Material Musings
I have a question re Ian's recent email outlining his prooposed approach to material culture in the context of Placing Voices. The question circles around the stated intention to abjure the traditional academic approach of documenting and creating 'typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities'. Instead, immersion in the affective practices of the flaneur and recorder of stories is proposed. My question is: are the outcomes of these experiential encounters to be reshaped/processed into academic interpretations or do they exist as self-explanatory stories or evidence in their own right? Are these experiences to be converted in any sense into analysis? I'm not clear on this.This question is partly provoked by Daniel Miller's latest book The Comfort of Things which I'm reading at the moment. Miller's book takes the form of a series of elegantly crafted short stories of encounters with people in their homes in a London Street. The people, their homes, their contents and their lifeworlds are evoked in pieces that could easily pass for short-stories in the conventional literary sense. But Miller is professor of Anthropology at London University, and I'm having difficulty identifying the particular disciplinary practice involved here. Does the new epistemology involve an increasingly blurred line between the creative and the analytical?Labels: archaeology, material culture, theory
posted by Pat Cooke @ Friday, September 19, 2008
5 Comments:
The issue that Pat is pointing to her is critical. What my draft document is a symptom of (or an attempt to engage with) is the chasm between analytical and continental traditions of thought.
Archaeology was born out of the continental tradition of antiquarianism - with its affective, emotive basis/justification being fascinating stories about the world and its temporalities and the odd material traces which provoke temporal mnemonic responses to places.
However, archaeology in the 20th century made some basic assumptions about the placement of people in the world - stating that objects were distinct from the self - and thus the rigorous studies of these objects could suggest patterns of behaviour in selves and groups of selves. I've a lot written about the intellectual history of 20th century cultural historical approaches to material things (I can circulate this if you'd like).
But in the 1960s (under Lewis Binford), archaeology adopted positivism as a way of developing systems of abstracted data separate from stories of human encounters of things. This facilitated the establishment of the discipline as a hard discipline in the university. However, I feel it has created a 'hard' shell around what is a very 'soft' and 'fluid' material - in order to control and restrain it's impact.
My turn towards continental traditions here is an attempt to rigorously and reflexively engage things as phenomena - in an early Heideggerian fashion.
As for how to reconcile my continental leanings with disciplinary expectations of analytical rigour - this is really up to Tadhg and what he orders me to do in the course of my research.
But from my perspective, I am in no way prepared to make data tables and distribution maps. I feel this brings us in danger of ethnological approaches. I propose instead to work towards a 'catalogue' of stories and images. So in a way it would be both a catalogue in an archaeological sense (an itemised list of things encountered with descriptions) but also in an art sense (a critical engagement with texts arising from found objects).
Apologies if this is something of a stream. I'm ill at the moment, so all thinking is immediate.
Firstly Ian: get well soon! And thanks for that response.
Indeed, I see where you're going. You mention Heidegger. I remember once being particularly taken by one of Heidegger's illustrations of 'Dasein'. He wrote about the 'hammerness' of the hammer. If you never saw a hammer, and happened upon one, the moment you picked it up its function would immediately be felt: it can only be a hammer; the human act of feeling its heft implies its function; form, function and human agency in the world flow in and out of each other. What makes this really poetic is that hammerness resides in all kinds of things--stones for example.
Another way of empathising with what you're striving for is to recollect what I was about in Kilmainham Gaol all those years. It felt to me that art was an indispensible ally in the exploration of meaning mounting challenges to prevailing ideology. The affective interstices between things are places rich in meaning, and full of subversive content!. Under a positivist scientism, this was an area that had largely been lost (or controlled in the Foucault sense) by disciplinary interpretations of the world. Art opens up the boundaries between feelings, experiences, things.
But we are still left with one conundrum: archaeology as a discipline, as a distinct mode of practice, as a system does need some kind of explanation. Otherwise, why not simply call it contemporary anthropology, or ethnology, or philosophical materialism? Although, come to think about it, the latter here may not be a bad description at all!
Thanks for the well wises Pat.
I'm with you on your last musing Pat. In the US, archaeology is one of many facets of anthropological thought. So I think the term contemporary anthropology is quite apt. In Europe, archaeology grew up separate - given the evidential material record of things from pasts in native Europe. Anthropology was something one did to study 'the other' 'far away'. The radical steps in archaeology in Europe are in pace with contemporary anthropology in the US. Indeed, this remeshing of the things of the world with the study of people in the world is central to our project's goal.
Philosophical materialism - mmm - I like this too. Which brings me back to Heidegger. Early in his career he advanced a rather unique philosophy of things (as opposed to the standard anthropocentric narrative) in his work 'Das Ding'. In this, he basically argued for a life of things and agency outside of our immediate experience (e.g. a hailstorm destroying a cornfield). In a way it's a bit of a Zen Buddhist mediation on things - if a tree falls in the woods...
Heidegger made the case in what some call his 'Tool Analysis' that things exist outside ourselves and then we have a radical experience of them which changes our understanding of placement in the world (e.g. stubbing your toe on the rock you didn't know was there).
But all I really want to point to is the development of a story of things that is not purely utilitarian for anthropocentric purposes of self/group justification.
To continue our conversation. I've recently been reading Ian Woodward's "Understanding Material Culture", which is a useful and relatively jargon-free introduction to the subject. I say relatively because there are peculiar moments of collapse. One of these I find particulary interesting.
He explains that what distinguishes the classical form of material culture study (e.g. Marx, Durkheim)from the contemporary form as practiced and advocated by the likes of Daniel Miller is that current studies are primarily interested in people-object relations as the primary site of analysis and as 'a matter of interest in its own right'. In contrast, Marx wrote of objects within his larger theory of capitalist development.
He concludes by highlighting the superiority of the modern method in the following terms:
'there is a greater potential for material culture to be theorised and conceptualised in more sophisticated ways, made central to the theroretical narratives and arguments of researchers, and become more pivotally imbricated in the articulation of social actions and outcomes.'
This is really very weak. In essence it says that material culture studies can more fully serve the self-serving goals of academic research as an end in itself. What are these 'more sophisicated ways'? (Marx is pretty sophisticated in his own way, mind you.) And what is 'more pivotally imbricated in the articulation of social actions and outcomes' only vague, piffling assertion?
I'm afraid I remain wary of the possibility that material culture as a self-referential 'site' of auto-generated meaning is in danger of collapse into solipsism. How far beyond postmodernity's threatened implosion into a hall of mirrored meaning does this take us?
As always Pat, you and I seem to be on the same path, just coming from different trajectories. Thanks for the critical push.
The conclusion you come to is correct - and this was the precise jumping off point for a book I was involved in titled: Overcoming the Modern Invention of Material Culture (edited by Julian Thomas and Vitor Oliveira Jorge). I can pass along my copy if you'd like.
Other than the contentions already discussed - in partaking in the project, I found that much 'material culture' discourse focuses primarily on the 'viewed' object. What is the case if someone is blind?
I contend that their are series ethical concerns about a material cultural discourse reliant on visual strategies of knowledge communication. Thus, in my work (and in the 'exhibit' deliverable), I hope to encourage tacticle opportunities for storytelling and performance/narrative. This is where I feel I resonate with Darcy's and Alice's work.
Again, I'm trying to be a bridge builder...
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