IAN WOODWARD
Griffith University
I Introduction
The frontiers of social theory and cultural inquiry have been advanced in the last few decades by the affordances of object-oriented analyses and, more critically, a material ontology. Objects, things and materials are the stuff of new ecologies of meaning and practice, whereby social structures, global networks, cultural ideals, social values and human bodies have been shown to be materially fashioned and constituted. Studies of object ecologies, material culture and things have challenged how social scientists describe the nature of mundane experiences, modes of social communication and performance, and networks of social affiliation. While this material ontology has been highly innovative across the social sciences and humanities, it can sometimes revert to rather dry analysis of technical material networks or culturally emptied, decontextualized practices, especially in its sociological configuration which do not satisfy the cultural sociological emphasis on systems of meaning. It is less common – again in the recent sociological tradition - for this mode of material theorizing to explore the links between materiality, emotion, imagination and the unconscious, where material agents are realized as central to expressing and transitioning ideals, symbols, and discourses. In the emergent cultural sociological tradition, we need to look toward, but also beyond the innovative field of techno and science-based object studies to understand objects in their expanded cultural sense: as material, concrete expressions of cultural ideals, desires and fantasies.
Consistent with the recent expansion and influence of materiality and object studies across disciplines but focused on cultural sociology, the core theoretical theme of this paper will be the links between objects and social practices, emotion, imagination and the unconscious. On a more expansive note, the paper works toward the promise of bringing matters of symbolisation, the unconscious, and emotion to accounts of materiality as constructive of social and cultural power.
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II Materiality and cultural sociology
Despite a couple of decades of intense sub-disciplinary creativity in theorising materiality in cultural anthropology, material culture studies and science and technology studies, cultural sociology has only recently begun to consider the material element of culture, though indications and pointers to a sociology of materiality can be found in a range of cultural classics from Durkheim, to
Simmel and also Goffman. Studies of material culture have as their primary concern the mutual relations between people and objects. In particular, studies of material culture are concerned with what uses people put objects to and what objects do for, and to, people. Furthermore, scholars working in the field of material culture studies aim to analyse how these relations are one of the important ways in which culture – and the meanings upon which culture is based
– are transmitted, received and produced. Within cultural sociology, materiality has recently been considered through various innovative conceptualizations of art and the agency of artistic works, and to some degree within the new sociologies of economic behavior, though for reasons I shall outline these works cannot fully develop a model for cultural sociology’s material turn. More promising developments have occurred in new approaches to iconicity
(Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, 2012). While sociologists and social anthropologists have historically had an enduring concern for the material constituents of culture, the recent sociological interest in objects has developed in the context of prominent socio-cultural accounts of modern consumerism, and in turn, the emphasis these have given to the material basis of consumption processes. In addition, new approaches to describing technical and technological features of contemporary society have introduced innovative ways of theorizing person-object relations. The ‘object turn’ in studies of consumer culture transfers attention to the intrinsic materiality of many consumption processes.
Particularly, it has suggested a role for objects in generating cultural meanings; in doing social and cultural work through processes of differentiation, objectification and integration. While the material culture approach to consumption retains a concern for consumer practice and ideation – as the foundational studies of consumption had previously emphasized – it devotes particular attention to the object as ‘the visible part of culture’ which serves to animate practice, coordinate socio-economic networks, or evoke feelings.
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Within sociology more broadly, we have recently seen a significant number of radical and innovative workings of materiality. To a considerable degree, cultural sociology has lagged behind in asserting a culturally infused model for exploring these questions. This is a missed opportunity for the relevance of applying cultural models to understanding material engagements. This paper explores the parameters and contexts for how cultural sociologists may conceptualise materiality through a focus on the commodity object and its relationship to understandings of economic action and, in particular, consumption. Though the commodity is arguably also a special case, its ubiquity and taken-for-granted mundanity across a range of social contexts means a close engagement with it allows a multifaceted model of material engagements to be conceptualized.
Human beings are now, as always, object-seeking social actors who need and desire objects in ways that are sometimes practical, prosaic and essential, other times related to desire, fantasy and the ongoing imaginative work of selfconstruction. At the same time, objects can also enroll, seduce and mandate human action and subjectivity. In ways that many people never know, objects have a type of hold on them. In the end, objects cease to be external to the individual: objects are their constitution, their subjectivity. Far from being a sign of human weakness, self-deception or oppression by the dead hand of a malevolent social system, the patterns of relationships between people and objects suggest people actively seek out – and require – these bonds with objects.
The form and substance of such material engagement needs to be considered through a performative model which fuses the material and embodied dimensions of object engagement with their narrative and mythic components, along with attention to the mobility of objects within social and personal territories.
III Object contexts: abundance and entanglements
An important context for contemporary discussions of materiality should be object abundance and ubiquity. Baudrillard begins his work The System of
Objects commenting upon the luxurious growth in objects which populate human civilisation, noting that we are 'witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets'. While an exhaustive list of the objects which surround humans might once have been a dream within reach, for example, as imagined in a project such as the Encyclopedie , these days - apart
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from a development of the schematic categories of objects like that attempted by
Baudrillard (1968) - such a task is it utterly impossible. The reality is that humans are far outstripped by the seemingly endless species of material objects which proliferate, multiply, populate and ultimately infiltrate our lives to a degree never imagined and which is difficult to comprehend. This world of
Babylonian abundance provides the raw materiality for as many human experiences and cultural imperatives we can imagine: from simple utility and satiation of basic needs, to identity formation and human development, to subtle games of cultural distinction and differentiation and symbolic communication.
Moreover, objects move about society, via personal and social realms, and thus they also have the capacity to shape and construct networked systems and engagements beyond, and at the same time, also thoroughly hybridised with humans. What is more, far from being helplessly lost in this luxuriant forest of objects, systems of economic production are now sophisticated enough - mostly due to their culturalisation and scientisation through the appropriation of research in disciplines like sociology and cognitive psychology - that now there are more sophisticated ways for objects to find us , as well as more efficient ways for us to find the objects we engage with.
IV The orthodox and consumption models of the commodity
One of the fundamental outcomes of the innovations in the last few decades within consumer studies, material culture studies and sociological studies of consumption has been a radical revisioning of theories of the commodity. This revisioning has been based on large part on bringing objects and material engagements into the centre of any analysis of sociality. To fully understand it, we need to briefly reconsider the history of the commodity in sociological thought.
In its conceptualisation of modernity, sociology, in particular, has always reserved a special place for the commodity, as either a material container of economically-driven processes of alienation, exploitation and disenchantment, or a status-based, aesthetic symbol of exclusivity and cultural superiority (Miller,
1987; Slater, 1997). The centrality of the commodity to modernist theories of society cannot be underestimated, forming the basis of Marx’s model of capitalist society which in turn inspired a couple of generations of critical theory. More than this, the modern conceptualisation of the commodity as reified matter with alienating power became taken-for-granted sociological lore, and then ultimately
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a form of sociological reification in its own right. While the postmodern and cultural turn in social theory succeeded in emphasising matters of lifestyle, pleasure, symbolic challenge and desire as elemental to commodity engagements
(Featherstone, 1991), it was culturally and anthropologically inspired work within recent material culture studies and interpretive consumer studies which have made the greatest advances in rethinking the commodity. As the classical statements in economic anthropology have reminded us, the economic activities of exchange and consumption actually constitute social bonds and the circulation of cultural ideals (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Mauss, 1954; Sahlins, 1974).
What is valued, exchanged and used are not just ‘commodities’, but material containers of social meanings. From a cultural point of view, what we call ‘the economy’ is fundamentally a networked system of symbolic exchange, a system organised for the construction and exchange of totems, rather than a merely field of social action defined by models of instrumental rationality and commercial contract.
A culturalised, materialised model of markets and commodities – the ultimate goal - requires a rather more fluid and processual theory of the commodity.
Reiterating some basic principles of classical works in cultural anthropology, one of the important insights of recent conceptualizations of material culture studies has been the idea that commodity objects have ‘social lives’ (Appadurai, 1986) or
‘biographies’ (Kopytoff, 1986). According to these conceptions, objects have social trajectories whereby their meanings for different groups of consumers change over time and space. Objects have an inherently mobile, mutable quality and are constructed both by their materiality and by stories, myths and their production and reception in particular contexts (Harre, 2002; Pels, Hetherington and
Vandenberghe, 2002). Moreover, as things of value, commodities must be persistently reconstructed via exchange, use and purchase (Lash and Lury,
2007). Moreover, they find their spaces and times, leaving indelible traces of their effects on cities, social spaces and cultural scenes.
V The model of the commodity as assemblage
The material approach to sociality – which in its strongest version is based on analysing haptics, pragmatics and techno-interaction - has in part developed as something of a reaction to recent dominant cultural approaches in the social and
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cultural sciences which emphasise meaning, interpretation and symbolic communication. This new material models work radically outside and beyond cultural accounts, de-emphasising their traditional assumptions and epistemological forms. A more recent and related development which looks to move beyond material culture studies but still deals with materiality comes largely from certain fields within sociological studies of science and technology and has been expressed recently in the form of studies of consumption practices and pragmatics. Within the current field of consumption studies – and also to a significant degree within the discipline of object studies more widely (see Knorr-
Cetina 1997; Latour 2007; Pels, Hetherington and Vandenberghe 2002) - it seems apt to observe that materiality, objects and ‘stuff’ are the new frontier, as sociologists position questions of materiality and object-based practices of consumption at the forefront of their studies (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Dant
2005, 2008; Swedberg 2005). In social theory, this focus on ‘assemblages of materials’ has been associated with actor-network theory, which deals with collapsing the distinction between people and material objects and the formation of material assemblages. In new studies of objects as ‘actants’, inspired by ideas of relationality and pragmatics and blended with new ethnography in the work of
Latour and then also a cache of writers who have extended and applied his insights in very useful ways (for example, Law 2002), though in these works the
‘material’ element has been the subject of much research and theoretical interest often at the expense of the ‘culture’ aspects. What comes first are the material interlinkages of person and object, and technical systems of assemblage, rather than questions of meaning, narrative and interpretation. To some degree, this is compatible with the most exciting anthropological work in the tradition of Mauss,
Durkheim and Gell, but in sociology it has been used most frequently in relation to technological systems, assemblages and engagements, and indeed has eschewed questions of human motivations and meanings which would seem central when one wishes to understand consumption. It has also been represented in emerging studies of the ‘practices’ of consumption (Dant 2008;
Warde 2005; Watson 2008; Watson and Shove 2008). Here too, though coordinated networks of people and things are given priority in organising social life, questions reside with material pragmatics and networked relationality more than actual consumption practice and commodity relation, obviously leaving significant cultural elements relatively unaddressed. To some, this focus on
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practice seems productive because it does not presume or speculate about cultural categories, meaning or symbolism but identifies how ‘consumption occurs within and for the sake of practices’ (Warde 2005: 145). The appeal of attending to such consumption practices seems to be that they are universal, habitual and continually unfolding within interrelated networks of other practices and hence have an apparent recursive material quality. But, this view also offers a rather restricted and truncated account of consumption, leaving out questions of cultural complexity, interpretation and meaning. Such a view is in danger of radically selling short the cultural realm, despite Warde’s suggestion that culture has received too much emphasis in studies of consumption (2005:
147). Warde even goes so far to state that ‘it is the fact of engagement in the practice, rather than any personal decision about a course of conduct, that seems to explain the nature and process of consumption’ (Warde 2005: 138). A whole body of work within sociology and consumer behaviour studies enables a more complex picture to be drawn (see for example, Belk 1988; Belk and Tumbat 2005;
Holt 2004; Kleine and Kernan 1991; McCracken 1988; Richins 1994). Warde further states that most consumption is directed toward the ‘fulfilment of selfregarding purposive projects’ (2005: 147), which itself suggests we need to look well beyond the realm of pragmatics of material interactions to understand consumption. In short, this is not to suggest that the physical, material, sensual components of various modes of ‘doing’ – driving a car, drinking wine, hitting a ball, preparing food - are not important, but that the risk with the ‘practices’ approach is that we develop distinctly thin accounts which attend to systems of coordinated perceptions and physical manipulations and lose much of the cultural context that could afford us a stronger theory of consumption as an enduring cultural-economic activity.
VI From consumption to experience: a grammar of material engagements a) In developing a program for a cultural sociological approach to the commodity,
I have argued that sociologists would profit be reconceptualising consumption as a universal, ongoing practice of cultural interpretation where social actors seek ritualised, enchanting engagements with objects that originate across the economic and cultural spectrum and which are perceived to symbolise variegated ideals such as goodness, beauty, authenticity or truth. Following Knorr Cetina’s
(2001) theoretical work on epistemic objects, commodity engagements can be
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characterised as a series of continuously unfolding, materialized exchanges with objects wherein chains of wanting are performatively constructed from emergent lacks, which themselves are recursively formed within the structures of these chains. b) The fields of economic sociology and cultural sociology have begun to address questions of price, value, preference and utility from their own perspectives (e.g
Wherry 2008). The basic principle here is that economic action is culturallymeaningful and culturally derived, rather than merely rational from an economic point of view. Literatures in the sociology of arts and cultural sociology which investigate the aesthetic surface of objects and their capacity not only to represent aspects of reality, but to prompt reflexive, cognitive responses in actors and collectives are also important (see Acord and Di Nora 2008; Alexander
2008b; Eyerman and Ring 1998; Eyerman and McCormick 2006; Swedberg 2005).
Thus, economic actors orient their actions to goals that make sense not just in terms of price and utility, but a range of other matters which are at the heart of cultural sociological investigation. The emergent cultural sociological approach suggests that we should think of the economic behaviours of individuals as guided by ideas, impressions, fantasies, irrationalities, asymmetries, perceptions of self and others, impressions of ‘what is going on’ with their own budget and the broadly configured ‘economy’. All this is fuelled by circulating texts within the economy including such things as product advertising, magazines, commodity branding, and the reporting of pronouncements from official economic bodies and economic commentators. As much as powerful economic modeling, the goal of generating a convincing theory of economic behaviour requires a strong theory of culture and sensitive empirical approaches. As a starting principle, this research agenda requires a cultural sociological model that fuses performative understandings of the materiality and sensuality of consumption, with consideration of the power of myth, narrative and meaning generation. c) The resources of cultural performance theory could be fruitfully applied within the field of consumption studies. Performance approaches suggest how consumer objects acquire their cultural meaning is within local settings, where people confer consumption objects a social life through their use and by offering active, creative accounts, or narratives which link in some ways to autonomous cultural discourses. Such narratives are locally accomplished phenomena, existing within
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various social settings where individuals are called to offer a believable, convincing, or ‘fused’ (Alexander 2004a) account of their relations with consumer objects. The performative model suggests there should be an aesthetic ‘fusion’ between the material and discursive, articulation and reception: ‘a coming together of background meaning, actors, props, scripts, direction and audience’ where performances are experienced as convincing or authentic by participants
(Alexander 2004a: 92). Such a model suggests a useful way of thinking about commodification, integrating materiality with narrative, context, desire, meaning and communication within contextualized settings.
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