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The study of GENEALOGIES OF ASYMMETRY: WHY THINGS WERE FORGOTTEN
-Bjørnar Olsen
(What I will do in this paper is not only to discuss why things has long fallen victim to an intellectual tradition that has devaluated and stigmatised the material. Despite the renewed interest in have become marginalized in the social sciences, but also to explore some crucial links between those philosophies that are the main suspects for thing’s marginalisation and central approaches in recent material culture witnessed in studies.)
To say that things have been ignored in twentieth century social science research is not exactly shocking news. A survey has provided me with a file of close to 100 authors making this claim since 1980, and that includes only publications in English. The majority of these scholars are of course archaeologists, but quite a few also sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers. One prominent is Michel Serres, who has noted the paradoxical situation that despite the fact that things are seen as diagnostic of humanity (“humanity begins with things; animals don’t have things”) they play no role in the study of this humanity. Thus, “in the current state of affairs the so-called human or social sciences seem at best to apply only to animals” (Serres/Latour 1995:165-166,199-200)
With such critical awareness of things’ exile from the social sciences being exposed, actions taken to repatriate the object would of course be expected. And this is precisely how the current story goes. Thus, a popular claim lately – almost as popular as to say that things are forgotten - is that they have recaptured much of their lost territory: ”the battle fought against mainstream social science” is won, Daniel Miller bravely claimed back in 1998, “the point that things matter can now be argued to have been made” (1998:3).
The triumph may have been proclaimed a bit prematurely. Things, material culture or materiality is not actually the buzzwords in current debates in political science, sociology or economy. There is a change of attitude, though, although mostly confined to disciplines and fields at the fringe of mainstream social science. Within these settlements the growing field of material culture studies, and the more general concern with landscapes and somatic experience, may be read as a rehabilitation of things.
Irrespective of their academic impact, it its still questionable to what extent the return to material culture studies also brought back the material; - brought back materiality as something intrinsically involved in what we use to refer to as social life. As far as I can judge, this was hardly the case. Apart from some heroic attempts, what we see is basically a prolonged asymmetry, in which things continue to be treated as secondary or epiphenomenal to some cultural or social “first instance”. To the extent things are allowed to speak it is largely to bear witness to those human intensions and action that they themselves are believed to originate from. Things may be social, even actors, but are rarely assigned more challenging roles than to provide society with a substantial medium where it can inscribe, embody and mirror itself. Meaning is something always being mapped onto things and landscapes, which themselves seem drained of all significance to facilitate their so-called cultural construction. In short, we are left with a notion of the material as always made transcendental, always bypassed; - and where the role of things is never to be themselves but always to represent something else.
I this paper I shall do a preliminary dig into the genealogy of this asymmetry. My purpose is to show that a main reason why the materiality of things still is being kept firmly at arm’s length, is that a thing-hostile ontology continues to inform dominant approaches in material culture studies. An ontology that since Kant at least denied any direct access to things, and which since have surfaced as a sceptical attitude in which the material is always treated with suspicion and never allowed any non-transcendental existence.
Why things were forgotten
Things’ exile from 20th century social science research is closely related to this hermeneutics of suspicion, and the wider effective history of thing oblivion and displacement in Western thinking since the 17th century. Rationalist and Enlightenment philosophers left us with a notion of matter as passive and inert, while the human mind was seen as active and creative. The sceptical attitude that followed in the wake of Descartes’ “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 head. 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 subject.
As for much of modern thinking, Immanuel Kant’s efforts to reveal the a priori structures of experience, had a great impact also on these issues. According to Kant, the thing in-itself – das Ding-an-Sich - could not be grasped directly, things appear to us only as phenomena - the refined product of our thinking. Kant’s denial of any face-to-face encounter with the material world meant that we cannot understand the thing in-itself, only in the way it is formed by ourselves, that is, by our own thinking or reason. The Kantian legacy meant that the things in-themselves, as non-transcendental entities, were out of reach. They were shut out 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. Moreover, in this coming modernist ontology man’s creative engagement with the world stopped being a relational involvement, in other words to reveal or make manifest what already dwells in things and nature. Creativity, influence and power became the current rare commodities of which only humans possess. Thus, the birth of man as the creative master subject in charge presupposed the simultaneous death of a lived, living and purposeful material world. In short, leaving us with a formless and basically meaningless materiality set apart (Andersson 2001).
The curious fact that things became “conspicuously” present in the mundane world a short century after Kant, didn’t help their reputation very much. To the contrary, to most philosophers and social theorists the mass-produced, mass-distributed and mass-consumed object of the late 19th century was a sign of an illusory world, a Schein conveying the deceptive image of the world as thing-made. Proliferating in the “ruin landscape” 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, producing simultaneously a powerful and persistent definition of freedom and emancipation as that which escapes the material. Things were dangerous in their deceptive appearance, they were a threat against authentic human and social values, as tellingly manifested in the Marxist (and social theorist) vocabulary of dinglich machen, versachlichung –or in English: reification, objectification, “instrumental reason”. Things ended up featuring the villain role as humanism’s other, giving their relegation from disciplines studying genuine social and cultural practices also a powerful moral justification.
No wonder then that during the 20th century to study “just things” became a source of embarrassment. Atempts to address the things-in-themselves, any care for them in their non-transcendental materiality, was at best a reactionary heir of mindless antiquarianism, at worst, a pathological condition reflecting a fetishistic addiction to substances beyond the limits of experience.
Repatriated and dismissed
According to the prevailing romantic plot this all luckily changed during the 1980s. Things were brought back from the cold and surfaced as a new concern within a number of disciplines, fields to which the somewhat ambiguous term material culture studies was reapplied. Of course, archaeology had more or less stubbornly been a material culture study all the time, but apart from its materiality and ‘thinglyness’ continues post-processual offspring it didn’t quite live up to the new standards. The new study of things was to be sacrificed in favour of a social concern, dedicated to the understanding of ourselves and other humans. This is where the pre-post-processual archaeologists had fatally failed, Daniel Miller informs us in 1987, since they were “increasingly obsessed with objects as such, treating them as having independent behaviour in a manner that separated them from any social context and which amounted to a genuine fetishism of the artefact” (Miller 1987:110-111).
Quoting Miller’s contempt is not just pure irony from my side. The antagonism expressed by the new converts against those studying “just things”, and the conspicuously expressed need to free their research of any suspicion of fetishism, was probably indicative of something more than just a strategy of self-identification through negation. For example, indicative of ontological legacy still effective, continuing to define who’s in power and what boundaries not to blur. Actually, re-reading the fierce rhetoric launched at so called traditional and processual approaches, however appropriate it appeared - and still appears, leaves little doubt about how persistently it was predicated upon a taken for granted ontological dualism between the intentional world of human subjects and the object world of material things. It was this a priori of two entirely distinct ontological zones that provided this edifying critical discourse with its justificatory virtue.
The power to define the world and ascribe meaning to it remained a sovereign property of the experiencing subject. The material inhabitants were plastic and receptive, sitting in silence waiting to be embodied with cultural significance. On the main social scene they may provide a context, but had no purpose or agency; much like the servants in the Victorian novels: there, but unaccounted for except as a useful part of the setting. Introducing what is often referred to as a major break-through in the social study of things, Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things (1986), the editor sets the scene by telling us that these very social things “have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with” (1986:4).
A peculiar expression of this effective historical burden was the attitude of domesticating or “softening” philosophies that at the outset was radically challenging the Cartesian and Kantian legacy, actually making them quite harmless in order to fit with the prevailing subjectivist and humanistic regime. One example may be the way post-structuralism was received and applied within material culture studies, overstressing the liberal-pleasing notion of multi-vocality and free reading (although it is questionable to what extent post-structuralism did pose any real challenge to the Cartesian legacy). Another is the way Bruno Latour figures in some works as a kind humanistic warrior defending social constructivism. A third one relates to phenomenology and the way it was introduced and received within material culture studies. And I will give this particular case some more consideration.
In his influencial book, The Phenomenology of Landscape, Chris Tilley tells us that “phenomenology involves the understanding and description of things such as they are experienced by a subject. It is about the relationship between Being and Being-in-the-world” (1994:12). The latter part of this statement was hopefully a slip of the pen, but even the former is so general and subjective edible that it could have been uttered by almost anyone; - with the likely exception of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty referred to. It almost rivals Ian Hodder’s one-sentence condensation of Heidegger, conveying the provocative claim that “all human understanding is interpretive” (1999:32).
Emphasising the interpreting subject is of course perfectly OK, but it is utterly problematic to claim this to be phenomenology in the sense Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty coined the term. Which was an approach far more receptive – even mimetic - to things themselves, claiming a kinship or “coincidence” between the perceiver and what we perceive. Heidegger tells us in Sein und Zeit that phenomenology is to let “that which shows itself be seen from itself - in the very way in which it shows itself…expressing nothing else than the maxim (..): ‘To the things themselves’”(Heidegger 1962:58). According to Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is to “restore to things their concrete physiognomy” (1962:57) “It is the things themselves, from the depth of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression (Merleau-Ponty 1968:4). These short statements – that to social archaeologist of all kinds probably was unspeakable fetishistic - reveal quite precisely why phenomenology did pose a challenge to the Kantian idealist notion of perception, a critical and fundamental aspect that is lost in the soft version Tilley first introduced us to. It is lost because it tried to accommodate phenomenology to the very ontological legacy that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty actually tried to do away with.
Notwithstanding that Tilley later works reflects an admirable attempt at getting closer to things, it was this first, domesticated and quite harmless approach that proliferated in material culture studies and archaeological textbooks; took on its own life in the disguise of phenomenology, while in reality emphasising idealist and social constructivist thinking. Landscape studies seem to have been especially prone to this “phenomenology” - a field were the active and creative mind anyway was hovering over matter inventing ever changing cognitive landscapes. Introducing her book, Landscape: politics and perspectives from 1993, Barbara Bender tells us that “Landscapes are created by people – through their experience and engagement with the world around them” (1993:1). In a recent paper she claims that a “phenomenological approach (to landscape) allows us to consider how we move around, how we attach meaning to places, entwining them with memories, histories and stories… “landscapes”, we learn, “are experimental and porous, nested and open ended” (Bender 2002:136-137, emphasis added). Ashmore and Knapp summarizes in 1999 this “phenomenological” dimension by stating 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).
Another and closely related example of how the old ontological regime is setting the agenda, is the immensely popular concept of embodiment, that so far seems to have escaped almost any critical concern in material culture studies. Taken as it is widely used, embodiment has come to mean the act by which people establish some kind of “quasi-social” relationship with objects in order to live out in a “real” material form their abstract social relationships (Dant 1999:2). Thus, and somewhat bewildering. when we encounter megaliths, landscapes or home decorations, what we are confronted with are really nothing but ourselves and our social relations (Latour 1999:197). My concern here, however, is how the whole notion of embodiment – which etymologically refers to the act by which a soul or spirit is invested with a physical form, is difficult to conceive of without an ontological framework were subjects and object are set a part. As an act, a doing, embodiment necessarily implies the possible existence of a prior phase of separation (“non-embodiment”) when mind and matter existed apart. In other words, that things, bodies, nature, originally, are not part of the social, but may eventually be included and endowed with history and meaning by some human generosity: a donor culture.
Conclusion
There is a famous anecdote of a small but heavy packet that one morning back in the late 18th century arrived at Immanuel Kant’s door in Königsberg. When Kant finally succeeded in unwrapping the packet it contained nothing but a red brick stone and a short handwritten note saying “Das Ding an Sich”.
Kant’s sudden face-to-face encounter with the thing itself high-lights some of the profound discrepancy between self-representation and practice that modernity was to be founded on. Despite always-already being “thrown” into direct, entangled and symmetrical cohabitations with things, our intellectual life became characterised by totally opposite forces of gravity struggling to pull us apart. The regime of split-knowledge grounding this asymmetry has enforced on the social sciences a kind of collective amnesia in relation to nature and things, leaving us with the persistent fantasy image of societies operating without the mediation of artefacts. Peoples, at least under their ideal “social” condition, were actors without things.
The new material culture studies may be seen as a brave attempt to end this diaspora. However, what was repatriated was maybe not so much the object as the readerly veil of humanly enveloping it. Thus, if the point that “things matter” can be said to have been made, it is the transcendental thing that matter, providing anthropologists and social archaeologist with another arena to study how people negotiate always-already culturally constituted meanings. The thingness of the thing is still exiled, still forgotten. I have been arguing that a main reason for this is that the ontological legacy responsible for this deportation has proved far stronger, far more persistently delusive, than the good intentions of liberating things.
Symmetrical archaeology, in my opinion, is nothing but an attempt of making our knowledge and our self-image compatible with practice, with the world as we live it. However far back we go into prehistory humans have extended their social relations to non-humans with whom they have swapped properties and formed collectives. If there is one historical trajectory that runs all the way down from Olduwai Gorge to Post-Modernia, it must be one of increasing materiality - that more and more tasks are delegated to non-human actors, more and more actions mediated by things. Landscapes and things do not just sit in silence waiting to be embodied meanings that envelopes it. Trying to explain the oblivion of the thingly, the author traces an effective history of asymmetry and suspicion toward things in Western thinking.
with socially constituted meanings, but possess their own unique qualities and competences which they bring to our cohabitation with them. What a symmetrical archaeology promises is that if we cease to treat action, influence and power as rare commodities of which only humans have possession, we may be able produce a more fair, interesting and realistic account of past and present collectives.
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