Contempt and Desire
Since the nineteenth century, industrial design and manufacture have delivered a mass of goods rooted in systems of technological knowledge fitted to an increasingly urbanized and global modernity. The constant offering of new products, combined with ever more effective marketing and advertising, have made the people of today seemingly more conscious about goods—about changes in design and fashion and the apparently urgent need to keep up with “the latest thing” in an age where the accelerating cycle of material replacement has outdated even last year’s novelties. Still, despite the new awareness created by the irresistible attractiveness of the most recent iPhone, Acne jeans, or Mini Cooper, our everyday dealings with most things take place in a mode of inconspicuous familiarity. The bed, the fridge, the stove, the floor, the shower, the butter knife, the cup, the dishwasher, the car key, or the front door rarely become objects of conscious and reflexive concern. These quotidian realities stubbornly exist and perform as taken-for-granted elements of our tacit everydayness. Thus unless broken or missing, or in any other way interrupting our implicit expectation of service as usual, the demeanor of things is perhaps best characterized as one of shyness and invisibility. They largely escape our attention through their naïve givenness.
Curiously, in the study of society, too, there is a lack of concern with the masses of ordinary things securing our existence. Despite their indispensable presence, objects are largely ignored or confined to the margins when the “real” spectacles of life are accounted for in political narratives or sociological analyses. On the main social scene, they may provide a background, a context, a setting, but are otherwise denied any purpose or agency. “Much like sex during the Victorian period,” Bruno Latour writes, “objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt. They exist, naturally, but they are never to be given a thought, a social thought” (Latour 2005, 73).
It is tempting to link things’ marginality in the social sciences to their everyday mundanity. Being at the same time “the most obvious and the best hidden” (Lefebvre 1987, 9), such an intellectual amnesia may seem a predictable outcome. However, under scrutiny, the apparent obviousness of the argument is hard to sustain; what people are consciously aware of in everyday life does not 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. Without denying any connection between the two levels of taciturnity, this suggests that we probably have to dig deeper into the foundation of modern thinking, and even into the very political economy of this thinking, in order to understand the exile of things from twentieth-century social research.
In this chapter, we shall make such an attempt. By exposing what we consider significant intellectual layers of asymmetry, we shall try to explore the foundation of the paradox that things, despite their centrality in an industrial consumer society, despite being the most obvious, closest, and fundamental, even “what might be most distinctive and significant about our species” (Schiffer with Miller 1999, 2), have persistently been kept at arm’s length when society was to be scrutinized and understood. There is more to this. Much as with Victorian sex, the modern attitude toward the thing has been ambiguous, simultaneously entailing ignorance and contempt, neglect and desire, knowledge and mystery. Thus, linked to the plot of silencing is a complementary story of how modernity also brought about a changed consciousness and ambiguous awareness of things. This ambivalence allowed for both a fear of things in their bewildering otherness and a redemptive longing for the atomized and humanized artifact, a longing for the comfort of things. In order to understand the fate of things in Western thinking, we also have to expose the roots of these ambiguities.
Idealist models of mental cognition have had grounding impact on theories of human perception. According to a dominant conception, our experience of things is by and large a cognitive perception in which sensory inputs, mainly based on vision, are filtered and transformed by our mind and language. Ian Hacking has named such suspicion of all that is beyond or prior to thinking and discursive representation linguistic idealism (or the Richard Nixon doctrine), “only what is talked about exists; nothing has reality until it is spoken of, or written about” (Hacking 2001, 24). Another (but not identical) version of this doctrine is expressed in the famous phrase with which Ludwig Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (1922). Taking this doctrine literally, an entity exists—and is rendered important to social analysis—only insofar as we as knowing subjects are consciously aware of it and are able to articulate this experience discursively.
Cartesian thinking constitutes a basal layer in the archaeology of idealism. This thinking left us with a notion of matter as passive and inert, while the human mind was seen as active and creative.1 Matter and mind belong to separate realms, and the widening gulf between them became a never-ending source for modern epistemological inquiries about how (and if) our concepts of the world could correspond with the material reality “out there.” The skeptical attitude that followed in the wake of Descartes’s “methodological doubt” placed a seemingly irretrievable wedge between the material world and the human mind. The so-called external world, matter and nature, had no necessary immanent existence; actually, it may all prove to be a construction in our heads. If not unreal, matter was still mere surface without any powers or potential; all qualities and ideas about it have to be located in the thinking, self-aware subject (Matthews 2002; Thomas 2004a).
Immanuel Kant’s efforts to reveal the a priori structures of experience also had a great impact on these issues for much of modern thinking. According to Kant, the thing in itself (das Ding an sich) cannot 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, as phenomena, are knowable “objects of sense”; we do not know “a thing in itself . . . 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, § 32). Kant’s denial of any direct encounter with the material world meant that we understand the thing primarily in the way it is formed by ourselves, that is, by what we supply with our own thinking or reason (Andersson 2001, 81–93).
With things in themselves largely out of reach, they are, for Kant, shut off from our immediate experience and thus expelled from the knowable world. Only in their abstracted condition as objects of science could they still be admitted (Andersson 2001, 130; Olsen 2007).2 This ontology denied any direct access to things and the rapports between them, and it later surfaced as a skeptical attitude whereby materiality is treated with suspicion and denied anything more than a provisional or transcendental existence. Moreover, creative engagement with the world became an asymmetrical enterprise leaving no role to the qualities and competences that could be said already to dwell in materials and nature, which humans in turn helped to release or make manifest in an act of co-production. Creativity, influence, and power became the current rare commodities, which only humans in themselves possess. The modern birth of humanity as the creative master subject coincided with, and in many ways presupposed, the simultaneous death of an active and purposeful material world. In short, this passage left us with a conception of matter as formless and basically meaningless (Latour 1993; Andersson 2001; Thomas 2004a).
That things became conspicuously present in the mundane world a short century after Kant ironically did not help their reputation. On the contrary, to most philosophers and social theorists the mass-produced, mass-distributed, and mass-consumed object of the late nineteenth century was a sign of an illusory world conveying a deceptive image of the world as thing-made (Brown 2003). Proliferating in the ruined landscape left by the onslaught of capitalism and industrialization, things, consumer goods, and machines, these cold and inhuman technologies, became the incarnation of our inauthentic, estranged, and alienated modern being (fig. 2.1).
FIGURE 2.1. Rows of finished jeeps churned out in mass production at the Willys-Overland facility in Toledo, Ohio, in preparation for the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Photo by Dmitri Kessel, June 1, 1942. Getty Images #50598573.
Philosophers, social theorists, artists, and writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century 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 life worlds—that is, as in romanticism more generally, the rural life world of the peasant—were vanishing. To paraphrase 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).
Heidegger’s conception of modern technology and mass culture typifies the nostalgia and pessimism to which modernity gave rise. The desertion of the countryside, the vanishing of village communities, family bonds, and traditional customs and values, created a sense of loss, of decay 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 the homeland and the people (Heidegger 1993; Young 2002). Such attitudes contributed to a kind of imperative of shortage based upon an arbitrary contrast between the authentic, singular, and unique as against the mimetic, mass-produced, and pervasive.
Similar anti-technological concerns were raised throughout the first and mid twentieth century by thinkers as different as Horkheimer, Adorno, Popper, Sartre, and Mumford. 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. This could be combined with an academic and elitist preference for high culture over popular culture rooted in mass-produced goods. Science and engineering were treated with intellectual suspicion or contempt, something that threatened humanity and which caused social theorists and philosophers increasingly to define creativity, emancipation, and authentic being as what escapes materiality. 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” (Popper 1972, 222). Things were dangerous in their deceptive appearance; they were a threat against authentic human and social values. Whether intended or not, as humanism’s other, things came to play the role of the villain, thus lending justification to them being ignored by disciplines studying what were seen as genuine social and cultural practices (Olsen 2003, 2010).
In addition to this technological menace, modernist thinkers also came to express a distaste for the inauthentic, the artificial. Mass-produced replicas and consumer goods replaced “good things”; evil things were substituted for things with “soul.” Heidegger’s care and concern, as in his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” seem increasingly directed toward art and gentle things, the work of poiesis, while ordinary equipment is seen as determined by usefulness, part of the serviceable Bestand, or stock (a standing reserve), in which matter is used and “used up. It disappears into usefulness” (Heidegger 1971: 44).
This concern with technology and mass production in “the age of mechanical reproduction” (Walter Benjamin’s formulation) gave rise in European thinking to a new and ambiguous awareness of things from the angle of shortage or loss: rooted in a past slipping away and dying, the real and authentic became increasingly scarce in their supply. The sense of this was well captured by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter dating from 1925:
To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well,” a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there. . . . Now everything is 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 common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered.3
Typifying this consciousness was a concern with mass-produced goods swarming the mundane world, providing ordinary people with affordable replicas of objects and materials otherwise reserved for the few and rich. 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: “white-washed tin presents itself as marble, paper mâché 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” (Friedell 1937, quoted after Christensen 1993, 27, our translation).
Another symptom of this concern for the vanishing real was a particular aversion against the new materials and designs that started to make an impact on the built environment especially from the nineteenth century on (fig. 2.2). Intellectuals and politicians increasingly complained about inauthentic architecture, the vulgar iron-and-glass arcades, exhibition halls, factories, and bridges constructed by engineers (Benjamin 2002, 33, Buck-Morss 1999, 127–29). Iron, for example, was distrusted by some architects because it was not immediately present in nature. Thus, when used structurally it was frequently faced with stone. Another argument used to denounce these constructions was that they lacked “ruin value,” they could not produce gentle ruins of the kind left us from classical antiquity (Yablon 2009). John Ruskin, for example, refused to count iron constructions (“the iron roofs and pillars of our railway stations”) as architecture, partly because the builders did not have true command over iron’s “modes of decay” (2001 [1849], 68–69). Nearly a century later, the Marxist Ernst Bloch likewise claimed that the products of the machine age were unable to acquire an aura of antiquity: they “cannot grow old but only rot in the course of the years” (quoted in Yablon 2009, 8).
FIGURE 2.2. A forest of wells, rigs, and derricks at the Signal Hill oil fields near Long Beach, California. Photo by Andreas Feininger, December 31, 1943. Getty Images #92925999.
In The Philosophy of Money (1978 [1900]), the sociologist Georg Simmel sharply identified this ambiguity as a defining characteristic of the modern attitude to things. Technology and mass production were seen as depriving things of their social meaning, and thus fuelling hostility toward “mere” things, but at the same time, there was a growing interest in and fascination for genuine objects, Simmel noted: “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” (Simmel 1978, 404). To Simmel, however, this new interest in things was superficial and fragmentary, and actually served as an escape from the pestering of the present material world (“The flight from the present is made easier”). Thus the modern interest in exotic art, in antiquities, in turning objects into art, is a redeeming and “comforting stimulation for weakened nerves”: “the present vividly felt charm for the fragment, the mere allusion, the aphorism, the symbol, . . . they place 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 agoraphobia: the fear of coming into too close a contact with objects” (Simmel 1978, 474).
In a similar way, another German intellectual, Walter Benjamin, explored how modernity came to impede this fundamental change in the conception of things. One of his concerns 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, in their auratic own-ness, the modern gaze was isomorphic, subjecting them to intimacy and sameness (Benjamin 2003, 255–56). In his critical writings of 1930s, Benjamin was targeting this dominant modern conception of materiality, especially as displayed in the intérieur of the late-nineteenth-century bourgeois home. As a reaction against (or retreating from) the emerging cityscapes and the “cold and inhuman” works of engineers, the bourgeois home became a sheltered arena of aesthetization, intimacy, and the sublimation of tradition. Staged as inventory in this domesticated sphere, things had completely lost their otherness and individuality. They were sentenced to serfdom and became nothing but labels of privacy, faithfully mirroring their owner: “[t]he etui-man [das Etui-Mensch] looks for comfort, and the case [etui] is the quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world” (Benjamin 1999a, 542). In a wonderful passage, Benjamin writes of how modern people, “chilled in a chilly environment” (1996, 779), try to overcome their 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 warmth if they are not to freeze us to death, and handle their spiny forms with infinite dexterity if we are not to bleed to death” (453).
It can be argued forcefully that the modern social and humanist turn against mass-produced goods and technology seriously contributed to things’ nonsocial status. Although directed at mass-produced, inauthentic “evil things,” this movement fuelled an implicit suspicion of the material, of things more generally. A very influential expression of this originates from Karl Marx’s writings on alienation and reification, especially as developed in the notion of “commodity fetishism.”
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. With fetishism came a “misunderstanding” by which qualities that can properly be ascribed only to the realm of humans were attributed to things (Christensen 1993, 39–41; Pels 1998).
In Das Kapital, Marx argues that the capitalist economy fetishized the commodity by ascribing to it an abstract intrinsic value (or exchange value). Operating in support of a wider bourgeois ideology, this fetishism masked the fact that the “real” value of goods stemmed from the social labor invested in their production. Things (as commodities) appear to have a value of their own, resulting purely from their circulation in a market. Thus they are alienated from their producers; they are divorced from the human toil and the social relations that gave rise to them through their production (Marx 1975, 324). This 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 works in a dual way by which social phenomena take on the appearance of things, as well as inanimate things are treated as if they had social qualities (Held 1980, 220).
Thus despite its iconic association with (historical) materialism, and the immense sociohistorical importance it assigned to ready-to-hand technology (as forces of production), Marxism paradoxically also came to fuel an aversion for things in modern social theory. Although primarily intended as a critique of how things lost their social value in the capitalist mode of production, Marxism de facto ended up providing social theory with an evocatively negative vocabulary that strongly contributed to their stigmatization: objectification, reification, and “instrumental reason.” Much as a consequence, 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,’” Daniel Miller observes (1987, 11).
Ironically, this critique joined forces with a long-standing bourgeois contempt in academia, and 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, distinct, from the repugnant filth of trivial labor and production (a distinction even underlying the divisions of labor in archaeology and the separation of the field from the laboratory, the archive, the study (Berggren and Hodder 2003; Shanks and McGuire 1996; Witmore 2004b). Only aestheticized material, fine art, the exotic—and the book—were allowed access, keeping oily, smelly objects at arm’s length (cf. Beek 1989, 95). The aversion to treating technological and applied disciplines and engineering as “real” academic disciplines rather than, at best, professional fields, is another aspect of this story.
At the same time as philosophers, writers, and intellectuals at large began to express their concern with an objectified, monetary and technology-driven modern society, things were excluded from being significant source material in anthropology and the social sciences. There is a striking coincidence in timing between the general intellectual reaction toward alienating machinery and mass production and the first cry against things as meaningful sources of social inquiry.
One powerful trajectory of this turn against things is seen in the development of British anthropology, which by the 1920s had reinvented itself as “social anthropology,” a discipline concerned with processes and structures beyond and mostly inaccessible through things. Societies and cultures were henceforth to be accessed directly through the new disciplinary imperative of dialogue and participant observation—ethnography (Miller 1987, 111; cf. Kuper 1978). Things were no longer assigned any role in mediating the relationship between anthropologists and the cultures studied. Increasingly concerned with the reasons for the natives’ “otherness” (i.e., that behind their seemingly strange and obscure habits and rituals, there was a “practical reason,” an economic or social rationality), social frameworks needed full, immediate dedication. Things became superfluous or at best illustrations. “It led to the position that one should really be studying the framework itself (the social context = society),” Marilyn Strathern writes. “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” (1990, 38).
A very different development, but with similar consequences, took place in American cultural anthropology. As a key figure in the latter, Franz Boas came to manifest this new distrust of things. Whereas earlier in his career he had been deeply involved in collections management and museum anthropology, he began by 1905 to abandon these projects. One reason given by Bill Brown is that “he had become increasingly convinced that the most important elements of culture were irreducible to artifacts, that anthropological facts could never become artifactual—that the cultural Thing, let us say, was too intangible to be found in things” (Brown 2002, 118).
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, studying things per se became a task in need of justification and a source of embarrassment, a reactionary heritage of a mindless antiquarianism that survived in the dusty storerooms of museums. In short, it left little honor for those practitioners within the discipline of things. And gradually a change could be discerned also in archaeological rhetoric: the material was only a means to reach something else, something more important—cultures and societies, the lives of past peoples, the Indian behind the artifact (see, e.g., Wheeler 1954, v; Braid-wood 1958, 734). Social scientists, however, remained rather unimpressed with the attempts to reach these desired subjects of inquiry. Even after archaeology had become “new” in the anthropological turn of the 1960s, Edmund Leach, the leading figure of British social anthropology, for example, continued to lecture that in the “last analysis” archaeologists should be “concerned with people rather than with things” (Leach 1973, 768). Indeed, there may have been a certain tendency of granting “too much independence to the empirical world” over which “idealism had a nice polemical virtue” (Latour 1999, 147), as vividly expressed in the anthropologist Irven DeVore’s harsh denunciation of archaeological practice: “In the past we were presented with lithic industries which, to judge by their descriptions, were copulating, hybridizing, evolving, adapting and producing offspring” (1968, 346). Still, the trump card of fetishism seemed always too close at hand. Thus when Daniel Miller in 1987 found it necessary to express his moral contempt of approaches to modern material culture in processual archaeology, fetishism 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” (1987, 143).
With the intellectual turn against things, it is important to understand why theories of fetishism were so smoothly and complacently accepted within modern thinking and why things, more generally, could be treated with such distrust. However, this is hardly sufficient for fully understanding the fate of things in modern social research. To take further steps toward a more comprehensive explanation, we have to ask a few basic questions: Why is it a priori wrong to blur the boundary between humans and things? Why is it a misunderstanding to ascribe personality and identity to things? What is the ontological justification for the persistent idea that action, influence, and power are qualities that only humans possess?
As hinted at in the beginning of this chapter, the answers to these questions are intimately linked to a wider effective history of the displacement of things in Western thinking since the seventeenth century (cf. Olsen 2010). The hermeneutics of suspicion that developed in the wake of Descartes’s methodological doubt led to the perception of an all-too-significant difference between nonhumans and humans. In what follows, we shall try to show how this significant difference somehow predestined things to their subsequent intellectual dismissal and silencing.
However, in order to understand this difference as intellectually constructed rather than ontologically given, it might be useful to confront it with other ways of conceptualizing the world. Numerous ethnographic examples illustrate how peoples in different settings refer to animals as kindred beings with whom people can have social relationships (see, e.g., Hallowell 1960; Fijn 2011; Alberti and Bray 2009). Among the Sámi of northern Fenno-Scandinavia, for example, as with most other circumpolar peoples, the brown bear was treated as a personalized being that understood human discourse and dispositions and was addressed as a relative. The hunting and consumption of the bear involved elaborate rituals terminating with human-like burials for the deceased bear (Fjellström 1981 [1755]; Myrstad 1996). Likewise, on their return from the mountains to winter pastures in the northern Swedish forests, the reindeer herders are reported to have hugged and greeted the pine tree. An ethnographer observed a young Sámi girl hugging a big trunk saying, “Good day, pine, I greet you from the mountain willow” (Demant-Hatt 1913, 84). The Sámi also ascribed life to their drums (which were assigned life-cycle rituals) and their supposedly “fetishized” stone “gods” (sieidis) (Kalstad 1997; Schanche 2000; Price 2002; Hansen and Olsen 2004). Nonhumans of various kinds, such as reindeer and lynx, drums and hearths, birch and alder, were different from humans, of course, but they were not considered as belonging to two distinct spheres. Personality and identity were not regarded as exclusively human characteristics.
As discussed in detail by Tim Ingold (2000), hunter-gatherers rarely invoke absolute distinctions such as mind/matter or culture/nature in their being-in-the-world. Neither do they relate to landscape or nature as an external, “natural” world to be domesticated or embodied. In other words, they do not regard themselves as spiritual, cultural subjects struggling with an alien object world of nature. Quite simply, the absolute distinction between spirit and matter, culture and nature, does not have a place in their thought or praxis. Anthropologists, historians, and social scientists acknowledge these attitudes as expressions of native belief, of course, and affirm this cultural otherness. However, interpreting this otherness nearly always implies the application of some sort of suspicious hermeneutics by bringing native thought to court, pitted against a preconceived (modern) ontology of how the world “really is” (that is, divided into nature versus culture). Thus analysis becomes an act of bifurcation and “purification” (Latour 1993), a sorting of the muddled worlds into the appropriate categories. Statements and practices that blur or cross the dividing line are interpreted and all too often shrugged off as “metaphorical” utterances, most commonly conceived of as social and symbolic appropriations of nature. The differences are to be found in disparate social groups, but the world is a singular underlying unity.
Following Ingold, such demystifying analysis usually involves arguments like this: “primitive people” make sense of their relation with things and the natural world by drawing on metaphors from their social life and their capacities as humans. They use their social experience to model their relation with the nonhuman world by which ecological or “thingly” relations appear as social ones (Ingold 2000; cf. Godelier 1977 for an illustrative analysis). Simple peoples themselves are, of course, unaware of their ontological blunders. They have not realized that their social relationship to nature is based on an illusion. However, as Ingold proposes:
notice how 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 [or rather societies 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)
Thus the need of the anthropological analyst to draw the line, start purifying, and sort out the categories for their subjects of study (see Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007). On the other hand, no suspicion arises when people establish intimate relations among themselves. These are social (or subsocial, i.e., economic, sexual, political, etc.). So we have one set of relations that are taken for granted as real, authentic, and honest; another set that are false, inauthentic, and delusional. The falseness seems to arise when we transgress a certain border, between the “us” and the “it,” projecting relations prescribed for one realm onto another.
Why has this boundary become so obvious, so ontologically secure, that analyses can be grounded in them?
In his manifesto We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Bruno Latour provides some suggestions that we find compelling. While modernity has been celebrated as both the origin and the triumph of humanism, as the birth of the human and the thinking subject (cf. Foucault 1973), there has been less talk about its less desired offspring: the simultaneous birth of things and “nature.” Following Latour, the “birth of man” (and it is indeed gendered) presupposed the construction of—and simultaneous separation from—the nonhuman, in other words, it made imperative a fundamental divide. From this moment on, the human and the nonhuman were relegated to different ontological realms, which were assessed by different disciplinary fields. On the one hand, there are human and social sciences concerned with humans-among-themselves, and on the other, natural sciences studying the inanimate object world (Latour 1993, 13ff.). By this split, the power, interests, and politics of humans come to be placed at one pole, while knowledge about and over objects and nonhumans was placed at the other.
According to Latour, this first great divide caused another significant distinction, namely, that between “ourselves” (i.e., the moderns) and the “others” (i.e., the nonmoderns or premoderns). As we saw above, the premoderns did not understand the first distinction, but mixed everything together in an appalling stew of people and things, cultures and nature. It is because we are able to distinguish between people and things, cultures and nature, that we differ from them (Latour 1993, 97–103). Latour’s cardinal point (drawing on the work of Serres, Whitehead, and others), is of course that this split reflects nothing but the modern “discrepancy between self-representation and practice” (Latour 2003, 38). The modern condition is more than anything a meshwork of hybrid relations and translations between humans and nonhumans; actually, the mess has never been greater! Thus—and this is the very paradox of this trope—we have never been modern. In other words, acknowledging the “symmetry” implied by all societies being mixtures of natures-cultures, humans and nonhumans, also discloses another principle of symmetry: that there is no ontological distinction between the constitution of our worlds and those of the “others” (Latour 1993, 103–6).
Still, the distinction between nature and society persists. Not because it is 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. Such distinctions are built into our very divisions of labor, into our categories of analysis. Scientific practice, in its modernist form, is thus also a purifying practice, in which everything that exists has to be placed within two distinct ontological boxes, categorized either as things or humans, objects or subjects. The more academic writing and being become enmeshed with things, the more exiled things become from intellectual discourses. As noted by Latour (2003), the true originality of the moderns was not to do away with things and hybrids, but rather to estrange themselves from their own practices, an estrangement that 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 in which we are stewing today. This was only possible by applying the same acts of purification that anthropologists have used to cleanse the illusions of those “others” who claim to inhabit a muddled world—encompassing relations with humans, animals, and things on an equal footing. In other words, the modern attitude consists of splitting the mixtures apart, in order to extract from them what came from culture (the social, the mind, the spirit) and what came from nature (Latour 1993, 78). The outcomes are then regarded as the starting blocks.
This desire for an immediate world emptied of its mediators has indeed 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, what came to be labeled as material culture ended up not occupying either of the two positions prescribed by the modern constitution; it was neither culture nor nature. And this, in all its simplicity, brings us to the core of the banishment of things from the social sciences: being a mixture of culture-nature, a work of translation, a work that increasingly mediates such relations, material culture became matter out of place—part of the “excluded middle” (see also Grosz 2002, 91–94) or rather that which was separated off by a second divide, as we shall show below (Latour 1993).
This exclusion—and the associated dangers of fetishism—might also be profitably related to the concept of the abject (Kristeva 1982). The abject is normally associated with the ambiguous border zone between (or rather outside of this separation altogether) the “me” and “not-me,” a sign of ourselves as distributed and 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). Things, especially in their untamed and uncanny mode, may be seen as typifying the abject, leaving space only for the singular, aestheticized, and privatized objects offering comfort and consolation.
This chapter has largely been concerned with explaining why things were neglected and ultimately forgotten among those studying societies and cultures. Some clarifications are, however, needed. It is, of course, not true that the academy—and public discourse in general—has forgotten things all together. As with the “folk” level, some objects have always been allowed to dwell and perform well within these discursive formations. However, with the partial exception of a few disciplines, they allow only for objects of a certain kind—usually objects that are emancipated from the networks of everyday trivia, dirt, and work. Thus, objects of art, conspicuous objects, have always been widely welcomed, talked about and discussed; although the opinions on their capacity to inform social science and humanistic discourses may vary greatly.
Although Simmel’s diagnosis might be too harsh, that the attraction of these decontextualized, aestheticized objects reflected a fear of coming into too close contact with things, there is still little doubt that emerging modern technology, “empty indifferent Americanized” consumer goods, the iron and concrete of modern cityscapes, caused little but contempt in hegemonic intellectual environments. Perceived as Gestell, Heidegger’s term for the monstrous and alienating technological framing of the world (Heidegger 1993, 325–32), modern material culture came to play the villain in academic and public discourses from the late nineteenth century on, a complacent and pervasive denunciation also based upon an all too arbitrary and socially biased contrast between the unique and mass-produced. Stigmatized as humanism’s other, things seemed utterly unfit to inform the disciplines studying genuine social and cultural practices.
However, their exile was based on a more profound and grounding conception of things and nature as the abject of the modern human. The “Great Divide” launched by the modernist thought regime created an abyss that things were never assumed or permitted to cross. Social relations became by definition relations among human subjects and any attempts to include drums, reindeer, and birch trees were seen as highly suspicious. Such inappropriate attitudes were either condemned as an expression of fetishism or to be purified as primitive, backward, and archaic metaphorical statements and symbolic appropriations of nature. Things were relegated to the other side but were constantly and increasingly mingling and mixing with people. Thus they became a problematic and ambiguous category within the modern regime, an abject that blurred the boundary. Not properly situated, neither in nature nor in culture, they became matter-out-of-place, predestined to banishment. Despite the proliferation of hybrids in its midst and all nonhumans being enrolled in the very fabric of modern society, the modern regime came to acknowledge properly only those entities that could be firmly situated. In other words, the modern regime acknowledged entities as dwelling either in culture or in nature (Latour 1993). This was the prescribed fate of those entities that were inscribed with an unfortunate but pertinent and seemingly contradictory label: material culture.
1. This is what Alfred North Whitehead called the “bifurcation of nature” (1964); see discussion in chapter 8.
2. This forms a basis for the rift between phenomenology—the philosophy of appearances—and science, where according to Heidegger, the world is progressively reduced to a shallow presence, whereby the interactions between menhirs and rain, goats and grass, are abandoned to the “calculating gaze” of the natural sciences (Heidegger 1994).
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot: 1921 bis 1926, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1935), 335–36, quoted in Heidegger 1971, 110–11.