to a past
still present become impossible to adequately analyze due to the a priori
refusal of the very materiality that this type of social memory is based on
(cf. Gonzälez-Ruibal 2008:254).
CONCLUSION: THE PAST EVER MORE PRESENT
The main thing lesson of this chapter is that the past is not left behind
but gathers and folds into the becoming present, enabling different forms
of material memory. One effect of the "illness of historicism" is that it
made us blind to this very effective history and the potential it constitutes
for genuine remembering. Cultural memory is not only an intentional
process of recalling a specific past or, even less, of inventing that past.
Memory is also habitual and material, a constant act of re-membering
embedded in our very being-in-the-world. The past lives on, making
itself present. In its "raw" mode, it presses against the present, "gnaws
into the future and . swells as it advances" (Bergson 1998:4). This past
does not comply with the constructivist idea of representing selective or
particular versions "captured in a permanent form" (Bradley 2003:223). It
accumulates and sediments also according to material trajectories that are
beyond human control and willful selection, creating the enormously rich
and palimpsestal present we encounter every day.
Maybe more than any other discipline, archaeology has the potential to
cure the illness of historicism. Contrary to the popular romantic trope, archaeologists
do not discover the past, but rather work on the past that is in
the present (Shanks 2007:591). This material past does not manifest itself
as linear texts or historical sequences. As Colin Renfrew rightly argued,
Temporality and Memory 127
the archaeological site is truly mixed, "consisting of a palimpsest of structures
and rubbish pits, constructed and deposited at different periods"
(1989:36; see chapter 3). What the excavating archaeologist encounters is
always a set of hybridized conditions such as mixed layers, superimposed
structures, artifacts, stones, soil, and bones mixed together—in short, sites
that object to modernity and historicism's wished-for ideal of completeness,
order, and purified time. However, rather than actively using this
material record to challenge historicism, the opted-for solutions have
nearly always been to purify this entangled mess and to reassemble the
entities to conform to the expectation of linear time and narrative history.
Time is not allowed to be mixed and hybridized but has to be cleansed
and sequenced, in short, "unlocked." Through ever more fine-grained
dating methods and advanced stratigraphical and typological sequencing,
prehistoric settlements and sites are cut into increasingly thinner
slices of time, cleansing them from the historical conditions that grounded
these presents.
It may be argued that this purifying practice is nothing but a necessary
reversal of the destructive transformational process that the archaeological
record has undergone. Thus, what we have left is the distorted
impression of "compressed" time; that beyond and prior to the exposed
entangled mess, there is a historical order to be restored, a pure temporal
specificity. This argument may sound convincing but should be tested by
exploring how it plays out in its own time. How would such temporal
slicing work when applied to sites such as London, Rome, or Tromso?
To which age does Rome belong? How do we identify the contemporary
London, the present? By excluding all entities that are more than ten, fifty,
or one hundred years old? What would be left of this site, in fact any site,
if we applied such a rigorous chronological approach? In any case, what
we would have lost is that which makes these sites what they are: the outcome
of a gathering past constantly conditioning the conduct of the present.
In this sense, the palimpsestal archaeological record is providing a far
more realistic and accurate image of the past than any historical narrative.
As argued by Laurent Olivier: "Each of the moments of the past is indeed
necessarily multi-temporal, since the present spontaneously becomes fossilised
in being transformed; at any time, the present is made up of an
accumulation of all the previous states whose successions have built this
present 'as it is now'" (Olivier 2001:66). In order to realize the potential of
this "thinging," past things themselves must be emancipated from their
synchronous imprisonment, allowing for the "monstrous" thought, "that
things themselves have a history" (Latour 1993:70). This is just another
way of saying that we must release them from the conceptual stepladder
of disconnected historical worlds, the monotemporal imperative based on
the seductive idea that what is rendered contemporary by the calendar
Chapter 6128
necessarily belongs to the same time (Latour 1993:73). In their own being,
things are "polychronic, multi-temporal, and [reveal] a time that is gathered
together, with multiple pleats" (Serres 1995b:60).
The past superimposes itself an the present as things, bodies, habits,
and thoughts, as "incontestable acquisitions" that (pace Merleau-Ponty)
prevent any desire to constantly "look back." Thus, history is not a projected
stream leaving the past behind but bends and twists in a disorderly
manner, interrupting the expectations of the "have been" and the becoming.
The past proliferates more than ever in the present. It sediments and
swells more and more, and if there is a distinction between the historical
"rootedness" of previous pasts and the present, it is, as Bergson would
have said, one of degree (or scale) rather than of kind. We repeat the
past differently by making our collectives larger and more inclusive than
ever—in other words, by receiving an increasingly greater share of the
past; a difference created by the intrinsic capacity of the material world
to tenku and pinga.
7
Living with Things
Matter in Place
As soon as you believe social aggregates can hold their own being
propped up by "social forces," then objects vanish from the view and
the magical and tautological force of society isenough to hold everything
with, literally, no thing.
—Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social
We are often met by anthropological—and archaeological—claims asserting
that the world is "culturally constituted," that the meanings
of things are always "culturally relative," and that variations in material
culture itself stein from things being imbued with this cultural difference.
Such Claims seem grounded in a notion of culture as somehow "prior" to
or detached from matter, that cultures and peoples "already different"
approach the material world in unique ways, causing the variety of material
expressions and meanings. Clearly, people around the world relate to
materials in different ways and ascribe specific meanings to things, and
myriads of material realities are being produced. The question, however,
is whether this difference is a product of different mentalities, ideologies,
or "cultures" that approach the material world in "culturally" specific
ways (cf. Hodder 2004:36; Meskell 2004:2-3; Preucel 2006:257). Or is it,
rather, a question of different ways of living with things, of linking (or
combining) humans and nonhumans in countless hybridities without assigning
any a priori precedence to who—to what—causes this difference?
The latter position is being explored in this chapter, which deals specifically
with this linking: how human life is "always-already"blending with
things, forming innumerable interacting hybrid units and collectives.
129
130 Chapter 7
Here I shall discuss various theoretical approaches that deal with this
blurring, focusing on the work of various scholars but with a particular
emphasis on actor-network theory (cf. Latour 2005). I shall use some of
these insights to explore alternative ways of understanding our living
with things. Although closely related to chapter 4, this chapter is more
"analytically" concerned with collectives (societies, cultures) and what
things actually contribute to such formations. First, though, I shall once
more return to phenomenology and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
to briefly explore an important turn in his thing-body ontology.
MERLEAU-PONTY ON THINGS AND
THE LIMITS OF THE BODY
Despite the fact that things play a rather subordinate role in most of the
works of Merleau-Ponty, they increasingly became a matter of more direct
concern to him. In The Phenomenology of Perception, the thing-body
theme is given a somewhat brief and straightforward consideration, possibly
because the primacy of the human body is taken for granted. Things
emerge as an elaboration, perfection, or extension of bodily functions,
that is, as artificial substitutes. White "the body is our general medium
for having a world," it cannot accomplish all desired tasks: "Sometimes,
finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural
means; it must then build itself an instrument" (Merleau-Ponty 1962:146).
Discussing the way we "instinctively" adjust our actions to create a
"fit"between our body with its adjuncts and the material world, MerleauPonty
uses the well-known example of the blind man's stick (cf. Malafouris
2008). The stick becomes an extension of the body, not an object in
and of itself. By being used, this instrument has become an extrasensory
organ that extends the radius of the blind man's touch. To familiarize
oneself withsuch instruments or items "is to be transplanted into them, or
conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body" (MerleauPonty
1962:143).
In his last, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
develops this theme by taking a more radical ontological position. Theoretical
thinking and philosophy, including his own phenomenology, had
long taken for granted a radical distinction between the experiencing
seif and the experienced world. They had attained a spectator attitude of
which the "transcendental subject" was the quintessence (Merleau-Ponty
1968:200; Matthews 2002:161-65). He now insists that even to speak of
"subjects" and "objects" implies a gap between them, such that the relation
between them can only be that of contemplation. The concept of
being-in-the-world has more radical implications: it is not at all talk of a
Living wich Things 131
relation between ourselves and our world, since our:own being cannot
be separated from that of the world we inhabit (Matthews 2002:160-61).
Resembling Henri Bergson's postulate on the kinship between matter
and perception (their difference is only a "difference of degree and not
of kind"), Merleau-Ponty now brings out a notion of "inter-subjectivity"
and claims a "coincidence" between the perceiver and what we perceive.
Seeing is possible because I have some kinship with what I see; the "visible"
is a common property to us, making me both something seeing and
something to be seen:
He who looks must not himself be foreign to the world he looks at. As soon
as I see, it is necessary that the vision be doubled with a complementary
vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another
would see me, installed in the midst of the visible. . . He who sees cannot
possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it. (MerleauPonty
1968:134-35, emphasis in original)
En passant, it can be noticed that the ontology of reciprocity grounding
this conception of the visible provides a rarely noticed link between
Merleau-Ponty's work and that of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's notions
of the aura of things and the ability to relate mimetically to things were
grounded in a view that involved both a respect for things' difference and
the acknowledgement of them as fellow beings with their own "integrity"
and intrinsic capacities. Quoting from one of his rare attempts at actually
describing aura and what the auratic experience consists of gives an idea
of how well Benjamin's conception complies with Merleau-Ponty's late
thing ontology: "To experience the aura of an object we look at means to
invest it with the ability to look back at us" (Benjamin 2003:338). In other
words, relating to things in a mimetic way is to expect the return of your
gaze and to acknowledge the symmetry of the experience.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the mutual "presentness" of people and
things is grounded in our common being as tangible, as "flesh":1 "the
thickness of the flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the
thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle
between them, it is their means of communication" (1968:135). As a carnal
being, my body is what connects me with things; it is the means by which
I grasp and affect the world and the way I myself can be grasped and affected.
As beings of a tactile world, there must be a dose relationship and
correspondence between my body, my movements, and things:
This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible
from without, itself tangible . if it takes its place among the thingsit touches,
isin a sense one of them, opens finally upona tangiblebeing of whichit is also
a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible,
132 Chapter 7
its ownmovementsincorporate themselvesinto the universe they interrogate,
are recorded on the same map as it; the two systems are applied upon one
another, as the two halves of an orange. (Merleau-Ponty 1968:133)
Heidegger once asked if the thing "never yet had come near enough for
man to learn how to attend sufficiently to the thing as thing" (1971:169).
Merleau-Ponty's last work can be seen as responding to this claim to
"nearness" by exploring the "crude" experience of being in direct contact
with things—a wild, uncultivated, and barbarian experience. We can
touch and be touched, see and be seen, act upon things and at the same
time be acted upon by them. Being flesh among flesh, the limit between
the body and the world breaks down: "Where are we to put the limit between
the body and the world, since the world is flesh?" (Merleau-Ponty
1968:138). Similarly to Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty talks about "the pact"
between us and things, the intertwining and the chiasm (the intersection
or crossover):
This bursting forth of the mass of the body towards the things, which makes
a vibration of my skin become the sleek and the rough, makes me follaw with
my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves, this magical
relation, this pact between them and me according to which I lend them
my body in order that they inscribe upon it and give me their resemblance.
(1968:146)
According to Merleau-Ponty, the experience of things is a "full," bodily
experience that cannot be accomplished by contemplation or by putting
in parentheses our ordinary and entangled cohabitation with them.
Through our shared "physiognomy," our body brings us in direct contact
with things;it "bring[s] us to the things themselves, which are themselves
not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would
survey them from above, open to him alone that . . . would coexist with
them in the same world" (Merleau-Ponty 1968:136). Although in many
respects very different, here one can also see a link between MerleauPonty's
thing ontology and the "direct perception" proposed by James
Gibson (1986). To Gibson, things present themselves to us in an unmedi- •
ated way and "to perceive the world is to co-perceive oneself" (141).
Merleau-Ponty's late phenomenology was an attempt to explore
the "inter-subjectivity" between humans and things as an ontological
grounding for experience itself. Our being in the world can never be
purely cognitive or contemplative; it is a situation of active involvement
with things as well as with other human beings. By necessity, our bodily
dealing with things is a situated experience that is both positioned and
directional. This, however, does not lead to the conclusion that our experience
of place is necessarily relative to the position and orientation of the
Living with Things 133
body (cf. Tilley 1994; Casey 1998:237;see chapters 2 and 4). Things appear
to us not only from where we are but also from where they are and from
what they are (e.g., as stones, cars, mountains, prisons, refugee places, and
so on). Things' positions, importance, and power are thus not only relative
to our own being in the world. Our "inter-subjectivity" is precisely
that—inter-subjective—distributing responsibility and significance far
more evenly among humans and nonhumans.
PEOPLE WITHOUT THINGS
Despite always-already being "thrown" into direct and entangled cohabitations
with things, our intellectual life is characterized by totally
opposite forces of gravity struggling to pull us apart. This ontological
"fission" of the world is justified by insisting that beneath the messy
surface the old divide still rules, that every hybrid is "a mixture of two
pure forms" (Latour 1993:78). Moreover, it is justified by insisting that by
applying sufficient amounts of suspicious hermeneutics, this authentic
rifted bedrock will shine through. As argued above (see chapter 5), these
processes of distancing and purification have stigmatized our thingly life
as primitive, fetishized, and constrained. Defining freedom and emancipation
as that which escapes the material, modern ideology and morality
effectively obstructed a sincere concern with matter. Actually, as claimed
by Bruno Latour in one of his vivid moments, many seem to think they
would be better off without it: "Without a body they would roam through
the cosmos with better ease . . . without instruments and artefacts, colleagues
and laboratories, they would know more; without prostheses
and machinery they would be freed and emancipated—soul, only soul"
(2002:140-41; cf. Latour 1993:137-38).
One outcome of this purifying process is that the subject matter of the
social sciences has largely become cleansed of nature and things. People,
at least under their ideal "social" condition, largely come unequipped. In
"agency theory," methodological individualism, and various "objectivist"
social theories, the agent that constitutes such an essential component
of social life is rarely supplied with more than intentions and a rather
unspecified capacity to "act." Regardless of creating, opposing, or being
determined by "structures," the proposed dichotomies between actor
and structure, individual and society, facilitate this purification. There is
no room for composite beings already mixed and networked, since such
hybrids would blur the regime of oppositional distinctions.
Likewise, the craving for the subject, the individual or the "self," as
witnessed frequently in archaeology and anthropology, seems grounded
in the assumed existence of monadic and noncyborgian historical agents.
134 Chapter 7 Livi g with Things 135
From this zero-degree position as naked hominids, they enter into relationships
with things and each other. Personhood, selves, or collective
identities never emerge from mixtures. (See Thomas 2000:148-52 for a
critical discussion.) In this scenario, things are somehow prelocated on
the "other side" as something the intentional subject relates to, becomes
engaged with, or "brings dose" through the processes of objectification,
embodiment, sublation, and so forth. Thus, it follows logically that the
claimed core activity of archaeological interpretation, the "getting at people"
(Gamble 2001:73), is to reach the Indian behind the artifact (cf. chapter
2). As John Barret has argued, within this ontology agency is reduced "to
an isolated being whose actions are represented by the archaeological record.
That is to say, archaeology seeks the individual whose actions have
resulted in a material trace" (2000:61, my emphasis).
Needless to say, within their respective "natural" fields of scientific
inquiry, nature and matter are produced in a similar vein without any
social and human dimension (Lee and Stenner 1999). This regime of split
knowledge, as evidenced in (and reproduced by) the prevailing linguistic
repertoire of binary oppositions (nature-culture, technology-society,
body-soul, matter-mind, human-machine, etc.), still constitutes the major
principle facilitating our academic division of labor. Through its own
peculiar sedimentation and very effective history, it constantly produces
seif-justification by separating the natural from the social, the social from
the natural. As Knut Sorensen remarks, "there is nothing innocent with
these dichotomies.They produce fences between different forms of knowing
and enforce on the social sciences a kind of collective amnesia in relation
to nature and things" (2004:21, my translation).
To be sure, technology and nature are not absent insocial discourses and
theory. However, when paid attention to, it is mostly through some prescribed
arrangement of antithesis or opposites—such as technology versus
society, nature versus culture, or objectification versus humanism—that
invites thinking in terms of simplistic cause-effect relationships, determinism,
constraints, and so on (cf. chapter 5). Things, technology, and nature
oppose, determine, or endose the social world; they are not integrated
parts of it. (cf. Lee and Stenner 1999:94-95). As claimed by Joerges: "The
social sciences have no concepts for dealing with technology because they
have no concepts for things and tangible events in general. They have left
the world of matter and tissues ...to the natural and engineering sciences,
and they have constructed themselves a world of actors devoid of things"
(1988:220). Although Joerges's assertion in some respects still holds water
in terms of the general attitude in mainstream social sdence, approaches
that account for a more liberal and inclusive conception of society and
agency have emerged. In what follows, I shall explore what they have to
offer.
EXTENDED PERSONS, COMPOUND INTERACTORS
A much-referred-to approach is to be found in the writings of art anthropologist
Alfred Gell, especially in his posthumously published book
Art and Agency (1998). Here he boldly speaks against the canonized
conception of art as a system of signification to be approached through
textual or linguistic analogies. He rejects the idea that art and things in
general should be conceived of as a means of communication—as a way
of expressing meaning. A purely aesthetic, "appreciative" approach to
art is also denounced as "an anthropological dead end" (Gell 1998:5). All
material expressions, art objects included;are rather about doing, and we
should be concerned with "exploring the domain in which objects merge
with people" (Gell1998:12; N. Thomas 1998:ix). Despite traditional claims
to the opposite, things and works of art are never individual:"They come
in families, lineages, tribes, whole populations—just like people. They
have relations with each other as well as with peoples who create and
circulate them as individual objects. They marry, so to speak, and beget
offspring which bear the stamp of their antecedents" (Gell 1998:153).
Contrary to mainstream versions of action theory based on the intentionality
of agency (in other words, the idea that agency is reserved for intentional
human beings while things can only exercise physical causation),
Gell is concerned precisely with things' agency: how things affect and
relate to people as well as mediate relationships between people (Gell
1998:19). By redefining agency as "relational and context-dependent," he
attempts to emancipate the concept from any classificatory and essentialist
grounding (22). Agency is about doing—the interactive relationship
between entities—and not a rare commodity of which only humans have
possession. This relational and transitive character of agency is operationalized
through what Gell calls a "patient." Every agent relates to a
"patient," and this relationship delegates and defines agency. A car can
be my patient, responding to my will and intentions, while at the same
time the operation of the car turns me into a patient of the car. Thus, a
patient is a potential agent that can turn the former agent into a patient. It
follows that things, humans, gods, animals, and so on all have the capacity
of agency (Gell 1998:21-22).
Even if human agency is "primary," it is always carried out within a
material world; intentional action would be impossible without things. It
can only become effective by delegating tasks to material operators. With
the exclusivity of agency removed, the sovereignty of the human subject
itself cannot be sustained. Relating his claim to Wagner's (1991) notion of
"fractal personhood" and Strathern's (1988) "partible" or "distributed"
persons, Gell maintains that the organic confinement of the human subject
has to be blurred. Using the example of Pol Pot's soldiers, he shows
Living with Things 137136 Chapter 7
how their personhood or identities were extended or "distributed" to domains
outside their bodies. Mines, guns, and instruments of torture were
as much a part of their identities as soldiers as the emotional hate and fear
that inspired their actions:
A soldier is not just a man, but a man with a gun, or a case with a box of mines
to sow. The soldier's weapons are parts of him which make bim what he is.
We cannot speak of Pol Pot'ssoldiers without referring, in the same breath, to
their weaponry, and the social context and military tactics which the possession
of such weapons implies.. . . Pol Pot's soldiers possessed (like all of us)
"distributed personhood." As agents, they were not just where their bodies
were, but in many different places (and times) simultaneously. (1998:20-21)
Using a more trivial example, a fisherman is not just a person, a human
body equipped with a mind. Using his boat, sonar, and instruments, he
places his nets at many locations along the seascape. The boat, nets, and
other gear, as well as the waves, seascape, and fish, are all components
of his blurred identity. The nets continue to act—to fish—without his
presence, as do the traps for the bunter and the fields and herds for the
farmer. Identities and personhoods are dispersed in time and space, and
the exercise of agency is also dispersed and cannot be confined to one
privileged category of actors. This also puts into question the nostalgia
of getting at the people behind things. People, the Indians included, do
not occupy positions behind things (through which they may be accessed).
People become human by living with and uniting with things. Their identity
emerges from mixtures to which, of course, they bring their share, but
that according to Gell cannot be accounted for in isolation.
While this aspect of Gell's work is well-known in archaeology (cf.
Meskell 2004; Knappett 2005; Jones 2007; Knappett and Malafouris 2008),
the fact that a closely related conception of relational (and extended)
agency is developed within the discipline itself seems actually less acknowledged.
Even if cast in a very different intellectual and conceptual environment,
Michael Schiffer's notion of compound interactors (1999) can be
treated as being akin to Gell's distributed persons (in addition to aspects
of network theory discussed below). Defining material as all phenomena
exhibiting materiality, three major families are regognized by Schiffer: people,
artifacts, and "externs," the latter defined as "phenomena that arise independently
of people, like sunlight and clouds, wild plants and animaLs,
rocks, landforms"3 (1999:13). More original however is his conceptual (and
ontological) treatment of these categories. Rather than starting from the
traditional ontology emphasizing their difference, Schiffer is concerned
with their similarity, particularly their shared capacity for interacting.
Thus the term interactor is used to denote them collectively. Additionally,
these interactors gather and combine "in various ways to form compound
Figure 7.1. "A fisherman is not just a person, a human body equipped with a mind."
Cod fishing, Lofoten, Norway, 1956 (photo: NTB/Scanpix).
interactors, which tend to interact as a single unity" (Schiffer 1999:13, emphasis
in original). A factory, a farm, or a fishing boat with its crew of
humans and gear are all examples of such "compound interactors."
The notion that each compound interactor acts as a single unit is of
course just a partial truth. Even the framing of such mixed and distributed
unities are blurred, as there are always "leakages" and points of
138 Chapter 7 Living with Things 139
ll
transmission to other units that create long and complex networks (cf.
Callon 1999). Opening up to heterogeneous networks, the interacting unit
is not only the boat, the crew, the gears, the water, and resources—it is
also other crews, economies, exports, legal sanctions, national and foreign
politics, bilateral agreements, researchers, research funding, and so on
(Holm 2000). These networks and possible links in principle are infinite,
which at the same time forces us to create some graspable analytical units
to avoid being swallowed by a totalizing, invisible world system of relations
(cf. Harman 2002:32-34).
ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY
This seems to be an appropriate time to bring in the approach or theory
known as actor-network theory (ANT).4 One of its goals is to address the
fallacies of the oversocialized conception of man and society. Technology,
things, science, and nature are not "extra" to society—that is, they
are not elements of an outside reality that causes something to happen
in this authentically pure social environment (or vice versa). Neither is
society itself an embracing container or structuring a priori to which all
individual actions may be anchored (and projected toward). A society is
rather a complex fabric of intimate relations that link and associate people
and things—in short, a collective in which humans and nonhumans cohabitate
and collaborate. As noted by Latour, "society is not what holds
us together, it is what is held together" (1986:276).
According to John Law, network theory may be understood as "a semiotics
of materiality. lt takes the semiotic insight, that of the relationality of
entities, the notion that they are produced in relations, and applies this
ruthlessly to all materials—and not simply to those that are linguistic"
(Law 1999:4; Latour 1987, 1993, 1999b, 2005; Callon and Law 1997; Law
and Hassard 1999; Law and Mol 2002;Sorensen 2004). Instead of reducing
the world to a regime of the two opposed ontological realms of culture
and nature, this approach claims that nearly everything happens between
the two extremes by way of mediation and translation and by heteroge.neous
networks linking all kinds of materials and entities. Reality is not to
be found in essences, but rather in imbroglios and mixtures, the seamless
and rhizomelike fabrics of culture and nature that link humans and nonhumans
in intimate relationships. It is a democratic and inclusive regime,
in which everything can become actors (or actants5) by being included in
a network and assigned properties to act. It is a regime that cares for hybrids
and those hybrid relations that other systems (be it social or natural)
have largely ignored. Thus, humans and things are not defined by oppositions,
by dualities or negativities, but by their relations, collaboration,
and coexistence. They exchange energy, properties, and competence, and
the functioning of what we call "society" depends on this interaction.
ANT approaches differ from social-constructivist and essentialist thinking
(and their epistemologies and ontologies) by rejecting any a priori
precedence given either to the social (or cultural) or to the natural (or
material). As noted by Bendik Bygstad and Knut Rolland (2004:70), they
instead may be characterized by their attempts at developing concepts
and interpretations that acknowledge an analytical share of significance
and influence between humans and things. Paying much more attention
to things than was hitherto common does not leave us with an antihuman
perspective. Rather, it may be seen as a way of bringing back a more complete
human, an impossible task unless the "other part of itself, the share
of things, is restored to it" (Latour 1993:136). However, as little as we
are dealing with people in the normal humanist conception of them (as
safely placed at the cultural side of the great divide), are we dealing with
an object-world placed at the other extreme as "hard" nature. Neither do
things conform to the revisionist conception of them as always transcendent
and plastic, as nothing but culturally constituted sites of inscription.
According to ANT, what we are living with are rather quasi-objects, hybrids
of cultures-natures produced by and within networks of relations.
Things conceived of in this way actually recall the assembling and "thinging"
quality assigned to them in the Tate works of Heidegger (1971:179;
cf. chapter 4). Precisely because they gather and link, things are hybrids,
or quasi-objects, which makes them feel alien in the rifted topography of
Cartesian thinldng. Thus, caring for their hybrid and mediating identity
implies avoiding the common temptation of trapping them into the either
/ or logic of modern scholarship:
Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective
thanthe "hard" parts of nature, but they are in no way arbitrary receptades
of a full-fledged society. On the other hand, they are much more real,
nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society—for
unknown reasons—needed to be projected. (Latour 1993:54)
STABILIZATION AND TRANSLATION
Things play an immensely important and indispensable role in making
society possible as a relational and hybrid collective. Without them, institutions
and structures would simply not exist; then Marx's diagnosis
of modern society as a society in which "all that is solid melts into air"
would have come through. Things enable and stabilize society (Johansen
1992). When we wake up the next morning, we do not have to start all
140 Chapter 7
over again, redoing all arrangement, reinventing communities, or worrying
if the world is there. Everything is (normally) there as an "incontestable
acquisition" (pace Merleau-Ponty). In other words, we rely upon.
things, "taking them for granted as that naive landscape on which even
our most jaded and cynical schemes unfold" (Harman 2002:20). Imagining
a social world beyond things is just that—imagination.
What we refer to as social structures and institutions are products of a
continuous interchange and mixing between humans and nonhumans;
and for structures to become structured, institutions to become institutionalized,
a means of stability and solidity is needed (Latour 1999b:198,
2005:35, 67-70). Michel Serres catches this point in his characteristically
vivid and uncompromising way:
The only assignable difference between animal societies and our own resides,
as I have often said, in the emergence of the object. Our relationships,
social bonds, would have been airy as clouds were there only contracts between
subjects. In fact, the object, specific to the Hominidae, stabilizes our
relationships, it slows down the time of our revolutions. For an unstable
band of baboons, social changes are flaring up every minute.... The object,
for us, makes history slow. (Serres 1995a:87; cf. Latour 2005:69-70)
Thus, the emergence of a recognizable structure or institution requires
not only a network of relations between entities, but also qualities of
stability, concreteness, and security—in other words—things. Through
our interchange with things, our habits and actions become standardized
and predicable, producing what we like to think of as (social) structures
and institutions. Without the tangibility and persistency of things, these
structures will erode (Sorensen 2004:10; see also Durkheim 1951:313-14;
Arendt 1958:137).
Consider the example of the nation. This is often referred to as an
"imagined community," a social construction based on an imagined bond
or communion living in the minds of a vast number of otherwise unrelated
individuals (cf. Anderson 1983). Even if undoubtedly a construction,
both the construction site and the building materials are far less porous
and airy than previously imagined. The nation and the nation-state could
not have been invented or constructed without the hard work performed
by innumerable nonhuman agents such as print machines, newspapers,
telephone and railroad lines, roads, coastal steamers, geological surveys,
post offices, national museums, stamps, maps, trigonometric points,
border fences, and custom points. Without the help of these nonhuman
volunteers, these imaginations, ideas, and institutions would, to requote
Serres, have been as "airy as clouds."
To the degree things are paid attention to in studies of nationalism and
nation building, they are primarily as symbolic representations (flags,
Living with Things 141
maps, costumes, songs, parades, museums, monuments)—in other words,
as sites of inscription and embodiment. Akin to the dominant trope of
conceiving of artifacts within consumption 'studies (cf. chapter 2), the
importance of artifacts derives from their eventual suitability for externalizing
and objectifying the nation. In short, similarly to the way people appropriate
things to create a sense of individuality, the nation uses common
symbols to carve out its own collective identity. These representational
objects (and associated practices) are, however, only credited a derivative
or residual role in this activity. As with other notions of embodiment (see
chapter 2), the primacy of the social (and the social/material split) seems
to be taken for granted. However, as noted by Latour:
If religion, art and styles are necessary to "reflect," "reify," "materialize,"
"embody" society—to use some of the social theorists' favorite verbs—then
are objects not, in the end, its co-producers? Is not society built literally—not
metaphorically—of gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles? Maybe social
scientists have simply forgotten that before projecting itself on to things
society has to be made, built, constructed? And out of what material could it
be built if not out of nonsocial, nonhuman resources? (1993:54)
More attention thus needs to be drawn to the concrete and steel, the nuts
and bolts involved in a nation's construction, the brigades of nonhuman
actors that constitute the very condition of the possibility for such
large-scale social institutions to be imagined, implemented, reproduced,
and remembered. Even if purely an imagination initially, the imagined
bond—in other words, the distribution and transport of imaginations
and feelings—would have been impossible without things, not to
mention the subsequent implementation of the nation-state. Thus, the
imagination of the nation and the later stabilization of it as a structure
and institution would be "unimaginable" without such translations and
translators. Ideas, thoughts, feelings, and actions are translated, distributed,
and mediated. In accordance with Gell's and Marilyn Strathern's
suggestions, social relation and actions involve a vast amount of human
and nonhuman interactors that work together in a coordinated or programmed
way (Sorensen 2004:16). To study "social relations" is to investigate
what happens within such heterogeneous networks, a work that
cannot be conducted if society is purified as idealized relations between
peoples-without-things.
COOPERATION, OR YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE
Even if one accepts that humans are prime movers in action, that axes are
made by people while people are not made by axes, the implementation
142 Chapter 7 iving with Things 143
Figure 7.2. "To act is to mobilize an entire company of actors." Launching a small actor
company, West Greenland, ca. 1906 (unknown photographer; Heims's collection).
of their will and goals could not happen without the delegation, transformation,
and swapping of properties with nonhuman actors. To act is
to mobilize an entire company of actors in which "the prime mover of an
actionbecomes a new, distributed, and nested series of practices that may
be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the
actants mobilized in the series" (Latour 1999b:181).
In many ways, ANT involves a decentering that is more radical than
the poststructuralist slogan (confining the leveling mostly to human).
As argued by Nick Lee and Paul Stenner, it avoids the mode of analysis
that, given the observation that "something is done," immediately starts
the inquiry "who did it." Such centered approaches seek to identify some
responsible figure(s) or cause(s): "he did it"; "the drought did it"; "the
new world view did it" (Lee and Stenner 1999:92). Even if network theory
is capable of giving an account of how centeredness may arise (i.e., by
processes of black-boxing and translation, see below), it does away with
the origin-of-action trajectory. Also, in cases in which a "prime mover" is
identified, "the centeredness of agentic responsibility is distributed into a
dispersed network of interdependencies and co-responsibilities" (Lee and
Stenner 1999:93).
The urgent need for bringing in the "missing masses" (Latour 1992)
may be illustrated by this trivial but still axiomatic example: Some years
ago a Norwegian adventurer who had skied across the Antarctic published
his account as "Alone to the South Pole" (Kagge 1993), vigorously
advertised as the story of "the first solo and unsupported expedition to
the South Pole." When you start to ponder these claims to sovereignty
and mastery (Alone? Solo? Unsupported?), you soon discover that it actually
was a whole company of actors crossing the Antarctic. Skis and a
sledge were delegated the task of helping him move and carry his other
indispensable equipment, producers of extreme-condition clothing had
provided him with wind-proof and warm clothes, sleeping lieg, and tent;
his need for high-protein nutrition was covered by his carefully selected
freeze-dried food; and sponsors and the media had given him the ability
to obtain all this. And how could anyone unsupported and solo navigate
across the vast interior anyway? Generalions of mapmakers, former explorers,
satellites, and navigators all helped him along the way.
When all the honor and fame is once again claimed by a single actor,
it also illustrates another, paradoxical, finding of ANT: when networks
stabilize—in other words, when their thingy components become massive
and indispensable—important parts of their functioning become hidden
("black-boxed"), and the focus is directed toward one or a few actors that
receive all the rewards and fame for the work done by those sweating on
the assembly lines (Latour 1987, 1999b). What happened on the Antarctic
ice shelf was in fact a typical example of collective action, "an action that
collects different types of forces woven together because they are different"
(Latour 2005:74). What Erling Kagge should actually be credited for,
apart from his stamina and strength, is his ability to translate and delegate
and thus uniting the different forces into a well-travelled collective—in
other words, into a "compound interactor" (pace Schiffer). Thus, even in
the Antarctic, you'll never walk alone.
IN SMALL THINGS FORGOTTEN?
Let us consider a well-known archaeological example. In his famous book
In Small Things Forgotten, James Deetz discusses important changes that
took place in the colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America
from the second half of the eighteenth century onwafd. In his masterful
dealing with material culture he shows a clear tendency: the communal,
common, and heterogeneous were losing ground to the individual and ordered.
This production of a society that increasingly cared for personhood,
privacy, purity, and order is identified in a number of changes taking place
144 Chapter 7 Living with Things 145
in burial practices, architecture, furniture, ceramics, and eating habits. For
instance, the communal infrastructure of eating was replaced by individual
plates and cutlery and by individual chairs for people to sit on around
the dinner table. As this took place, congested communal burial grounds
were gradually replaced by small, individual family graveyards. Increasingly,
houses were symmetrically organized and divided into separate
rooms, with public and private spaces separated. Bunks were replaced by
beds. Clothes became increasingly differentiated as people acquired personal
effects, chamber pots, musical instruments, books, and so on. Deetz
nicely summarizes: "tone now is the order, corporate emphasis, wherein
sharing of technomic objects was the norm. In its place we see a one-to-one
match, with each person probably having his own plate and chamber pot.
. . Balance and greater importance of the individual characterize this new
view of life" (1977:59-60). These material changes reflect an accommodation
to a new conception of the world and the individual's place within it,
"an expression of a newly emergent world view characterized by order,
control, and balance" (Deetz 1977:60).
Deetz saw this as an idea of order, individuality, and privacy being
carved out and embodied in solid materials—in other words, he believed
that a mental concept existed prior to (and consequently was the cause
for) its material realization. As he outlines in relation to housing in a later
work (with Patricia Scott Deetz), "Vernacular architecture is not made
with plans, but is rather the idea of what a house should be like that is carried
in the minds of the people and passed down through the generations
by word of mouth and by example. . . . Houses don't change, but ideas
do" (Deetz and Deetz 2001:173; cf. Deetz 1977:36, 43, 127). Thus, what the
changes in burials, houses, refuse, ceramics, cutlery, and furniture really
tell us, "in ways great or small," is about a change in the American way of
thinking. This change, Deetz asserts, "must have been at a very deep level
of the Anglo-American mind, since it is so abstract as to manifest itself on
the surface in so many different ways. The entire social order must have
been similarly affected" (1977:127). From its deep cognitive location this
originary force of change subsequently migrates to things and practices
on the surface. In this scheme, things become intermediaries that faithfully
execute this change, and as such constitute trustworthy sources to recall
it, but are themselves assigned little causality or effects on "what happened"
(cf. Latour 2005:39-40).
Deetz's identification of a founding level (the Anglo-American mind) is
an example of the way archaeologists and scientists themselves conduct
translation in a very specific way, how science creates its objects (Callon
1986; Latour 1987). This is a work that transforms heterogeneous relations
and hybrid materials into a few situated and acting agents that cause and
explain whatever happens (Johnsen 2004:50-51). Drawing on the vast
resources provided by an effective history of dual thinking (including
depth-surface models; cf. Thomas 2004:149ff.), complex and interacting
networks are transformed into a relationship between mind (active, prior,
depth) and material (passive, residual, surface). One telling expression
of how this works is Deetz's assumption that the more widespread the
changes are and the more heterogeneous the materials involved in them,
the deeper in the mind we have to dig to find the originating and structuring
langue (1977:127). Deep down, a hidden center (the Anglo-American
mind) is conducting "action at a distance," affecting the shape and being
of another punctuated agent, the social order, and in turn the material
residues of this order.
Within an actor-network perspective, the emphasis on a "prior" mental
template or worldview becomes far less important than the "how
to." How could a subject-centered society emerge? How could a new
order become effective and stable? How many different types of actors
were gathered and what culture-natures were mobilized in creating this
new order? Instead of any central hero subjects—human, worldview,
mind—we should envisage a brigade of actors: plates, forks, gravestones,
humans, garbage pits, houses, food, chamber pots, law books, musical
instruments, and so on acting together. In each settlement these entities
joined forces, acting as "compound interactors." While things in Deetz's
scheme act as intermediaries, which obediently transport meaning without
transformation, they should rather be conceived of as mediators: as
innumerous interactors that transform, translate, distort, and modify (Latour
2005:39-40). Through processes of delegation and translation forming
many and complex hybrid relations, these mediators effectuated and
over Urne stabilized a new social configuration. They made new bodily
practices necessary and prescribed new programs of action. Any mental
conception of the individual, the private, and the pure may as well be
seen as the outcome of these programs rather than their cause (cf. Olsen
1997:211-16). In any event, such conceptions would have been "airy as
clouds" without the collaboration of material actors, creating innumerous
webs also ranging far beyond each local community. Thus, and not without
a certain irony, the individual was made possible by the collective
work of a brigade of actors.
WHERE DOES SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE DERIVE FROM?
The commonplace assumption that the meaning or social significance of
things primarily derives from outside has two problematic consequences.
First, it denies things any constitutive role in generating meaning; and,
second, it reduces them to loyal messengers transmitting meanings and
Chapter 7
phenomena that exist more or less independently of them. However, as
argued above, it should not be taken for granted that painted canoes,
fur coats, Cartier watches, bell beakers, forks, teacups, and Kobe beef
conform to such servile actions. Thinking of them as members of a large
company of mediating actors actually assigns them a far more essential
role. This generating and constitutive role involves more than serving
as "motivated signs" or material metaphors (Tilley 1999); things possess
real qualities that they offer to social construction and entrepreneurship.
Walls dividing a house into rooms or compartments create boundaries
and confined spaces that, whether it's intended or not, make an important
difference to social perception and behavior. In this fashion, the new
Georgian architecture of the Tate eighteenth century represented a real
difference from previous housing: "The change for the person crossing
the threshold was great, for he was standing in a dark, unheated hallway,
not within the hearthside glow....In the new house the most public room
was only as accessible as the most private room was in the earlier buildings"
(Glassie 1975:121). Privacy, for one thing, would be hard to exercise
without the help of walls or shelter.
Moreover, how could social distinctions actually become and stay
meaningful without the help of things and their real and intrinsic differences?
An example used by Latour illustrates this point well. A common
interpretation of the social distinction between silk stockings (highbrow)
and nylon stockings (lowbrow) would be that this is a social difference
being expressed in fashion. The difference between silk and nylon is, for
several reasons (price, marketing, effective history), convenient for representing
the distinction between those well-off and those not so well-off.
However, this ready-made material distinction itself is rarely considered
as significant to the existence of the social difference. It is "mobilized
purely for illustrative purposes" (Latour 2005:40) to express a difference
socially defined in advance. However, Latour notes that "if, on the contrary,
the chemical and manufacturing differences are treated as so many
mediators, then it may happen that without the many indefinite material
nuances between the feel, the touch, the colour, the sparkling of silk and
nylon, this social difference might not exist at all" (40). Likewise, as argued
above, cutlery, Georgian houses, and tombstones were not merely
expressing or—even less—symbolizing a new American mental template
created in advance. They were also actively involved in creating and
"ontologizing" the new social schisms and thoughts, which without them
might have never existed.
Things' ability to act, and their work as mediators rather than intermediaries,
is also central to Gibson's concept of affordance. In his ecological
theory of "direct perception," Gibson maintains that landscapes—things—
offer their properties and ready-to-actness in a direct, unmediated way
Living with Things 147
(1986:127ff.; see Knappett 2005). Thus, the cup affords drinking, the bridge
a river crossing, the ax cutting. Flint affords blade production and fire
making. Things, materials, and entities provide us with a wealth of affordances
that help, permit, direct, prevent, and otherwise influence our
day-to-day activities. Despite providing us with an enormous reservoir of
differentiated affordances, they also join forces in offering common properties
that act together. Things' persistence and durability, as discussed in
the previous chapter, may be seen as a common affordance that through a
wide range of individual entities facilitates certain actions, attitudes, and
meanings. In other words, they cater to both widely shared and more specific
purposes. The eighteenth-century New England dinner plates, chairs,
beds, and chamber pots afforded people the opportunity not only to eat,
sit, sleep, and urinate, but also to become individual.
CONCLUSION: REMEMBERING THINGS
In this chapter, I have considered various approaches that all express an
urgent need to acknowledge that things have a far more vital role in what
we like to think of as human society. The exclusiveness and pivotal Position
of humans, not only as thinking subjects but also as acting bodies,
is being destabilized and decentered through concepts such as chiasm,
distributed personhood, hybrids, and actor networks. Adding a Heideggerian
term to that repertoire, we may say that a "thrown" condition of
human life—now and forever—is to "blend with things." Thus, this condition
is not an occasional or spatiotemporal enveloped part of our living,
something that we switch to and from, decide on or deliberately accept
or reject, but an always-already imperative of human life. The building of
a society and the making of social change cannot and have never taken
place outside the embeddedness of being, and if there is one predictable
historical trajectory, it is that of increasing entanglements and delegations.
Living with things is not of course a static involvement. Things transform
our life and are themselves, to some extent at least, transformed by
this mutual engagement. An Inuit hunter becomes a very different actor
when united with his kayak and thus with the kayak's attached repertoire
of lines, spears, and so on, and at the same time the kayak is transformed
into something more. They are both turned into someone/something
else—in other words, into a specific hybrid actor, cyborg, or compound
interactor (Latour 1999b:178-83; Schiffer 1999:19; cf. Gell 1998:20-21).
Again, this should not mislead us into assuming that mixing and "compoundness"
are situational, that is, reserved for special situations. The
same Inuit hunting on ice during winter and spring interacts with other
assemblages (dogs, sledges, whips, etc.) that create other hybrid and
148 Living with ThingsChapter 7
149
Figure 7.3. Man, kayak, and hunting gear, Narsaq Kujalleq, Nanortalik, West Greenland,
1911. The man's kayak suit (tuilik), made of softened, water-resistant seal skin,
was sewn as a hooded jacket with drawstrings. These secured the suit around the face
and wrists and fastend the bottom opening tightly around the coaming of the kayak
cockpit (see figure 4.1). When the man was seated and strapped in, he and the kayak
operated as a unit, with all hunting gear (weapons, float, lines, etc.) mounted within
easy reach (photo: John Moller).
interacting units. Just as Kagge never crossed the Antarctic alone, hunting
is not an individual exercise. A complex flock of actors was involved,
united by a skillful combination of the power and properties afforded by
each of them. In other words: "Action is . not a property of humans but
of an association of actants" (Latour 1999b:182, emphasis in original).
Needless to say, to separate a material world from a social or cultural
world and to insist that the latter somehow should exist "behind" the
former becomes utterly problematic. As confirmed by all daily observations,
people are not actors without things, and to split the mixture apart
in order to present us with a human society devoid of things actually
renders us with a rather strange prehuman image of that society (Serres
1995b:165-66, 199-200). As argued above, however, the effective history
of the conception of things as "bracketed oft" from society and culture is
strong and actually very effective and has to a large extent become "ontologized"
by its own materialization into books, university buildings,
museums, and educational programs. These Janus-faced sediments act as
a means of purification that paradoxically provide stability to the modern
wish image of a divided world.
Backed by this effective history, it still seems seif-evident that archaeologists
should "transcend the merely manifest in the objects which they
uncover and see through these fragments to the reality of the social and
cultural lives of which they are mere remnants" (Miller 2005b:212). Thus,
when Lynn Meskell Claims that "we cannot privilege the material world
alone since materiality is ultimately bound up in creative cultural contexts"
(2004:13, my emphasis), the material-cultural split and its hierarchy seem
to be taken for granted. Needless to say, questioning the cultural prior is
not a matter of giving priority to "the material world alone." Rather, it is
a claim to do away with such hierarchies or centers, to thus acknowledge
things not as a backdrop to, or embodiment of, remnants of societies and
cultures, but as an inseparable part of their very constitution.
The social and cultural field is not an invisible realm to which things
relate in an epiphenomenal or residual way. Societies have always been
reified, and although the surviving material components of past societies
are fragmented, they are no less social or cultural than those less tangible
entities that have not survived (cf. Leone 2007:206). If in doubt about this
materialist-opiniont_one should explicitly direct one's suspicion to the
things we perceive, experience, and mix with in our own present living.
Are the buildings, streets, power stations, satellites, cars, airports, electricity,
computers, and food and drink the remnants—the residues—of
our own culture or society? As all laypeople living and toiling below the
"philosophical heights" (pace Miller) can confirm, things are genuine and
constitutive elements of the collectives to which we add such names. As
much as these collectives depend on us, they depend on things. Thus, the
crucial issue is not so much to move from the latter to the former as it is to
try to understand how we are combined to make society possible.
8
In Defense of Things
Endowed with a persistence which echoes with obsessiveness, things
saturate the world with their presence. Wherever the I turns, there are
things, and when it closes its eyes, they still haunt its imagination with
the presentation of odors, sounds, tastes, almost imperceptible sensations
through which things still pulse their vitality.
—Silvia Benso, The Face of Things
Tbroughout this book I have presented and discussed Fragments of
various assemblages of thing-theory that have surfaced under labels
such as poststructuralism, phenomenology, and actor-network theory
(ANT). These may be seen to be more or less diverse, as might indeed the
works of the individual authors normally associated with them. While
some scholars conveniently serve as totems for strong theoretical lineages,
others, such as Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, occupy more
ambiguous positions within the theoretical landscape. In my dealing with
these theories and theorists, I have tried to avoid a "developmental reading"
(Harman 2002:7) both within and between scholarships. Without
denying sympathies—or antipathies—I have tried to let myself be guided
by the declared bricoleur attitude, searching around for usable bits and
pieces that may be reassembled with other appropriate spare parts (cf.
chapter 1).
So far, much time has been devoted to this reconnaissance work and the
immediate evaluation of the usefulness and quality of the various finds. I
regard this task as temporarily accomplished, although much may be said
about the actual finds and their treatment. In any event, such work has
151
Chapter 8
a pragmatic aspect; it is relative not only to availability and immediate
needs, but also to the eyes and skill of the collector. Bricolage as an actual
work process, however, is not only to gather bits and pieces but also to
creatively reassemble them—using those parts to construct something
usable. This is the more difficult and challenging part, and I have only
partially attempted to pursue this goal through the thematic reassembling
in the previous chapters.Much more work of course is needed, and in this
final chapter I shall start this work by addressing some issues that run
across the previous chapters and trying to build some main arguments
from these partial encounters.
Before embarking on this final journey, I would like to emphasize the
kinship between bricolage and archaeology, beyond the obvious common
toil of collecting. The bricoleur and the archaeologist join forces in working
on what there actually is—which often is the fragmented, the discarded
and abandoned. Both also share the dubious fate of having the narre of
their craft appropriated by anthropologists, philosophers, and literarg
critics in their search for something sufficiently metaphorically material
to buttress and concretize their abstract conceptions. Thus, writing this
work as an archaeologist may also be seen as involving an act of theoretical
repatriation, that is, reclaiming a concept.
DEFENDING WHAT THERE IS
For the student of material culture familiar with the debates that have circulated
since the1960s, this book must be seen as missing some vital components.
What about the debates on style, about how things are shaped
and selected as part of a meaningful process of creating individual or
collective identities? How can one possibly talk about the way things are
formed and changed without taking into account the thoughtful historical
agent, the toolmaker, the consumer? To some extent, my opinion on these
issues has already been addressed (cf. chapters 1-3), and it is tempting
to refrain from further arguments due to the fact that this book explores
thing-territories that these debates have largely avoided. However, a few
additional comments seem pertinent at the beginning of this final chapter.
While recognizing the importance of the various perspectives that have
been advocated, I also find their general outcome unsatisfactory in several
respects. One reason is the widely shared assumption that the sexiest
significance of things always lies in their symbolic and representative
functions, while their habitual everyday uses are trivial and of interest
only to old fashioned "folk" studies. As argued above (see chapter 4), habitual
use is not "trivial," in the derogatory sense of the word; it implies
knowledge, care, and respect for what objects are in their own being. The
In Defense of Things 153
significance of a boat, for example, is not primarily a function of the symbolic
role it potentially may serve in transitional rituals, by acting as an
embodied sign of power or by communicating individual or group identity.
What seems forgotten in the vast majority of material culture studies
is that the boat is mostly significant for what it is—that is, a boat. It is
significant because of the knowledge and skill it assembles, the capacities
it possesses in terms of speed, stability, mastering of winds and waves;
the practices it affords such as transport, fishing, hunting, and so on. In
a similar way, an ax is significant due to its ax qualities, and a reindeer
due to its reindeer qualities. Whatever symbolic roles they may play are
residues of the primary significance of their own being.
There is another, closely related, asymmetry written into these numerous
texts: the focus is almost entirely on how things are creatively used
by people for their various purposes rather than on asking what things
afford or have to offer us. Thus, in most debates about things' "meaning,"
the material qualities of the objects in question actually seem rather irrelevant
to this meaning or to their own "cultural construction." As with
the "readerly" text (pace Barthes), the transformation is always supposed
to involve the hierarchical and unidirectional move from signified to signifier,
from content to form, and from idea to expression (cf. chapter 3).
Beyond being a concrete and visible medium for inscription and embodiment,
things' integrity has been sacrificed or subsumed to the dominant
social and bumartist trope in which their role is to always represent something
extramaterial eise.
To make myself clear, I am not at all disinterested in things' meaning
and share the concern with the significance of things. However, I think
we need to pay far more attention to the questions of why and how
things are significant. What difference do they make in making the world
meaningful? Clearly, things are also being made and formed with human
intentions in mind and for an infinite number of purposes. Rather than
thinking of this as a process by which a human idea is being implanted
into something raw and meaningless, we should think of design as
also emerging from the materials and the practices that are intimately
involved with them (see Lemonnier 1992, 1993; Ingold 2000). The qualities
that "slumber" in the material used, the equipment involved in the
processing, the "ready-to-hand" knowledge of the human producer, the
effective history of former things and their production are all affecting
the outcome, thus making this a far more complex and entangled process
than suggested by the old style-function debate (Sackett 1982, 1985; VWessner
1983; see Boast 1997). Even today, when technology is supposed to
have enforced its power on nature, when "making" is supposed to have
replaced "weaving" (to use Tim Ingold's terms), when nature and materials
seem reduced to Bestand (pace Heidegger), design is not liberated from
154 In Defense of Things 155Chapter 8
Figure 8.1. "Habitual use is not 'trivial,' in the derogatory sense of the word; it implies
knowledge, care, and respect for what objects are in their own being." Persistent tools
at Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway (photo: Bjornar Olsen).
these enabling and constraining forces. Actually, the constant urge to invent
new materials with different qualities may be seen as a confirmation
of the intimate link between design and materials. Thus, the remaining
part of this book will be devoted to the material properties of things: what
is their significance, and what difference do they make?
THINGS MATTER—ALSO BY THEMSELVES
Most of the theories addressed in this book can be described as relational,
emphasizing the significance of context, interaction, linkage, and difference.
This may be seen as a diagnostic feature of modern interpretative
and social theories at large. In hermeneutics, the parts receive meaning
from the textual whole; structuralism stresses difference and opposition;
and from Heidegger we learn how tools always belong to a set of other
equipment, an equipmental totality. Marxism, structuration theory, and
system theory, to mention a few other programs, are no exception to this
generatrüLe. lt is nosurprise then that this is a dominant theoretical trope
in material culture studies as well. For example, one assumption of the
contextual approach was that "an object out of context is not readable"
(Hodder 1986:141), and while the poststructuralist counterclaims denied
the very possibility of being "outside" context (and the play of difference;
Yates 1990:270-72), relationality is nevertheless the unchallenged key to
understanding (cf. chapter 3).
In other words, meanings are produced in relations, and much of the
recent explicit inspiration for this thesis is of course found in structuralism
and semiotics. In John Law's definition of ANT referred to in the
previous chapter, a central feature is "that of the relationality of entities,
the notion that they are produced in relations"; ANT is a "semiotics of
materiality" and "applies this ruthlessly to all materials—not simply to
those that are linguistic" (Law 1999:4; Latour 2005:153). Importance and
significance are products of the difference between entities, rather than
inherent qualities of the entities themselves.
Moving from the meaning-constitutive qualities of language to a "semiotics
of materiality" has, in some respects, been a worthwhile exercise
(see chapter 3). However, as repeatedly argued throughout this book,
this transformation is hardly as smooth as is often portrayed. Indeed,
something rather crucial about things' being may actually be lost if the
principles of semiotics (and relational theories at large) are "ruthlessly applied"
to them. Relationality may be a principle less imperative to things
than to words.
To be sure, things clearly attain their relative importance through their
position within a relational web. A petrol station is utterly marginalized
without roads, cars, pipelines, oil wells, petroleum plants, oil fields, and
so on. A hammer without nails, hands, and planks would be rather useless
(although "parat" for future actions). The point therefore is not to
discard relational (or contextual) theory; quite the contrary, the insights
that have emerged from such varied sources as structuralism, hermeneutics,
Heideggerian phenomenology, and poststructuralism are all very
valuable indeed. But perhaps, as pertinently observed by Graham Harman,
the case is that "relational theory has already performed its historical
mission, and is now burdening us with its own excess" (2002:24; cf.
Latour 2005:131-32). Although one may have some doubts regarding the
subsequent claim that a "theory of substance is inevitably reborn from
the ashes" (Harman 2002:24), the univocal stressing of the relational may
156 Chapter 8 In Defense of Things 157
have caused us to lose sight of the individual qualities of things, their
intrinsic power, and the way they actually therefore work as mediators in
collective action. Thus, it may be time to take one step back.
A house, a mountain, a bridge, or an oil reserve all have intrinsic
qualities that seriously restrict their exchangeability. A kayak or an ax
does have a competence that cannot be replaced by just any other signifier.
They are not merely "enslaved in some wider system of differential
meaning," but are defenders of their own private terrains, masters of their
own castles (Harman 2002:280). Moreover, contrary to the linguistic sign,
the reality of these entities is experienced directly, through themselves;
they come to us—also—in an unmediated way (Gibson 1986; cf. Hacking
2001:10). In other words, despite being enrolled to serve in a network and
achieve a large part of their meaning from it, "the elements of the world
do retain individual integrity" (Harman 2002:294). They are important
because each of them makes a difference to the world, not in a negative
manner for the sake of the difference itself, as in Saussurian semiotics and
poststructuralism, but because of the positive difference they make due to
their irreplaceable uniqueness. As acknowledged by Bruno Latour, an actor
"is exactly what is not substitutable" (2005:152, emphasis in original).
Even when removed from their original contextual setting and dislocated,
things retain some of their integrity. A Neolithic pot used for
storing food, left behind in an abandoned settlement from where it is
recovered six thousand years later, retains some of its uniqueness and
autonomy. Even when put on display in a faraway museum it is still a
pot, not only holding in reserve its affordances and "pot properties" for
eventual (if unlikely) future actualization, but also persistently offering
them for direct perception. Thus, when dealing with things we should
actually acknowledge that there are qualities immanent to the signifiers
themselves, properties that are not accidental or only a product of their
position in a relational web. What we are dealing with are not "empty signifiers"
but real entities possessing their own unique qualities and competences,
which they bring to our cohabitation with them—competences
that also facilitate the "weaving together of difference" that is constitutive
of collective action (Latour 2005:74). Their efficiency and usefulness
stem not only from their human use, but also from the fact that they are
"capable of an effect, of inflicting some kind of blow on reality" (Harman
2002:20, emphasis in original).
Things' inherent and varied properties are also decisive even (and not
without a certain irony) when their "serviceability" is extended to the
symbolic and linguistic sphere as objects "good to think" and "speak"
with. Linguistic metaphors are actually ready to be picked from this repertoire
of material difference and are somehow preselected for appropriate
uses (cf. Tilley 1999; Renfrew 2001:127-29). Thus, "soft as steel" is not
a metaphor we live by. In other words, even when things join language
and participate as signs in a system of communication, their actual form
or material substance is far from an arbitrary quality; their very significance
actually depends on their intrinsic characteristics. In this way, they
also carry with them an iconical or indexial weight that makes their pure
symbolic role (in the Peircian sense) very limited (Preucel 2006).
THE PROPERTIES OF THINGS:
DIFFERENTIATING AND SHARING
Things are often lumped together linguistically as "things," an attitude
facilitated by their convenient common noun. As indicated by the previous
section, things are not a homogenous category displaying similar
characteristics. In this way, things are not only different from words and
language but also differ almost infinitely among themselves. We differentiate
between things according to features such as form, scale, texture,
durability, color, and density—which in itself makes defining "what is the
thing" so difficult and largely futile, if exact and univocal definitions are
called for. Things include big objects (trains, cities, planets), soft things
(butter, cotton, sponges), small artifacts (coins, pearls, microchips), durable
matter (stones, rocks, irons), and perishable goods (bread, leaves,
dew). Things may serve specialized functions (as arrows, lightbulbs,
cameras);others may be deliberately multifunctional (Swiss Army knives,
hand axes, houses); while others again (although prescribed primarily for
the first category) may be flexible enough to allow for different uses (pots,
knives, pyramids). These different properties are constitutive and imperative
for their incorporation into collectives and networks. Thus, rather
than thinking of them as produced in relations, we may think of them as
what makes relations possible.
Many of these properties are contained in the very material which a
thing is made from, properties that allow for different uses or processing
(cf. Ingold 2007b:33). The texture and density of flint and obsidian afford
systematic chipping and fractioning, allowing for Blender blades to be
produced as well as sharp and strong edges for cutting and perforating.
These qualities are not found in stone materials such as slate or granite,
despite their linguistic bonding as stones or rock. These "stones," however,
offer themselves for other purposes and handling, such as slate for ground
or polished tools (knives, axes, arrows) and granite as building materials.
In a similar way, oak differs from spruce, birch from pine, and larch from
willow, allowing for different uses as building materials, as utensils, in
paper production, or as fuel. Other materials, such as steel, plastic, bronze,
and glass, can only be artificially made, which allows for more things with
Chapter 8
more properties. Pottery unites clay, water, and fire, which in combination
"afford" ceramics making. Artificial or not, the various qualities somehow
"slumber" in the material and are brought forth "mimetically" by the
skilled maker in partnership with his or her skilled equipment.
Things' differences are also caused by their size, mass, and physiognomy.
While the human body is relatively homogenous, despite variations
due to age, sex, inheritance, and nutrition, things come to us infinitely
more differentiated. Some we move and carry with us, others we
move with, while others again make us move, defining material programs
of action monitoring and disciplining our everyday life. Some things
draw attention to themselves, some create fear or pleasure, some enable
views, while others block views. In other words, different materials and
different things offer different uses and different meanings.Thus, to draw
a first conclusion: what we are living with are not "things" or "material
culture," as a homogenous or univocal category opposed to us, but a differentiated
mass, heterogeneous matters, whose accelerating difference
affects us in increasingly different ways. It is within this differentiated
mass, as a part of it, that human life unfolds.
There is another side to this, though, which is as important and real:
similarity. Stressing or acknowledging things' differences does not prevent
us from realizing their shared properties. There is no either./ or.
Things—at least as normally conceived of—do also have features in common
(and this explains, at least in part, the persistency of the appellative).
They have substance and surface, and they are tangible. In short, they
are material and thus perceivable by a wide range of senses (sight, smell,
touch, sound). Moreover, if we avoid the absolutism of having to choose
between the always and the never—that is, if we perceive the world in
the reductive way we normally do (pace Bergson)—the shared properties
of things become even more explicit. Things are more persistent than
thought. They evidently last longer than speech and gestures. Things are
concrete and offer stability, although to a varying degree. It is from these
simple and naive facts that I shall now proceed.
IN THINGS WE TRUST
Things are normally in place, at least enough of them to make our existence
predictable and secure. When we wake up tomorrow, the bed,
room, and house are still there. So are our private belongings, other
houses, the streets and pipelines that connect them, buses and cars, shops
and factories, gardens, mountains, and trees. They constitute our incontestable
acquisition. We do not wake up to a completely new world every
morning, having to start all over again from scratch. Despite what some
In Defense of Things 159
liberal thinkers want us to believe, the material identities of things do not
change "quickly and without warning, right in front of our eyes"; they
are not part of "a magician's show" (Holtorf 2002:55). Quite the contrary,
things are overwhelmingly there, and we expect them to be in place. They
are the real Dasein. Streets, buildings, airports, boats, tents, fireplaces,
quartz quarries, and reindeer fences are situated, they are in place and
they manifest themselves to us as familiar, as known. Being in place, of
course, does not imply that they are immobile, but that they appear where
we expect them to be. The seal-hunting gear, the strike-a-light, the lasso,
the yurt, the iPhone, and the memory stick are all within reach.
This"belongingsomewhere"is part of our circumspective dealings with
things:we expect them to be within our "region" (Heidegger 1962:136-37).
And again, this region is not isomorphic with the catchment area of the
rural Heimat ridiculed by globalization theorists and cybernomads. Familiarity
and situatedness are as much an apriorism of the supermodern
nonplaces (Auge 1995), such as shopping malls and international airports,
as of a Black Forest farmhouse or Sämi reindeer camp. The existential
importance of this entire field of ready-to-handness, of the being-in-place,
becomes evident in those cases in which it is disturbed or lost. It is well
known that any dramatic changes in the thing environment, by war or
environmental catastrophe, have traumatic consequences. Losing your
belongings, house, city, farm, or hunting ground creates a loss that cannot
be easily mentally settled. Everyone that has experienced such traumas
can confirm how the existential and mnemonic importance of things lost
suddenly becomes manifest (cf. Parkin 1999:214-15; Naum 2008:278-80).
Throughout human history, this reassurance of stability as the normal
state of things can hardly be overstated. Even if far from being exhaustive
of their qualities or equally true for all things, solidity and permanence
are thing properties that make a vital difference to human life: not only
to society and social bonds, but also to our existential security. The vital
importance of things to this aspect of human existence was actually recognized
by another sociologist pioneer, August Comte, who saw "things in
place" as a grounding constituent for our mental equilibrium: the stability
of the things we interact with an a daily basis provides human life with
an immediate and fundamental impression of permanence (Connerton
1989:37; see also Durkheim 1951:313-14; Arendt 1958:137 for similar recognitions).
Likewise, the socializing effects implied in Pierre Bourdieu's
early conception of habitus, "understood as a system of lasting, tränsposable
dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every
moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions" (1977:82-
83), can of course not be implemented (or understood) without the brigades
of lasting things in place, including those constituting the "region"
of the Kabyle house (Bourdieu 1973; see Johansen 1992; Meskell 2005:3).
Chapter 8
Figure 8.2. The existential importance of things is most dramatically disclosed in those
exceptional cases in which entire thing environments are lost or disturbed. The ruined
fishing village ofBerleväg, Arctic Norway, alter the German withdrawal in 1944 (photo:
Krigsarkivet/Scanpix).
Thus, despite the unquestionable variation among things, I will claim
durability and "in-place-ness" as probably the most important culturally
constitutive and socially constructive qualities of things. This lasting
quality of "being there, being operational" affords security and prediction
(Gaver 1996:119, cf. Norman 1988) and is probably also the primary
"existential affordance" of things. This trusted durability, which also includes
a "holding-in-readiness" for future interactions and reenactments,
however, also allows for another intimately related effect: the gathering
or sedimentation of the past. As we shall see, this gathering itself allows
for processes and outcomes that, to some extent at least, are unpredictable
and subsumed to material trajectories that create their own statements of
crucial significance for how the past is conceived and remembered.
SEDIMENTATION AND CHANGE
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx wrote his deathless
dictum that people make their own history, not as they please, "but
under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from
In Defense of Things 161
the past" (1968:96). The past not only burdens the brains of the living
("like a nightmare"), but the very material circumstances under which
people live, which they directly encounter and which they are conditioned
by, are inherited from the past.
Marx thus opposed, at least for the time being, the common idea of
modern society as "liberated" from the bonds of the past. As noted earher,
it is a widespread assumption that so-called traditional societies, that
is, the "premoderns," were closer to their past than we are. Contrary to
the situation in these societies where the past was supposed to live on in
"real environments of memory," milieux de mdmoire (Nora 1984, 1989), the
accelerated history of the modern is claimed to have left the past behind,
leaving a void that only can be filled by our recollective memory and
historical reconstructions.
A number of theorists, however, ranging from Marx, Bergson, and
Benjamin to Serres and Latour, have all countered this modernist leitmotif.
Their claim is rather that the past proliferates more than ever in the
present—or, as Benjamin would have said, that nothing is less ended
than the past Each generation is actually receiving an increasingly
greater share of it. This is not primarily due to deliberate practices of
recollection in terms of books, museums, and disciplinary knowledges,
the consciously developed aide-mdmoires for storing and transmitting information
about the past (cf. Huyssen 2003). A more fundamental cause
for this gathering has to do with the durable qualities of things that make
us live in an environment increasingly conditioned by the structures and
residues of the past. In different shapes and in various conditions, this
material gathers and thus constantly sediments into potentially new environments
of memory. Most obvious of course, is the ongoing layering of
all working and useful matter, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings,
monuments, and so on, which continues to constitute a taken-for-granted
part of our "contemporary" lifeworlds. As previously argued, what we
conceive of as our contemporary world is not made up of entities originating
from the same age, the "present," but instead takes the form of
a "flattened" multitemporal field (cf. Lucas 2008), the complex and dispersed
stratigraphy of accumulated pasts. The present "basically consists
öf a palimpsest of all durations of the past that have become recorded in
matter" (Olivier 2001:66; cf. chapter 6).
The notion of sedimentation clearly begs for a number of comments
and the pertinent question, what about change? If materials sediment
and solidify this way, preserving and objectifying society, do they always
come to counteract change? (See Lucas 2008:62-63 for a related discussion.)
Is there a creative, innovative aspect of humans that is somehow
combated or calmed by the slowing, sedimenting materiality? (cf. Bergson
1998). An adequate response requires that we recognize the varied
160
Chapter 8
affordances and capacities of things—in short, and to put it in the most
trivial terms possible, that they are capable of more than one historical
effect. On the one hand, there is undoubtedly a leveling of instability, of
"noise," through objectification. Materials and the historically effective
past that "swells in our midst" facilitate society with the necessary stability
and solidity, the pillar and bolts that prevent our social bonds from
being "airy as clouds" (Serres 1995a:87). These firming things clearly have
a preservative function; they arrest action and "slow down the time of
our revolutions," to borrow another of Michel Serres's formulations (cf.
Serres 1995a:87ff; Serres 1995b:199-202). There is an explicit, even banal,
aspect of this "slowing down," although of course not exhaustive of its
operation. The very scale and mass of society's material reinforcement, in
other words of the things mobilized and assembled to make it work and
stay together, will under certain circumstances slow change, preventing
flexibility and forming a basis for the impression that the past weighs
heavier on some societies than others (cf. Lucas 2008). The stones, iron,
and concrete used in the massive construction of some past and present
empires are not only burdening the brains of their inhabitants; they left a
thick and sticky heritage of materials that to some extent, at least, explains
their continuous, effective history.
On the other hand, things are also what makes change possible and
it is hard to conceive how human creativity and agency can be realized
without these very beings (cf. chapters 4 and 7). Moreover, by the
physiognomy they add to history (pace Benjamin), things also constitute
the key device in helping us to recognize historical changes. In order to
adequately address the question of change we therefore need to move
beyond the dominant humanist trope of creative (but unequipped) historical
agents rendered opposed to materiality. Moreover, we also need
to refrain from conceiving stability and change in oppositional terms:
these are rather complementary phenomena. To recognize change there
raust be something preserved, something to recognize, that is, some stilleffective
history that makes the novelty in the change stand out as new
(Mullarkey 2000:135). Exploring things' role in historical change we thus
have to mediate between repetition and novelty, stability and change; in
other words, to avoid the trap of the either./ or. In this sense (and rephrasing
Bergson liberally), history also becomes a record of how the past is
repeated differently, a repetition of difference.
WHY DO THINGS CHANGE?
This does not, however, bring us very far in understanding why things,
and materiality at large, change. There are, of course, gradual shifts and
In Defense of Things 163
variations that are always involved in human and nonhuman existence.
(We never step into the same river twice.) Chopping a tree, knapping a
scraper, building a motorway, and driving a car all contribute to a "process
world" that is always in transformation. Also contributing to this
are the forces and rhythms of nature, which slowly or more abruptly are
changing the physiognomy of the landscape in addition to the conditions
for human life. Things themselves change, age, and wither, as the material
world is also subject to the process of ruination (see below). Thus,
notwithstanding the solidity of the material world, there is a multitude of
changes within this mass operating at different scales and different paces,
always-already in action.
Change, however, is often conceived of as "episodic" (Giddens 1981),
something (at least retrospectively) conceived of as bringing something
new to things themselves or society at large. In Marxist social theory,
these are brought together in a causal link. Things, as productive forces
(technology, raw materials, and work organizations), are accredited a crucial
role under certain historical conditions by being developed to a scale
and organizational level that causes an interstructural contradiction with
the social relations of productions. (Related conceptions can be found in
different versions of systems theory.) The reasons why things (technology
and the associated organization of production) develop are largely
located outside the things themselves, such as in "social needs" or contradictions
within the social relations of production. These may be valid
parameters, and it is not my aim here to do away with notions related to
human or "systemic" motivations or "movers." My ambition is more to
ask if there is something in the material itself that contributes to its own
transformation. I have already addressed the various "affordances" of the
raw materials themselves and shall briefly point to some other aspects.
In his important book on the materiality of social change, Norwegian
sociologist Tom Johansen writes about how the potential for transformation—as
improvements—is somehow embedded in the materials them-
selves:
Since the material manifestations are of such a solid and persistent character
they become a "concrete memory of the acquisitions of the past." But precisely
because of this, they lay the groundwork for improvements, developments
and refinements of this memory. Moreover, they also remind us about
the deficiencies of the past—as a constant challenge to the present to extend
the ploughshare, improve the dwellings, refine the ornaments, etc. Because
of the exteriority of the past, it enables an enduring crilicism. (Johansen
1992:30, my translation)
Clearly this is not to say that the materialized past has been subjected
to such an enduring criticism, nor have the materials consciously been
162
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posing a constant challenge. However, the important issue here is their
potential for doing so—in other words, the fact that their "being-in-readiness"
for such criticism and reworking is constant and enduring.
Crucial here are the two modes of tool-being explored by Heidegger
(see chapter 4). According to him, we normally deal with things in their
ready-to-hand mode, encountering them in their "unobtrusive presence."
They are not objects of conscious concern, subject to criticism or posing
any serious challenges. They are, in short, absorbed by the "in-order-to"
and black-boxed by their own successful operations. However, when
malfunctioning, encountered in the wrong places, or lost, these very
objects "light up"; they consciously "come to mind" rather than circumspectly
"to hand." If the fridge stops working, we realize "what it was
ready-to-hand for" (Heidegger 1962:105, emphasis in original). By their
very malfunctioning, things become "conspicuous" to us (Heidegger
1962; cf. Harman 2002; chapter 4).
Hubert Dreyfus has isolated three modes of "coming to mind" in
Heidegger's work and has ranked them as increasingly more serious
disturbances: conspicuousness, obstinacy, and obtrusiveness, of which
the latter or "total breakdown" is most effective (1991:70-83). While small
disturbances are normally leveled out in order for life to go on in its
practical attitude, some interruptions prevent us from going on as usual.
When a tool is missing/lost and our work permanently interrupted, "we
can either stare helplessly at the remaining objects or take a new detached
theoretical stance towards things and try to explain their underlying
causal properties" (Dreyfus 1991:79).
This gradation of "the coming to mind" is a useful one, as it modifies
the usual oppositional conception of these two modes of tool-being
the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand) as mutually exclusive modes.
Moreover, things' present-at-hand mode is not activated only by their
obtrusive and absolute malfunctioning ("total breakdown"). Although
Dreyfus may be correct in stating that this may be the most imperative
case, the options he proposes for how we handle such collapses seem
somewhat limited. For a philosopher, the choice may be restricted to
either "staring helplessly" at the objects or taking a new "detached theoretical
stance" toward them. For others, probably the vast majority of past
and present people, there may be other and more viable choices for how
to go on. These will all involve practical action: to repair, improve, or even
invent new tools.
Far more common disturbances than "total breakdown" are things'
minor or partial deficiencies, and contrary to what Dreyfus seems to assert,
these are not necessarily leveled out. By not working properly and
causing minor disturbances, things themselves may initiate a growing
concern about their functioning. Becoming aware of something activates
In Defense of Things 165
the potential for improvement and change. Normally, things are brought
back to their original state of being through repair, replacement, or return.
However, the interruption caused by malfunctioning may also cause an
awareness or doubt about its original functioning, thus stimulating improvement
or refinement. A boat that behaves in an unruly manner under
certain wind and wave conditions will be examined, discussed, tested in
an attempt to improve it. Changes to the sail or keel may be made, and, if
successful, they will be translated and eventually black-boxed into future
vessels. This process, however, does not include a "new detached theoretical
stance towards things"—it is actually grounded in the knowing
how of the skipper, the sailor, and the boat builder. This knowing how,
irrespective of whether it involves a cuttet kayak, or long ship, always
involves a sensibility for the "tuning" of the vessel at sea, a bodily felt
awareness of how it works and how it may be improved. Thus, in this
sense the ready-to-hand knowledge of things is crucial for their improvement
and for the way they eventually "come to mind" and their treatment
in a present-at-hand mode. As a result of this, there is always a latent criticism
involved even in habitual living.
It may be argued that the modern conditions have changed all this, and
that the accelerating turnover time for consumer products and technology
reflects the loosening grip of the ready-to-hand; also a condition for
change. That our "ontic" and rational attitude makes us far more conscious
about things and increasingly renders them in a reflexive presentat-hand
mode. Also due to the rationales of capitalist economies, the calming
and slow rhythms of ready-to-hand trajectories, which primarily were
related to practical need, are replaced by a constant and deliberate urge
for instant changes. Although there is some truth to this, the picture is far
more complex. For example, the vast majority of "new" things offered to
us still contains and preserves their own ready-to-hand affordances, tuned
in by their own effective history of being "capable of action." The knifelike
quality of the keife and the shoelike quality of the shoe are not replaced
or seriously modified by new styles and designs. The effective history of
functional success is evident in forms and materials that have survived
throughout the millennia, adding yet another dimension to how the past
settles in the present.
This may also serve as a timely reminder that the ready-to-hand is not
an endangered mode. Beyond the things we consciously notice slumbers
the enormous and effective bedrock of ready-to-hand things. Although
the state of "coming to mind," in terms of how we deal with things, might
be seen as a relative increase, especially when entire industries today are
devoted precisely to creating new designs and equipment, the material
bedrock is now and always constituted by the ready-to-hand. Even the
design industries and their conscious designers are situated firmly and
166 Chapter 8
dependently within this everydayness of inconspicuous materials, which
enables them to devote their time to the tiny and often quite marginal
portion of that which makes society possible.
SEDIMENTATION AND DIFFERENTIATION:
RUINS AND THE DISCARDED PAST
There is a distinctive kind of disturbance or tension embedded in the
notion of the sedimenting and gathering past that deserves more attention.
This tension is created by its differentiated mode of acquisition: the
gathering not only of the useful and feasible but also of the ruined and
discarded. As we have seen in Bergson's formative conception of the term
habit memory, it was largely conceived of as a function of adaptive value:
only those aspects of the past that are useful or compatible with our present
conduct are "remembered" in habit memory. Likewise, a substantial
share of the accumulating past consists of surviving materials still useful
and still functional, although mostly inconspicuously embedded in the
ready-to-hand of our daily doing and existence. This is not restricted to
what we usually think of as "old things" still in use, such as buildings,
streets, bridges, but in fact includes every thing we use, ranging from that
bought yesterday to the medieval foundation of the town we live in. It is
this predominantly reassuring past that we feel as an "incontestable acquisition"
that prevents (or rather makes redundant) a recollective "looking
back" to make us sure that it really is there.
As discussed previously, the habit memory intimately related to these
aspects of the "pure" past is normally contrasted and subordinated
to "recollective memory," which by definition is conscious recovering
and exclusively directed toward recalling the past (Casey 1984:281; see
chapter 6). However, this dualist conception of habit versus conscious or
recollective memory is complicated (and perhaps strangely mediated) by
another component of the sedimenting past: the ruined and the stranded,
a component that although marginal still swells, so to speak, in the spaces
left open by the habitual and the recollective.
Despite the fact that things clearly do age differently and that their expected
life lengths also vary greatly, there is a certain egalitarianism associated
with their aging. Thus, given that persistency can be listed among
their qualities, things do not discriminate among themselves in their
duration. This means that in addition to those "unbroken" things that
facilitate smooth or "good passages" (cf. Moser and Law 1999), there is a
survival of the outdated and stranded. This is the material past that persists
despite being discarded, ignored, and made superfluous—in short,
the surviving material redundancy of the past. (Cf. Edensor 2005 for an
In Defense of Things 167
Figure 8.3. "Even when things are discarded, destroyed, and demolished, something
is nearly always left—in other words, gathered." Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway (photo:
Bjernar Olsen).
excellent discussion.) The survival of these things is, of course, threatened,
not only by their own aging and withering, but also (and probably
more so) by neglect and destruction (Gonzälez-Ruibal 2008). However,
even when things are discarded, destroyed, and demolished, something
is nearly always left—in other words, gathered. Thus, in the notion of a
past that sediments and swells in our midst, there is also a component of
the neglected, the unwanted.1
Discussing the "mission" of these outdated things of the past, "freed
from the drudgery of being useful" (Benjamin 2002:39), it is pertinent to
pay a final visit to the project of Walter Benjamin. In his theses on history,
Benjamin brings attention to a picture by Paul Klee called Angulus Novus.
This shows an angel with its wings wide open being blown backward
while his gaze is fixed on a heap of rubbish growing at his feet. The "angel
of history" is staring at the past, and despite his wish to stay and heal, he
is blown away. Unable to dose his wings, the storm of progress "drives
him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him grows towards the sky" (Benjamin 2003:392).
This picture illuminates two central themes in Benjamin's historical
writings. First, as noted by Dag Andersson (2001:15), the angel's frozen
168 Chapter 8
Figure 8.4. Stranded Skoda in the field, Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway (photo: Bjornar
Olsen).
stare at the accumulating debris of the past counters the conventional
historicist gaze, which seeks to plot history as a chain of completed events
unfolding within a continuous narrative. The picture challenges the idea
of historical linearity in which the past is always left behind. History is topological
and accumulative, not linear or biographical. It decomposes into
images and historical objects, not into narratives or biographies. Things in
their accumulative bonding object to the pace and linear irreversibility of
continuous history. Second, and apart from the critique it also entails of
the modern conception of progress and utility, the depiction of the past
as an accumulation of debris, as heaps of rubbish, pertinently captures
Benjamins concern with the "other" past, the discarded, the wrecked, the
"at once scattered and preserved" (Benjamin 1996:169). This rubbish, this
discarded past, serves a crucial critical historical mission.
Nowhere is this more conspicuously manifested than in the ruins of
modernity itself, in our own marginalized pasts. Since the nineteenth century,
mass production, consumerism, and thus cycles of material replacement
have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are, with
increasing rapidity, victimized and made redundant. At the same time,
processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although they are
In Defense of Things 169
largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance
devoted to consumption and production (Gonzälez-Ruibal 2006, 200S).
The outcome is a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping
malls, overgrown bunkers, and redundant mining towns—a ghostly
world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns
and conventional histories (Edensor 2005; DeSilvey 2006; Burström 2007;
Gonzäles-Ruibal 2008; Andreassen, Bjerck, and Olsen 2010).
These ruined things were once useful and thus embedded in repetitious
practice and infused with habit memory. When discarded and outmoded,
their habitual mnemonic significance is lost while their physical presence,
albeit ruined, continues. As such they survive and gather as the material
antonyms to the habitually useful, creating a tension-filled constellation
that carries the potential of triggering a particular kind of involuntary
memory (Benjamin 1999b). As debris and as a component of the "other
past," things may be actualized as "dialectical images," a term Benjamin
used to denote instances or moments where the past comes together with
the present—not in habitual (or ideological) harmony but as an unreconciled
constellation, a charged force field. In their residual state these
othered things bring to attention the tensions between their own pre- or
ur-history (of uses, success, hopes, and wishes) and their after-history,
their fate as stranded rubble in the present (Benjamin1999b:473-76; BuckMorss
1999:110ff., 219-21).
Thus, the tension-charged constellation, "the petrified unrest" that
Benjamin located in the "dialectical image" is primarily activated by the
"other" and discarded past: the abandoned farmhouse, the one-eyed doll
in the garbage pit, the wrecked Skoda in the overgrown field. The past that
is not only blasted out of continuous history (as narrated and conceived),
but that also exists in suspense to the past still present but absorbed into
our habitual schemes of action. While the lauer may be seen more as conforming
to a Gadamerian fusion of horizons in its ready-to-handness, the
mnemonic of the former consists precisely in actualization "flashing up in
the nowof its recognizability" (Benjamin1999b:473). Reverberating against
the taken-for-granted materiality of habit memory, these ruins become
potential agents of disruption; they actualize the forgotten or unwanted.
In other words, the duration (and sedimentation, although in different
proportions) of the outdated and nonuseful alongside the habitually (and
sometimes also politically and ideologically) useful, causes tensions that
allow for alternative memory practices unfolding between the habitual
and the consciously recollected. By definition, this memory is genuinely
involuntary and acts in this respect as a device of Verstörung, something
that interrupts and disturbs both the habitual and the recollective.
Decay is usually understood in a purely negative way; things are degraded
and humiliated through material alteration, while the informa-
19
170 Chapter 8
tion, knowledge, and memory embedded in them become lost along the
way (DeSilvey 2006). However, central to Benjamin was also the idea that
things may actually release some of their meaning or generate a different
kind of knowledge precisely through processes of decay and ruination
(Benjamin 1999b; Andersson 2001). Experiencing a working, populated
city or a complete building may not reveal much about the way it actually
works, the diversity of materials and technologies that are mobilized to
construct and operate it. These comrades tend to be cunningly hidden or
disguised by design and smooth architectural form. Ruination disturbs
the taken-for-granted; in the destruction process new layers of meaning
are revealed, meanings that may only be possible to grasp at second
hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality.
Ruination can thus be seen also as a recovery of memory (DeSilvey 2006):
a slow-motion archaeology, or self-excavation, that exposes the formerly
hidden and black-boxed. The masked object is unveiled, inside is turned
out, privacy revealed (Andreassen, Bjerck, and Olsen 2010). As expressed
by Tim Edensor:
Ruination produces a defamiliarized landscape in which the formerly
hidden emerges; the tricks that make a building a coherent ensemble are
revealed, exposing the magic of construction. The internal organs, pipes,
veins, wiring and tubes—the guts of a building—spill out .. . The key points
of tension become visible, and the skeleton—the infrastructure an which
all else hangs—the pillars, keystones, support walls and beams stand while
less sturdy materials—the clothing or flesh of the building—peels off. (2005:
109-10)
The things left, in their general accumulative bonding but most pertinently
as announced by the discarded and stranded, may thus be seen
as serving a double historical mission. First, they reveal the gaps in the
construction of history as progress and as continuous narrative. Second,
they rescue a forgotten past, not as heritage, at least not in any ordinary
sense, but as a special kind of involuntary memory. This memory illuminates
not only what conventional cultural history has left behind, but
also what is made redundant by habitual memory. These things bring
forth and actualize the abject memories that both the recollective and the
habitual have displaced. Moreover, one may also speculate as to whether
it is in this state of abandoned being, "freed from the drudgery of being
useful" (Benjamin 2002:39) and released from the chains of relations they
have been enslaved in, that aspects of things' ownness and integrity most
immediately are made present.
In Benjamin's work the ruined gives face to that whichis discarded and
outdated, bringing forth what is fragmented and lost in conventional history.
Interestingly, it is also in this this borderland—that much
Figure 8.5. Revealed privacy, Lyngmo farm, Arctic Norway (photo: Bjornar Olsen).
ilp
172 Chapter 8
archaeological work has taken place—not only when conspicuously
explored in its marginal and postcolonial fields, but also in its everydayness
of bringing to light those mundane things that cultural history has
ignored (cf. Lucas 2004; Gonzäles-Ruibal 2008:248, 261-62). The potential
significance of this merging is great, as the work of a number of scholars
has already explicitly shown (cf. Burström 2007; Deetz 1977; Shanks 2004;
Gonzäles-Ruibal 2006, 2008; Andreassen, Bjerck, and Olsen 2010). As
argued by Michael Shanks, to do archaeology is to work on what there
is and on what is left (2007:273)—in other words, things in their duration
(see Meskell and Joyce 2003).
CONCLUSION: HOW ARE THINGS?
"How are things?" asks Roger-Pol Droit at the outset of his fascinating
book whose title asks the very same question (2005). And although the
answer is necessarily somewhat inconclusive, his mundane inquiry into
the being of things reveals their profound significance in all aspects of
our everyday life. My main inquiry in this book and this last chapter
has been to explore the question of how and why things are significant.
To accomplish this task, I have found it appropriate and necessary to
pay less attention to things' "meaning" in the ordinary sense—that is,
the way they may function as part of a signifying system, be involved
in material semiotics, and so on. Although by no means dismissing this
communicative and representative role of things (see Preucel 2006 for an
excellent overview), I do not conceive of it as a primary aspect of their
being (cf. Gell 1998:6). It is in any case well explored, even perhaps overemphasized,
leaving us with a somewhat biased conception of things in
material culture studies (cf. Ingold 2007a). My focus has therefore been
the less explored facets of things' being. What is the significance of things
"in themselves"? What is their integrity, so to speak?
The answers given start from the simple fact that things are not words,
nor are they primarily signs to be read or products ready to be consumed
or "sublated." Things possess their own nonverbal qualities and are
involved in their own material and historical processes that cannot be
disclosed unless we explore their integrity qua things. Things come to
us primarily as ready-to-hand equipment: as chairs, beds, stoves, axes,
kayaks, fridges, houses, cars, roads—in other words, as things that work,
not as symbolic consumables. Contrary to the linguistic signifier, the tasks
they fulfill are primarily due to their irreplaceability or superiority in conducting
precisely these tasks and to their nonarbitrariness in significant
operations such as shooting, boating, traveling, bridging, sitting, housing,
and so on. In conducting these tasks, things normally come to us as reliIn
Defense of Things 173
able and familiar. We can trust them. They are in place, and they last. Not
without exception, of course, but as the normal state of their being—in
other words, the overwhelming majority of everyday instances.
Thus, it is hard to conceive of society and culture without the durability
and "in-place-ness" of things. These are probably their most important
general, culturally constitutive and socially constructive "affordances" (in
addition to their specific task value). Apart from the solidity this brings
to all we have learned to think of as social and cultural, it also allows
for another intimately related effect: the gathering or sedimentation of
the past. The past is not left behind, but patiently gathers and folds into
what we conveniently term the present. teile we have become familiar
with Gadamer's notions regarding tradition and how effective historical
consciousness affects us as scholars and laypeople, the way we are influenced
by this very effective material past is far less acknowledged and
far less frequently discussed. However, contrary to Gadamer's harmonious
fusion of horizon (including the surviving "authority of tradition")
and Bergson's conception of the habitual useful, this enduring materiality
is—by itself—largely indiscriminate, also caring for the traces of the
discarded and what is made redundant and "othered" in history. Thus,
sedimentation not only "makes history slow," it also rescues that which
is untimely and displaced, creating the potential for involuntary and possibly
disturbing memories of this forgotten past. It is also the very same
affordance that allows archaeology to be conducted and which also points
to the great, critical potential of the discipline known by that name (cf.
Gonzälez-Ruibal 2008).
How are things then? Well, despite their marginalization and stigmatization
in much of modern Western social and political thinking, they
are doing pretty well, which is probably just another reminder of the discrepancy
between practice and self-representation in modern academia,
an intellectual dodge made possible by a very particular kind of oblivion:
that human society is built with things.
([1111'1"1
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. This clearly includes a good portion of my own work (e.g., Olsen1987, 1990).
2. The phrase originates from Karl Marx, but has taken an its own "effective
history" since then.
3. Thus the "Tardian moments" ascribed Durkheim by Latour are actually far
more (and probably more DurIcheimian) than acknowledged (Latour 2005).
CHAPTER 2
1. Miller actually writes "the 19th century," which is obviously a Slip of the
pen.
2. The statement originates from Edmund Husserl but is more widely adopted
as a slogan for phenomenology (See Heidegger 1962:50, 58; Merleau-Ponty
1968:4).
3. The literature is far too vast tobe referenced fairly. See Meskell (1996), Hamilakis
(2002), and Joyce (2005) for overviews, and Meskell and Joyce (2003) for a
particularly well-developed discussion.
CHAPTER 3
1. The concept of derance is a hybrid of the concepts of diffdrence and differ6,
thus combining the notion of "differing" with "deferral." By doing this, Derrida
adds a dimension of postponement (and dispersal) to the concept of difference.
175
176 Notes Notes 177
2. The translation of Derrida's phrase "i/ n'y a pas de hors-texte" is somewhat
debated. More correct semantic versions may be that there is "no outside-text" or
even "nothing outside context."
3. Figure captions borrowed from Thomas (2004).
CHAPTER 4
1. This should not be read as though Husserl's later ("genetic") philosophy
influenced Heidegger's founding work, Sein und Zeit. The latter work can be seen
as a reaction against his teacher's early phenomenology, against which Husserl
himself also turned.
2. For some critics, Bergson's notion of image is so dose to the thing itself
that he has no need to distinguish between the thing and its image (Sartre
1962:39-40).
3. While ontic assertions may be seen as necessary for any discussion of the
world and the being of things, the thing's ontological "being-in-itself" cannot be
clarified from the present-at-hand only (or primarily; cf. Heidegger 1962:106-7).
4. One important lesson from Heidegger's discussion of things' modes of
being is that theoretical thinking about them, or reflexivity about the world, in
some sense presupposes a suspension of the referential entanglement, our practical
ready-to-hand concern (cf. Dreyfus 1991:79-84). This dearly resonates with
Bergson's notion of disentanglement as a necessary condition for "picturing" the
world.
5. There are also, of course, obvious links to other bodies of work such as
Bourdieu's notion of habitus and the condition under which the "doxic" mode
may be questioned and thus brought to mind (1977).
6. In an interesting discussion of this concept, Harman argues that it involved
a "diagonal" dualism on two levels: On one level sky and mortals are related as
part of the visible (the present-at-hand, "broken tool"), while earth and gods are
part of the concealed (the ready-to-hand, "tool"). On another levet Heidegger's
distinction between the "specific something" and the "something in general"
relates sky and gods (as something specific), as opposed to earth and mortals (as
something at all; Harman 2002:203).
7. In most (English language) literature, this term is used untranslated as
Heidegger's term for the violating character of modern technology. Directly
translated, it means "rock," "skeleton," "frame" (originally: a position, to place),
something that (in a negative sense) "frames up" our modern being (Heidegger
1993:325; cf. Inwood 2000:210-11; Young 2002).
8. Actually, this taxonomy continues to also reproduce itself in the "new"
material culture studies, where it appears under new names-one of them being
implied in the focus on "inalienable" objects (cf. Appadurai 1986b;Thomas1991).
9. As one will notice, these concepts are given another, much more negative
meaning as compared with Being and Time.
10. The term belongs to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke describing how modernity
and monetarism have deprived things of their meaning, turning them into
commodities. Thus, things long back: "The ore is homesick. And it yearns to leave
the coin and leave the wheel that teaches it to lead a life inane."
CHAPTER 5
1. In an exchange with Theodor Adorno, Benjamin writes favorably about Simmel
("Isn't it time he got some respect") and The Philosophy of Money ("Nevertheless,
if one disregards its basic idea, very interesting things are to be found in the
book" [Benjamin 2003:209]).
2. Miller uses this term very liberally, and Bruno Latour seems to be a key
representative of this category of abstracted thinkers despite his numerous works
on scientific practice.
CHAPTER 6
1. This premise is of course widely held in archaeology as well. The archaeological
concern with past objects as a source material, a way of recollecting the past,
is related to our conception of them as present-at-hand traces, sources, or signs.
2. Mulhall actually describes the past dinner plate in its present context as
ready-to-hand ("ready-to-hand as a piece of domestic crockery or an antiquity"
[1996:18]), a term very difficult to assign to something consciously singled out as
historical and treated in a special way according to this abstraction.
CHAPTER 7
1. Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh is somewhat ambiguous. It is not matter in
any direct sense and "to designate it we should need the old term 'element,' in
the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth and fixe, that is, in the sense of
a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea"
(1968:139). He also speaks of it as "the concrete emblem of a general manner of
being" (147). In some ways it can be seen as related to Bergson's concept of the
image and the "virtual" (cf. Pearson 2002:2 ff.; see chapters 4 and 6).
2. Gell argues against the distinction between art objects and things in general.
3. "In actuality, many extern become artefacts as they are modified through
interactions with people or artefacts" (Schiffer 1999:13). This should probably imply
that clouds, for example, may today be conceived of as artifacts.
4. For a while, the name seemed to lack confidence. Latour himself dedared in
1999 that "there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory: the
word 'actor,' the word 'network,' the word 'theory' and the hyphen!" (1999a:15).
These "four nails in the coffin" did not bury ANT as a program or its name, and
in 2005 Latour published a heavy introduction to the nailed project (Latour 2005).
5. This concept, borrowed from semiotics, has been suggested as an alternative
to that of actors (which has a strong human association), in order to establish a
Notes
more democratic, more inclusive approach to"who acts" (cf. Latour1999b:180-82,
303). As noted by Lee and Stenner, "the being of an actant is contingent upon its
capacity to act, and its capacity to act is dependent upon its relations to other
actants" (1999:93).
CHAPTER 8
1. Needless to say, the distinction between the habitually useful and the discarded
past is a very coarse typology that more expresses two extremes of a continuity,
rather than any dichotomy.
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actor-network theory, 12, 50, 73,
101-3, 130, 133-34, 137-48, 151, 155,
177n7.4; actants, 73, 138, 142, 148,
178n7.5; black-boxing, 73, 142-43,
164-65, 170; intermediaries, 73,
144-46; mediators, 17, 38, 103, 145,
146, 156. See also Bygstad, Benclik;
Latour, Bruno; Law, John; Lee,
Nick; Rolland, Knut; Stenner, Paul;
symmetrical approach; Sorensen,
Knut
Adorno, Theodor, 91, 177n5.1
affordance, 15, 146 47, 156, 160, 162-
63, 165, 173
agency, 11, 17, 27, 35, 133-36, 162; of
things, 11, 35, 51, 134-36
Alcock, Susan, 29, 123
Andersson, Dag, 167
ANT. See actor-network theory
Antarctic, 143
anthropology/ anthropologists, 4, 5, 7,
17, 21-24, 33, 37-38, 47, 49, 53-56,
75, 77, 79, 86, 93, 97-98, 100-4, 121,
126, 129, 133-35, 152
Appadurai, Arjun, 36
archaeology: and art, 61; and
phenomenology, 26-31, 40, 46, 71,
75, 77-78, 84-88, 132-33, 152-53;
as concept and metaphor, 2-3,152;
discipline of, 22-26, 126-27, 170-72;
postprocessual, 24-27, 29, 40, 49, 52;
processual, 34-36, 42, 107
architecture, 38, 96, 121, 144, 146
Ashmore, Wendy, 29
Attfield, Judith, 4
aura, 52, 96, 131. See also mimetic
attitude
Barret, James, 134
Barth, Fredrik, 23
Barthes, Roland, 39, 41, 43-44, 50-52,
55, 111
Beek, Gosewijn van, 58
being-in-the-world. See Heideggerian
concepts
Bender, Barbara, 29-30
Benjamin, Walter, 2, 12, 17, 34, 36, 52,
55, 61, 87, 95-96, 111-12, 114, 118,
120-21, 131-32, 151, 161, 167-70,
177n5.1. See also aura; dialectical
image; etui-man; mimetic
attitude
Benso, Silvia, 151
Bestand. See Heideggerian concepts
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Index
197
198 Index Index 199
Bergson, Henri, 2, 8, 12, 67-68, 75,
78, 87, 108, 116-20, 131, 151, 161,
162, 166, 176n4.2, 177n7.1. See also
memory: recollective
Bickel, Balthasar, 77
Boaz, Franz, 97
body, 7-9, 27-28, 32, 56-57, 68, 70,
77-79, 116, 120-24, 130-33, 136, 158;
as "flesh," 7, 67, 131-32, 177n7.1;
orienting/positioning of, 68, 71,
76-79, 132-33; and sex/ gender,
56-57; techniques of, 120-21, 132.
See also memory: habit
Borges, Jorge L., 61
Bourdieu, Pierre, 27, 159, 176n4.5
Bradley, Richard, 110
bricolage, theoretical, 12-14, 28,
151-52
Brown, Bill, 1, 97-98
Bruegel, Pieter, 107
burials, 48, 74, 99-100, 125, 144
Butler, Judith, 7, 45, 56-57
Bygstad, Bendik, 139
Cartesian thinking, 7, 12, 31, 41, 64-66,
69, 78, 139
Casey, Edward,117
Certeau, Michel de, 7
circumspection. See Heideggerian
concepts
Childe, Vere G., 10, 24
Clifford, James, 54
Colombia Plateau, Oregon, 85
Comte, August, 159
Connerton, Paul,121-24. See also
memory: incorporating practices;
memory: inscribing practices
constructivism, social/cultural, 3, 5,
17, 30, 40, 61, 84, 126, 139-40, 153
consumption studies, 22, 32-34, 37,
141
Cooney, Gabriel, 29
Dasein. See Heideggerian concepts
deconstruction, 45, 54, 58
Deetz, James, 143-45
Deluze, Gilles, 120
Derrida, Jacques, 41, 44 45, 58, 175-
76n3.2
Descartes, Rene, 64, 98
dialectical image, 169
Dreyfus, Hubert, 71, 164
Droh, Roger-Pol, 172
Durkheim, Emile, 6
Dyke, Ruth van, 29, 123
Edensor, Tim, 170
embodiment, 3, 28, 53, 85-86, 101, 109,
134, 141, 153; criticism of, 34-36,
142. See also objectification
Eriksen, Thomas H., 5
etui-man, 34, 96, 105
fetish/fetishism, 11, 24, 38, 54, 92-94,
97-99, 103, 105, 133
Fischer, Michael, 53
Friedell, Egon, 92, 95
Foucault, Michel, 7, 12, 27, 40-41, 46,
54, 112-13
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 124, 169, 173
Gamble, Clive, 25
Gell, Alfred, 135-36, 141, 177n7.2
Gestell. See Heideggerian concepts
Gibson, James, 132, 146-47. See also
affordance
gift/ gift exchange, 5-6
Glassie, Henry, 33, 49, 63
Gurevich, Aron, 5
habit memory. See memory
Hacking, Ian, 58, 64
Harman, Graham, 11, 13, 59, 65, 70, 82;
155-56, 176n4.6
Haraway, Donna, 57
Hatt, Emilie D., 99
Hegel, Georg W. F., 78
Heidegger, Martin, 2, 12-13, 15, 27-28,
36, 41, 64, 66-84, 87-88, 91, 96,
112-16, 139, 153, 155, 164, 175n4.1,
175n4.3-4.6; Being and Time, 69, 80,
82, 87, 176n4.9
Heideggerian concepts: being-in-theworld,
28, 31, 66, 68, 76, 78, 99, 113,
115, 117, 124, 126, 130; Bestand,
82-84, 88, 153; circumspection,
71-72, 75-77, 87, 88, 124, 159, 164;
Dasein, 66, 75-76, 113-15, 159;
equipment, 69, 71, 73, 75, 80-83, 87,
114-15, 123, 153, 155, 158, 165, 172;
Gestell, 82, 84, 92, 105, 115; presentat-hand,
72-74, 78, 80-82, 88, 111,
114-15, 118, 164-65, 176n4.3/4.6,
177n6.1; ready-to-hand, 15, 59,
69-76, 78, 80-82, 86, 88, 94, 113-15,
118, 125, 153, 159, 164-65, 169, 172,
176n4.4/4.6, 177n6.2; the thing,
80-84, 88, 176n4.6
Hjelmslev, Louis, 41
Horkheimer, Max, 91
hunters/hunter-gatherer, 70-71, 96, 99,
136, 147
Husserl, Edmund, 27-28, 64-66,
175n2.2
IKEA furniture, 16, 38
image, 67-68, 116, 176n4.2
idealism, 61, 63, 67, 97
involuntary memory. See memory
Ingold, Tim, 15-16, 18, 99, 101, 107,
153
Jakobson, Roman, 41
James, Henry, 61
Jewett, Sara 0., 98
Joerges, Bernward,134
Johansen, Tom, 163
Jones, Andrew,110
Joyce, Rosemary, 35
Kagge, Erling, 143, 148
Kant, Immanuel, 64-65, 78
Klee, Paul, 167
Knapp, A. Bernard, 29
Kristeva, Julia, 41, 44, 52
Latour, Bruno, 1, 12-13, 17, 73, 101-2,
111, 133, 141, 146, 156, 161, 177n5.2,
177n7.4. See also actor-network
theory
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 41
Löfgren, Orvar, 34
landscape, 3-4, 10-12, 26-32, 34, 36-37,
39-40, 50, 62, 70-71, 75, 77-78,
84-86, 88, 90, 99, 107, 116, 124, 140,
151, 163, 169-70
Law, John, 138, 155
Leach, Edmund, 24, 38
Lee, Nick, 142, 178n7.5
Leone, Mark, 21, 25
London, 127
Macann, Christopher, 79, 113
Marcus, George, 53
Marx, Karl, 10, 93-94, 139, 160-61,
175n1.2
Marxism, 5, 94, 155
material culture, 1, 3, 9, 16, 18, 22, 24,
25-26, 35, 49, 50, 52, 57-61, 87, 89,
97, 103, 105-6, 129, 143, 152, 158;
concept of, 15-16, 25, 106; studies,
2-3, 13, 15, 18,19, 21, 22, 29, 32-34,
37-40, 42, 46-47, 57, 84, 87, 98, 153,
155, 172, 176n4.8; as text, 26, 39,
46-50, 56-62
megaliths, 26, 36, 85. See also things
memory: archaeological approaches
to, 108-12, 123, 125-27; habit,
8, 60, 116-26, 166, 169, 170; and
incorporating practices, 121-25; and
inscribing practices,121-22, 124-26;
involuntary, 110, 117-19, 169-70,
173; recollective, 8, 108-9, 116, 118,
122, 124-26, 161, 166, 169-70. See
also Bergson, Henri; Connerton,
Paul
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 7, 12, 28,
66-68, 78-80, 87, 120, 125, 130-33,
177n7.1. See also body; motor skills/
habits; memory: habit
Meskell, Lynn, 35, 123, 149
metaphors/metaphorical relations,
2-3, 25, 31, 34, 86, 94, 101, 105, 141,
146, 152, 156-57
Index Index 201
mimetic attitude, 52, 95-96, 131, 158.
See also aura
Miller, Daniel, 1, 11, 26, 32, 37, 94, 97,
103-4, 175n2.1, 177n5.2
motor skills/ habits, 79-80, 116, 120
Mulhall, Stephen, 177n6.2
New England, 147
New York, 58
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 112
Nixon, Richard, 63
objects. See material culture; things
objectification, 12, 28, 38, 80, 86, 94,
134, 162. See also embodiment
Olduvai Gorge, 9
Olivier, Laurent, 108, 127
the past: as duration, 48, 107-9,
115, 119-21, 181, 166, 169, 172;
as gone (forgotten), 108-16, 125;
sedimentation/ accumulation of,
127, 160-62, 165-66, 168-69, 173
Petursdöttir, 136ra, 6, 99
phenomenology, 13, 26-31, 40,
46, 63-88, 130-32, 151. See also
archaeology: and phenomenology;
Harman, Graham; Heidegger,
Martin; Heideggerian concepts;
Husserl, Edmund; Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice; Tilley, Christopher
Popper, Karl, 91
processual archaeology. See
archaeology
postprocessual archaeology. See
archaeology
poststructuralism, 12, 26, 39-62, 142,
151, 155
present-at-hand. See Heideggerian
concepts
Preucel, Robert, 57
Propp, Vladimir, 41
Proust, Marcel, 61, 118-20
ready-to-hand. See Heideggerian
concepts
reductive perception, 65-66, 68, 117,
158
reindeer and reindeer herders, 21,
86-87, 96, 109, 163, 169
Renfrew, Colin, 42, 126
Rilke, Rainer M., 92, 95, 176n4.10
rock art, 36, 85-88, 94
Rolland, Knut,139
Rome, 127
ruins/ruination, 111, 160, 163, 166,
168-70
Sämi (the people), 87, 99-100, 159
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 41
Scarry, Elaine, 8
Schiffer, Michael B., 1, 63, 136-37
semiotics, 2, 138, 155-56, 172, 177n7.5
Sennett, Richard, 37
Serres, Michel, 9, 12, 21, 140, 161
Shanks, Michael, 172
Simmel, Georg, 34, 52, 89, 95-96, 105,
177n5.1
South Pole, 143
Stenner, Paul, 142, 178n7.5
Strathern, Marilyn, 135, 141
structuralism, 12, 40-44, 155
Sweden, 36, 85
symmetrical approach, 9-10, 13, 62,
85
Sorensen, Knut, 134
Sorheim, Toruran, 5
Tallgren, Aarne M., 24
Taylor, Walter, 24
technology, 11, 16, 46, 58, 73-74, 81-82,
88, 90-92, 94, 97, 105, 126, 134, 138,
153, 163; fear of, 11, 81-82, 90-92,
97, 105, 176n4.7
things: forgetting of, 1-2, 5-12, 17,
21-22, 63, 81, 89-106, 133-34, 138-
41, 143; integrity of, 2, 26, 37, 64,
71, 81, 88, 96, 131, 153, 155-57, 170,
172; as quasi-objects, 139; return
to, 19-21, 22, 32, 34, 59, 66-67, 87;
theorizing of, 2-3, 12-15, 17-18, 38,
151-52, 154-55; and writing, 15-18,
52-56, 61. See also material culture;
memory; metaphors; ruins/
ruination
Thomas, Julian, 27, 58
Tilley, Christopher, 27-30, 36, 77-78,
85, 112
time, 107-16, 118-19, 127-28, 136
Travolta, John, 7
Trentmann, Frank, 21
Tromso, 127
Umsicht. See Heideggerian concepts:
circumspection
Vision/ visual y, 30-32, 64, 71, 76, 96,
131
Wagner, Roy, 135
White, Hayden, 53, 55
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15, 78
Yates, Timothy, 47
Young, Julian, 82
Zeug. See Heideggerian concepts:
equipment
zuhanden. See Heideggerian concepts:
ready-to-hand
About the Author
Bjornar Olsen is professor in archaeology at the University of Tromso,
Norway. He has written a number of papers and books on northern and
Sämi prehistory and history, museology, and on archaeological theory.
His latest book (with Elin Andreassen and Hein Bjerck) is Persistent Memories:
Pyramiden—a Soviet Mining Town in the High Arcti (2010).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has taken a long time to complete. Much of the research for it
was conducted during my sabbatical year at Stanford University in 2003
and the writing was completed during my second year at Stanford in
2007/ 2008. I thank the Stanford Archaeology Center for providing work
space and allowing me to use their facilities, and the Norwegian Research
Council and the University of Tromso for funding my research. A special
thank to Michael Shanks for hosting me at his Metamedia Lab and proving
such a vibrant and generous research environment.
I am very grateful to a number of colleagues and friends who have
shared ideas and literature and discussed various issues related to this
book. In particular I want to thank Douglass Bailey, Cathrine Baglo,
Hein Bjerck, Ewa Domanska, Ian Hodder, Bill Rathje, Alfredo Gonzäles
Ruibal, Michael Shanks, Tim Webmoor and Christopher Witmore. I am
also grateful to Ian Hodder, Robert Preucel and two other anonymous
reviewers for their detailed comments to an earlier draft of this book.
Thanks also go to Elin Rose Myrvoll, Alfredo Gonzäles Ruibal, and Karin
Tansem for allowing me to use their photographs.
203