MATERIALITY

MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

AND SOCIETY
This book examines the relationships between society and
material culture: the interaction between people and things. TIM DANT
Tim Dant argues that the traditional approach to material
culture has focused on the symbolic meanings of objects,
largely overlooking the material impact that objects have on
everyday life in late modernity. Dant resists the now well-
established model of consumption as the principal relationship
with ‘things’ in our lives. Using the motor car as a recurring
theme, he shows how we confront our society through material
interaction with the objects that surround us.
Materiality and Society draws on debates with historical,
philosophical and theoretical discourses that address materiality,
from Braudel and Merleau-Ponty to Heidegger and Latour. The
book opens up new lines of enquiry and makes a convincing
case for the closer study of the interaction between people and
things.

TIM DANT
MATERIALITY
This book is key reading for students and researchers in a variety
of disciplines concerned with social relationships with things –
including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and
technology studies.
Tim Dant is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
East Anglia, UK. Before this he taught social theory, research

AND SOCIETY
methods and the sociology of culture at Manchester
Metropolitan University. His recent publications include Critical
Social Theory: Culture, Society and Critique (2003) and Material
Culture in the Social World (Open University Press, 1999).

Cover design Hybert Design • [Link]

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Materiality and Society

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Materiality and
Society

Tim Dant

Open University Press

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Open University Press

McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead, Berkshire
England SL6 2QL

email: enquiries@[Link]
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and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 1012–2289

USA

First published 2005

Copyright © Tim Dant 2005

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of
criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited of 90 Tottenham Court Road,
London, W1T 4LP.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 335 20855 X (pb) 0 335 20856 8 (hb)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, CornwallMP????G Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
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To Mollie – who showed me that there is

more to material interaction than
working on her car
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Contents

Preface ix

1 The sociality of things 1

2 Material civilization 11

3 Technology and modernity 33

4 Agency, affordance and actor-networks 60

5 Being-with materiality 84

6 Material interaction 108

7 Materiality and society 136

Notes 148

Bibliography 155

Index 165
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Preface

We spend much of our waking time more or less alone, not interacting with
anyone. But we are always living with the things that have been produced
within our society, things which have a cultural resonance that makes the
flow of our lives feel familiar, just as much as the sound of our language
does. At work, at rest, at play, whether other people are involved or not,
material things accompany the activities of our body and provide the environ-
ment for everything we do. And in the world of the second millennium, for
most of us, these material things are human made, shaped or placed in
accord with the conventions of our culture – whether it is the trees in the
local park or the arrangement of furniture in an office. As a sociologist inter-
ested in theoretical ideas and as a social policy researcher interviewing all
sorts of different types of people – usually the least well-off in our society –
I began to realize that much of what society gives to people that is useful,
is stuff. It is the material environment of homes and workplaces and all the
things in them that shape the context in which our personal lives of loves
and ambitions are played out. Now although this has always been the case,
material life has for long periods of history been relatively stable with new
types of objects or technologies being introduced relatively slowly. In earlier
times, our material environment was much more shaped by nature and our
response was oriented by need rather than choice. But at the turn of the
twenty-first century what seems to be of constant interest and concern to
us is the stuff that surrounds us, that we use and that we live in and among.
In the past it was religious beliefs, a sense of shared pride in nationality
or a common ideology that gave a society its identity. In the late modern
world it is as likely to be the shared difficulties we have in moving about
our society or in getting the mundane things of life to work properly, that
give us a sense that we share the world. What all humans have in common
is our sense of embodiment, which means that whatever our many differ-
ences, we know that we have at least similar practical experiences of the
material world we live in. In an earlier book Material Culture in the Social
World (Open University Press, 1999), I explored a number of the ways in
which this commonality of embodied experience shapes society. I argued
that it was not simply in consuming, if that means buying, acquiring or
appropriating things, that material culture was meaningful to us. I suggested
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x MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

that it was through the mundane ways in which we interact with things
that our material culture becomes partly constitutive of our social worlds.
In this book I want to take that idea further and explore how the realm of
the material has become tied up with our ideas about what society is and
in particular to start to unravel some of the fundamental, but taken-for-
granted, ways that we interact with things. There is a running example of
the car – a type of object that so many of us interact with so often and that
seems to shape our societies in many ways. But, with the help of a research
grant and a colleague, I took this example a little further by studying rather
closely how those who repair and maintain cars actually do interact with a
material object. This was a practical type of material interaction to study;
cars are big objects that stay in one place when they are being worked on
and, while the work practices of a repair garage were strange to us as
researchers, much of what went on was largely familiar and comprehensi-
ble through out own limited technical understanding of cars. The techni-
cians were engaged in skilled work that is of great significance in our society
(after all, they keep our cars running …) yet it is essentially a particular form
of the type of material interaction that we all engage in as we use objects
and tools in our everyday life.
At home using kitchen or other domestic equipment, at the office
using pens, filing cabinets, computers, and telephone and in all sorts of
work and leisure activities, we use things to shape the world around us and
enable us to do what we need or wish to do in it. As we manipulate objects
to affect other objects they become ‘tools’ and many of the objects we
encounter we co-opt as instruments to realise our ends in the world. In this
sense the work of the car technicians is an exemplar of our everyday inter-
action with objects and this is the reason for discussing it in this book. The
technicians’ material interaction with the underneath workings of our cars
is a sustained form of the sort of material interaction in which we all engage
with a wide range of different types of objects – including the car that we
drive. Now the material stuff, the objects, that we encounter in our ordinare
lives are just about all products of our culture and our society; they have
been shaped for instrumenetal purposes and designed to fit in with partic-
ular types of cultural practice. As we use them to shape our lives and ralise
our intentions and goals, so they shape us, guiding us in the ways of our
society. The consequence is that how we act on the world is entailed inthe
objects made available to us in our partricular cultural context. Our actions
take the form of physical force – it might be as slight as the pressing of a
button or speaking an instruction to a sensing device – that has effects in
the material world around us. But what we do in the material word is
shaped in two ways” firt, by the direct impact of objects on our perceptions
channelled via the bodily sensations of sight, touch, smell, taste and sound;
and second, the meanings and significance of these bodily sensations are
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PREFACE xi

shaped through the embodied processes of mind and memory by our cul-
tural experience. However much our reflective conscousness is brough to
bear, however much we feel we are acting through our wone ill, our actions
are constrained by the material objects to hand and the cultural experience
we have acquired. Often what do is routine, habitual and hardly guided by
thought so we follow a culturally acquired practice that accords with the
materiality of the objects with which we are confronted. Together with the
discursive and political realtionships between people, which are more
usually the domain of sociology, our material interactions, whether con-
scious or habitual, both manifest and realize the culture of the society in
which we live. If you think that interacting with things is not important to
you, just try to remember the last time that you were not engaged in some
sort of ‘material interaction’.
I would especially like to thank David Bowles who was the research
associate on the ESRC project on ‘Car Care: The Repair and Maintenance of
the Private Car’ (R00023370) that was undertaken at the University of East
Anglia during 2000/1. David was behind the camera for the video work and
undertook the great majority of the fieldwork. He was also very involved in
drafting reports and early project papers – but most importantly he enjoyed
discussing what we could see on the video recordings and trying to make
sense of the process of material interaction. I would like also to thank all
those who took part in the project, including managers, proprietors and
members of the advisory group but, most importantly, the technicians who
generously allowed us to watch and record them at work.
My special thanks must go to Bernadette Boyle for her kind help with
the translations from French. I would also like to thank Jon Hindmarsh,
Christian Heath and Dirk vom Lehn at the Work, Interaction and
Technology Research Group at King’s College, London. They provided
inspiration and ideas about a topic and a project that others shook their
heads over.
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1 The sociality of things

Introduction

The hand reaches out for the kettle, lifts it off its stand and places the spout
under the tap. Water flows. The kettle is returned to its stand and a move-
ment of the thumb has set it going as the hand leaves the handle, the flow
of electricity indicated by a warm red light. The water soon boils and, with
a click, the kettle turns itself off. The hand lifts the kettle to pour the boiling
water into a cup with a teabag in it. This action is a routine sequence that
many people do many times a day, more or less without thinking. It is not
easy to do with one’s eyes shut – although the ‘look’ of the kettle is famil-
iar, sight helps to co-ordinate the positioning of the hand as it closes on the
kettle, and the kettle as it closes on the tap and then as it is returned back
to its stand. But the body’s familiarity with the kettle means that the hand
is oriented to its handle before it gets close; the hand is open enough to
easily move into a grip with the thumb opposed to four fingers and it is pre-
pared for the vertical handle of a ‘jug’ kettle or the horizontal handle of a
traditional kettle. The thumb ‘knows’ where the switch is and whether to
press or push to release power.
I’ve described someone using a plastic jug kettle that plugs directly
onto its stand and fills through a filter in the spout. A few years ago the
kettle would be much more likely to be made of metal and thus be heavier
and its external surface would much more likely be hot; it would have had
a plug attaching a lead directly into the kettle which would have stood on
feet but with no stand. The kettle would have had to be unplugged first and
filled by lifting the lid to let the water enter the body of the kettle; the spout
would have been too narrow for filling. Electric power would have been via
the plug and the switch would most likely have been at the wall; the user
would have had to switch on and then off when the kettle boiled. And a
few years before that the kettle might have been made of aluminium and
designed for putting on a gas cooker with a large spout for filling and a cap
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2 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

with a whistle. Or we may go back to the turn of the twentieth century

when the kettle would have had a handle, a spout and a lid but be designed
to hang over a range. Made of much heavier metal, its handle would have
been grasped with some sort of cloth and probably using two hands. The
range might have had its own water tank built in but water might well have
had to be pumped and carried to the kitchen.
The relationship between material objects and human bodies is charac-
teristic of a particular culture – it is precisely this that has enabled archaeolo-
gists and anthropologists to study ‘exotic’ cultures, displaced in place or time,
in the absence of a contemporary documentary account of the culture. We
might even say that the material stuff of a people provides a document of the
culture and, of course, its documents, whether gravestones, pen and ink
writing or typescript, are material objects too. What is noticeable in contem-
porary societies is that the complexity of material culture has increased at an
unprecedented speed and this has been connected with a very rapid change
in the material culture of modern societies. Researchers have commented on
the impact of this change before – here is Michel de Certeau’s colleague Luce
Giard commenting in 1994 on the change in kitchen equipment from tradi-
tional hand tools to the modern battery of specific tools, often electrically
powered, often with attachments, tools like the food processor:

The change involves not only the utensil or tool and the gesture
that uses it, but the instrumentation relationship that is established
between the user and the object used. In the past, the cook used a
simple tool, of a primary kind, that also fulfilled simple functions;
her hand furnished the kinetic energy, she directed the progress of
the operation, supervised the succession of action sequences, and
could mentally represent the process for herself. Today, she
employs an elaborate tool, of a secondary kind, that requires com-
plicated handling; she truly understands neither its principle nor
the way it works. She feeds this technical object with ingredients
to be transformed, then unleashes the movement by pushing a
button, and collects the transformed matter without having con-
trolled the intervening steps in the operation.
(de Certeau 1998: 211–12)1

The change in the way that objects are incorporated into activities such as
preparing food is not simply a change in the objects, it is also a change in
the embodied practices, the ‘gestures’ with which the objects are used. But
further than that, Giard is commenting on a change in the way that the
social actor interacts with the object that transforms their relation to the
action and to the process. This is a late modern equivalent in everyday life
to the transformation in the work process that Marx described in relation
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THE SOCIALITY OF THINGS 3

to the mechanization of production in early modernity (see Chapter 2). The

change in the ‘instrumentation relationship’ is there even in the automatic
electric kettle where the source of power is virtually invisible and its con-
nection with the kettle almost incidental, and where its control is ceded to
the object. The user does not see the element, does not confront the con-
nection to the power and probably does not know where or precisely how
the kettle ‘knows’ when to switch off. As Giard acknowledges, the material
transformation of the domestic kitchen does save time and effort, increases
comfort and hygiene but at the cost of ‘the ancient balances in the trans-
mission of savoir faire and the management of time’ (de Certeau 1998: 212).
What de Certeau and his colleagues call ‘practices’, that is, an embodied
sequence of habitual or repeated actions that incorporate ‘savoir faire’ or
‘know-how’, are aspects of material existence learnt through the culture. In
Chapter 5 we will see how this cultural knowledge is embedded in routine
and repeated actions to become what phenomenologists call ‘operational
intentionality’.
The materiality of society is usually engaged with on an individual
basis because it is the meeting of body and object that constitutes the rela-
tionship. Some material objects, buildings, for example, interact with many
individuals at once, but much of the material environment that constitutes
the culture of a society is interacted with by individuals one at a time. Not
only the kettle and kitchen equipment but the furniture we use and the
tools for everyday living (pens, pencils, mobile phones, personal computers,
cars, clothes, and so on) are interacted with on an individual basis. It is even
as individuals that we interact with buildings simultaneously, our minded
bodies negotiating our own route at our pace, for our purposes. Groups
of people do react together but most often to a performed cultural event
(a theatrical performance, a public speech or a football match) rather than
as an interaction with a material object. So it is through the direct interac-
tion between individuals and material objects that the culture is mediated:
the objects have embedded within the materiality of their design and manu-
facture a series of cultural values that shape the practices, both of body and
of mind, by which those objects are used. Of course, on the other end of
these material interactions are other people who are both shaping and
sharing the culture: those who design and make the artefacts we live with
and those who benefit from our material interactions, such as the friend for
whom the tea is made.

Studying humans and things

The issue of interaction between human beings and their material environ-
ment has long been a concern within anthropology as the study of human
beings in all their cultural variation. Anthropology often focuses on particular
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4 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

cultures but underlying such study is a concern with what makes the life of
human beings possible; what is characteristic of human being as distinct
from any other animal species. In studying distinct cultures, the material
life of a people is inseparable from the religion, rituals or customs of their
cultural existence and sometimes it has provided a particular focus for
making sense of a particular culture. Malinowski’s (1922) interest in the
Trobriand Islanders’ exchange of shells in the Kula ring, and the building of
sea-going canoes to transport them, is one of the most famous examples in
the anthropological literature that led to decades of discussion and re-
analysis (see e.g. Miller 1987: 60–1). Among the commentators was Marcel
Mauss who exerted considerable influence over the development of
anthropological understanding of material culture with his discussion of
the gift – in which a certain measure of human agency is invested in objects
that are passed between human beings according to a set of cultural codes:
‘Things possess a personality, and the personalities are in some way the per-
manent things of the clan. Titles, talismans, copper objects and the spirits
of the chiefs are both homonyms and synonyms of the same nature and
performing the same function’ (1990: 46). Objects that are given create
obligations of reciprocity as well as symbolizing social status. This strand of
cultural anthropology has laid considerable emphasis on the capacity of
material objects to sustain social relationships and manage a cultural order
– it has given rise to an anthropological interest in ‘consumption’ as the
commodified equivalent of this process within modern, capitalist societies
(Veblen 1925; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Miller 1987; McCracken 1988;).
The emphasis in the anthropological interest in consumption has been
in the capacity for material objects to symbolize or represent social rela-
tionships but Marcel Mauss’s anthropology has also given rise to a different
tradition in which more attention is paid to the embodied relationship with
material objects. In 1934 Mauss delivered a lecture on the ‘Techniques of
the Body’ (1973) pointing out that how people moved their bodies was not
simply ‘natural’, or animalistic, but was in some senses ‘cultural’. Mauss dis-
cusses a number of such techniques including swimming, walking, running
and sitting still which were all ‘arts of using the human body’ that he sug-
gested could be understood in terms of a habitus, that is, the ‘acquired abil-
ities’ that varied ‘between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions,
prestiges’ (1973: 73). What interested him was that this cultural variation
was not an abstract or purely mental capacity but was a blend of biological,
sociological and psychological features that were acquired by members of
society through imitation and through action. The techniques of the body
were not created by a cognitive grasping of concepts and ideas but were
generated and transmitted through the work of collective and individual
practical reason. Mauss clarifies what he means by a technique as an action
of the body that is ‘effective’ and ‘traditional’ and is realized and experi-
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THE SOCIALITY OF THINGS 5

enced as ‘actions of a mechanical, physical or physio-chemical order’ that

treat the body as an instrument (1973: 75). Now Mauss was principally con-
cerned with ways of moving and placing the body in its environment, what
we might call bodily hexis (Bourdieu 1990: 69–70), but one example he
gave involving haptics (the sense of touch) was of soldiers during the First
World War digging trenches. He describes how French soldiers could not
use English spades and English soldiers could not use French spades, so that
each time a division of troops from one country relieved those of another,
8000 spades had to be brought into the battlefield and another 8000
removed. There was a ‘manual knack’ that took time to learn and was char-
acteristic of the particular culture but here the ‘technique’ was linked to the
particular material form of the spade.
For Mauss, it was the cultural specificity of the bodily technique of
digging that was important but recently his ideas have been extended by
modern French anthropologists and social scientists. Pierre Parlebas develops
Mauss’s innovative ideas to suggest that the techniques of the body extend
to include the world of material objects and that individual innovation in
bodily technique and use of objects is a distinctive feature of action:

Techniques of the body incorporate material objects. A tennis

racket, the wheels of a bicycle, the prow of a boat or the tips of skis
will extend the body and become its sensors … Material objects are
the recipients of bodily practice.
(1999: 37)2

For Parlebas, both bodily techniques and material equipment are embedded
in a culture that shapes action in ways that are not easy to recognize from
within the situation. A similar approach is explored by Jean-Pierre Warnier
(2001) who resists reducing material objects and bodily techniques to a
social logic in which simple membership of a culture determines how one
relates to objects. He argues that the embodied practices of material culture
need to be addressed to understand how human practices are engaged with
specific objects to generate different subjectivities within the culture. For
Warnier, the subject of social action is not simply a person, but a subject
constituted out of material and cultural relations. One of the examples he
gives is the child soldier who ‘incorporates in his sensori-motricity the
kalachnikov and the 4×4 Toyota, plus all the trappings of armed material
equipment’ and who will at some point be ‘fused with his material culture’
(2001: 21). Warnier’s powerful argument is that while these various pieces
of equipment may be read as signs, it is through their daily use for months
on end that they become part and parcel of the child’s subjectivity that
transforms his relationship with other selves. We cannot begin to understand
the practices of killing and maiming without recognizing the complexity of
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6 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

this compound subjectivity in which the social actor includes both equip-
ment and embodied practices. Drawing on the work of the psychoanalyst
Serge Tisseron (1999), Warnier is keen to introduce the emotional relation-
ship between the individual and the object by which the social and cultural
significance of things is sustained. But reading signs and analysing dis-
courses are insufficient to understand material practices and Warnier and
his colleagues (see e.g. Warnier and Julien 1999) propose that what is
needed is a ‘praxeology’, by which they mean a science of motricity that
can be used to develop an analysis of sensori-affectivo-motor culture. The
attempt to understand the lived relationship between humans and objects
that constitutes the social, alongside the complexity of discursive and emo-
tional relationships between humans, is the concern of this book. However,
the emphasis in Warnier’s praxeology is on the way that subjectivity is
enhanced as material forms extend the possible actions of the human body;
it is the subjectivizing of objects that he and his colleagues focus on, rather
than the interaction between subjects and objects. In Chapter 4 I will discuss
a number of perspectives on human agency and objects but will argue that
human beings interact with objects as well as forming assemblages with
them to act in the world. Materiality constitutes an environment for human
being with which individual human subjects engage; sometimes materiality
remains environment, sometimes it is interacted with directly as distinct
objects and sometimes material objects are taken up as tools that extend
human instrumentality.
Michael Schiffer is an anthropologist who has recently argued for the
importance of studying the interaction between humans and objects
because ‘human life consists of ceaseless and varied interactions among people
and myriad kinds of things’ (1999: 2). Schiffer develops what he calls an
ontology to try to make sense of the ‘material medium’ that human beings
are immersed in but he does so from the premise that ‘all human behaviour
is communication’ (1999: 4). As his argument develops, a new jargon
emerges to describe this mode of communicative behaviour that is between
human beings but which involves artefacts. Schiffer argues for the impor-
tance of artefacts in interpersonal communication, pointing out how
clothes, make-up and other forms of adornment, modify the nature of
inter-human communication as does the material environment. Again the
emphasis is on how materiality extends the performance possibilities of
human beings which in turn affects their behaviour. What is rather less
credible is that Schiffer does not explain just what the effect is; his general
claim that artefacts modify behaviour and interactive performance is well
made but we remain unclear what the consequence for communication is.
For example, as he describes the various ways body odours are modified
through perfumes, soaps as well as tobacco use and foods such as garlic, he
argues merely that they affect interaction but does not discuss what the
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THE SOCIALITY OF THINGS 7

effect on meaning is. It is of course an empirical question and his book is

establishing a theoretical position but the general problem remains that the
impact of materiality on interaction may often be slight and the relative sig-
nificance of materiality as opposed to speech and gesture in communicating
meaning is not tackled. Schiffer’s approach of equating material interaction
with communication leads to a limited ontology that, for example, does
not allow for the interaction between humans and artefacts to be shaped or
oriented for purposes other than communication. Quite simply, much
human/object interaction is concerned with work and is not primarily
about communication. Whether it is cleaning the house or replacing an
exhaust pipe, human interaction with objects is often directed primarily at
the material life of humans – sustaining and maintaining artefacts and an
environment that enables that particular lifestyle to continue. Schiffer’s
notion of communication is limited to the transfer of information (‘the
passage of consequential information from interactor to interactor’, 1999:
68) and does not take account of the possibility that interaction between
human beings or between human beings and objects can be oriented to
emotion (see Tisseron 1999; Chapter 4 below), or pleasure seeking and sen-
sation (see Dant 1999, Howes 2003; Chapter 6 below). Schiffer does theo-
rize the process of interaction between person and object when no other
person is involved but always treats it as a form of communication as if
information were food enough for the maintenance of bodily and social
existence.
Rather than attempt to build an ontology from scratch as Schiffer does,
I will work from the ontological discussions of Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty who provide an account of embodied being-in-the-world and its rela-
tion with other beings, including those that are non-human. Schiffer does
argue persuasively for the potency of material interactions as a vehicle for
culture to be exchanged and some of his conceptual apparatus is interest-
ing. For example, he takes up the idea of ‘registration’ to refer to the way
that the human sensory apparatus responds to the world around it. Rather
than the common-sense term ‘attention’, the concept of registration does
not suggest wakefulness or particular conscious activity: ‘registration may
be conscious or nonconscious, explicit or implicit, and voluntary or invol-
untary’ (Schiffer 1999: 105). This concept allows for considerable variation
in the way that a body apprehends the material world during interaction
with it and the way that this is managed within the being, a process Schiffer
calls ‘weighting’. In some of his modes of material interaction, Schiffer
allows for direct interaction between a person and an object in which the
weighting of registration varies between the object, a tool and the environ-
ment as the interaction proceeds. For example, he writes of someone
carving a duck on his front porch; as the interaction proceeds, the infor-
mation received through the actions of carving are weighted and will affect
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8 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

the next stroke of the knife. Information from the environment is simulta-
neously registered but differently weighted – although someone coming
along will be registered and may be weighted sufficiently to yield a response
such as a greeting (Schiffer 1999: 107–8). A further contribution from
anthropology about agency, Alfred Gell’s discussion of art as agency, will be
discussed in Chapter 4.
Schiffer’s close attention to the process of interaction and the gleaning
of information from a range of material entities is most interesting and is,
sadly, not matched by the discussions of materiality and society within the
sociological literature. In the sociology of science and technology there
have been a number of discussions on sociality and materiality (Law and
Mol 1995; Knorr-Cetina 1997 – see Brenna et al. 1998; Preda 1999; Dant
and Martin 2001; Pels, et al. 2002; Bruun and Langlais 2003; Thurk and Fine
2003). Much of this material has drawn on the stimulation of Latour,
Callon and Akrich’s ‘actor-network theory’ which will receive some atten-
tion in Chapter 4. In general, these commentaries attempt to grasp the
nature of materiality as a form that can be related to society at an abstract
or theoretical level. This continues a debate about the general relationship
between society and technology that will be addressed in Chapter 3. But in
the sociological literature there is little attempt to grasp how social rela-
tionships with material objects are formed by attending to the detail of how
contact between social actors and things is achieved. An exception is the
work of Christian Heath and his colleagues who have developed a distinc-
tive approach to the study of workplaces (see Heath et al. 2000; Luff et al.
2000). They have gathered and analysed video data in a variety of settings
where material objects are part of the activity of work and have attended to
some of the details of the interaction between humans and objects.3 Their
focus of attention has primarily been on how material objects become
incorporated into interaction between humans and how attention to mate-
rial objects is inserted into exchanges of talk. This body of work brings
together some of the rigour of conversational analysis and the attention to
embodied, non-verbal communication that was a feature of Heath’s work
on medical encounters (1986). This style of research brings fine detail to
understanding how collaborative work is achieved through convergence of
action, co-participation in decisions and the sharing of judgements and
assessments of situations. What their studies show is how objects are incor-
porated into collaborative work because the work arises from information
received from or about objects (and is often directed to manipulating
objects) and because objects – such as telephones and computer screens – are
tools for mediating between co-workers. Inspired by this fascinating work, I
have taken a different direction to focus on the direct interaction between
human beings and objects without being necessarily concerned about inter-
action with co-participants. This is because the cultural significance of the
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THE SOCIALITY OF THINGS 9

interaction is often between those who are not co-present: those who made
the object and its end user. It is the detailed nature of how this interaction
is undertaken that is the focus of this book and the approach of the book is
to explore a series of discourses that potentially address the relationship
between society and materiality.

Material interaction

A running example, though not the only one, that will be used during the
book is the nature of interaction with cars. The motor car emerged into
and participated in the development of capitalist production early in the
twentieth century to become a key component in modern and late modern
culture (see Chinoy 1955; Goldthorpe et al. 1968; Beynon 1973; Altshuler
et al. 1984; Sachs 1992; Gartman 1994; O’Connell 1998; Thoms et al. 1998;
Adams 1999; Hawkin et al. 1999; Urry 1999, 2000; Miller 2001b). The tra-
jectory of the car was very much linked to the development of the mass
production of objects but by the middle of the twentieth century became
significant in the development of late modern modes of consumption,
lifestyle and the organization of societies. The car as an object that shapes
much of social life at the beginning of the twenty-first century is only just
beginning to be recognized. As John Urry puts it: ‘The car’s significance is
that it reconfigures civil society involving distinct ways of dwelling, travel-
ling and socialising in, and through, an automobilized time-space. Civil
societies of the west are societies of automobility’.(2000: 59). The car is at
once a social object and at the same time one that is largely interacted with
by an individual, the driver (Dant 2000a; Dant and Martin 2001; Dant
2004). As well as an object that is produced and consumed, the car also has
to be maintained if its owner is to be able to continue to participate in
modern society and the repair and maintenance of the car offer an oppor-
tunity to study interaction with objects close up. This type of work is
routine and everyday to those who do it and yet, unlike the filling of the
kettle, is somewhat exotic to those of us who do not. Interaction between
human and object during the repair and maintenance of cars is relatively
easy to observe because of the size of the objects involved and the pace at
which work proceeds. Although it involves many modern electronic and
sophisticated pieces of equipment, the wielding of handtools, particularly
the spanner, is the principal means of working on the car and its compo-
nents. Chapter 6 will focus on embodied material interaction and draw on
illustrative examples from video data collected during an ESRC-funded
research project undertaken at the University of East Anglia.4
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10 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Overview of the book

In this introduction I have mentioned all the chapters that follow but I will
briefly summarize here what their themes are. Each chapter addresses a dis-
course or group of discourses that in some way bear on the topic of materi-
ality and society. There is a structure of moving progressively from society as
history towards the micro-level of interaction between a person and an
object – the argument of this book is that ultimately this is how material
culture is mediated in its embodied, non-symbolic mode. In Chapter 2 I will
discuss Braudel’s idea of ‘material civilization’ as a way of understanding the
emergence of modernity as a transformation in the relationship between
society and materiality. Here I will also briefly discuss the importance of
material relations in the emergence of the capitalist mode of production that
Marx describes as well as the place of materiality in the attempt to under-
stand consumption in modern societies. The emphasis of studies of con-
sumption has been on the ‘meanings’ or significance of social status of
objects but that has overlooked the lived and practical relations with things.
As modernity has developed, the possibility that things may come to domi-
nate society has been a theme for social theories about technology and this
will be addressed in Chapter 3. In anthropology, psychology and sociology
there are various views of objects that attribute them some degree of social
‘agency’ which is the topic of Chapter 4. These views treat materiality as dis-
aggregated into things, usually things embedded in human or social rela-
tions, rather than as a collective whole such as ‘technology’. In Chapter 5 I
will explore some of the features of being-in-the-world through the phe-
nomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as tackling rather more fun-
damentally the possibility of human relations with things. Chapter 6 will
develop this approach and apply it to the process of ordinary material inter-
action – specifically between technicians, their tools and the cars they are
working on. In Chapter 7 I will make some concluding remarks about how
the relations between materiality and society are changing in the late
modern societies of the twenty-first century.
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2 Material civilization

Introduction

Sociology has not traditionally concerned itself with the material stuff of
life much. Its principal concern has been with how human beings live
together and, as a collectivity, create an entity with a form that cannot be
reduced to the life of individuals or the biological propensity of humans as
animals to survive – society. It is the connections between humans, that are
interactive, communicative and emotional, that create the institutions and
patterns of social relationship characteristic of the form of society. That
form is more complex than can be accounted for simply in terms of instinct
or genetic inheritance so that the study of societies is distinct from biology
or zoology. Perhaps the most significant feature of human societies that
distinguishes them from the social groups of other species is symbolic
language that is transmitted through vocalization and inscribed into repre-
sentational images and writing. But symbolic communication is not sepa-
rate as a distinctive faculty of biological human being because it emerges as
part and parcel of social patterns of action and behaviour, that include
family arrangements, religion, legal systems and economic arrangements.
There is a contiguity between sociology and a series of other disciplines that
study various aspects of human collective existence, particularly history,
anthropology, economics, politics, philosophy and psychology, each of
which focus on a different aspect or area of human collective behaviour.
It is often difficult to distinguish sociology from these various disci-
plines, to mark what is distinctly sociological about a perspective, a theory
or a line of argument that could not be incorporated within these other disci-
plines. If there is a distinction, then it appears to have two characteristics.
First, the sociological perspective suggests that there is something about the
way that humans form into collective groups that is imperative for any
individual’s specific action within the group. This is not to suggest that
society is determinative of individual or even collective action, merely that
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12 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

the responses of other members of the group to an individual’s actions in a

social context can be more or less anticipated. Second, sociology is largely
concerned with the form of modern societies, with those that have emerged
after a transformatory period of industrialization. It would be strange to
suggest that there were no ‘societies’ prior to industrialization but the dis-
tinctive discipline of sociology emerged in the attempt to grasp the effects
of industrialization. The form of pre-modern societies has been of interest
to historians, anthropologists and archaeologists who have studied societies
of the past but sociologists have studied such societies principally in order
to understand the transition to modern societies. The effects of industrial-
ization are largely to do with new economic, political and legal arrange-
ments that emerged during a period of rapid transformation over a couple
of centuries in the way people worked and lived in industrialized societies.
The form that societies take, and that sociology is interested in, has some-
times been concerned with social structure – the ways in which individuals
are situated within sub-groups or strata within the society – and at other
times has been more concerned with social agency – the ways in which
individuals realize themselves within the context of social constraints.
These dimensions of structure and agency, of group formation and individ-
ual response, have led to the development of theories and methods that
emphasize one or the other, but sociology is always concerned to specify
what constitutes society and how it bears on the actions of individuals. The
transition to modernity has brought with it changes in social structure and
in the relationship between individuals and their society that sociology has
attempted to understand.
For reasons that are tied up with the historical process of institutionalized
knowledge, sociology has not, on the whole, been concerned with the
material life of human beings. This is strange because one of the most
dramatic impacts of industrialization has been on the transformation of
human material life. The ways of meeting material needs for sustenance,
shelter, comfort, body maintenance, mobility and aesthetic pleasure have
been transformed in modernity. The changes have perhaps been of less sig-
nificance for the wealthy few who have always been able to ensure that
they have sufficient in the way of material goods (in terms of food, comfort,
adornment and decoration), even at the expense of those such as slaves or
serfs who lived an impoverished material life. Modern industrial societies
remain strikingly unequal in the material quality of life of their members,
but there has been nonetheless, for the great majority, a dramatic transfor-
mation in their material life as compared with even a couple of decades ago.
Material standards are better in the twenty-first century for most people in
the rich industrialized countries than they were for even the rich few of the
eighteenth century. Of course, this does not mean that people are happier
or any more fulfilled, it does not even mean that they have more autonomy
over their lives – but it does mean that they have more material opportu-
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 13

nities to live in comfort, to travel, to be healthy, to eat sufficiently and to

enjoy aesthetic pleasures of the senses.
Classical sociology, which emerged to account for and explain the
social consequences of modernity, set the agenda for the discipline for the
last century. Even today students are taught the writings of these founders
who established what the proper concerns of sociology are – and rightly so,
since their work has a bearing on the sociologies that have emerged since,
whether it is functionalism, postmodernism, critical realism or feminism.
The classic sociology of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel give us some
basic conceptual tools with which to understand the transition from what
we might call ‘traditional’ society to ‘modern’ – industrialized, capitalist,
urbanized – society. Sociology as a distinct discipline emerges to understand
precisely this new form of society, to grasp its new economic and social
order and analyse how it is different from what has gone before. In this
chapter I will explore some of the ways in which sociology has engaged
with, touched upon or avoided the process that Braudel calls ‘material civ-
ilization’ – the impact of material life on the changing form of society.

Marx: a materialist sociology

It is Marx whose analysis of the economic transformation to a capitalist

mode of production identifies changes in social relations of great signifi-
cance, most importantly the emergence of a new class order based on rela-
tionship to the means of production. The class distinctions between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the social concomitants of economic
changes such as the division of labour and a reorganization of work around
the commodity, the factory and the city. These themes become key areas of
debate for classical sociology that continued well into the latter half of the
twentieth century, but Marx and Engels’s analysis of the mode of produc-
tion followed a distinctly materialist understanding of history. Engels’s
materialism made a link between the scientific understanding of society
and the scientific understanding of the material world – mathematical
mechanics, the physics of electricity and biology. Physical science had
demonstrated that knowledge, practical knowledge, was needed to address
the material substance of the world empirically and resist distraction by
ideas, fantasies and myths. In Anti-Dühring (1936) and the Dialectics of
Nature (1940), he attempts to chase out the remains of metaphysical
thought from the natural, material sciences and to identify universal or
transcendent laws that will persist across all scientific knowledge. Engels
demonstrates an obsessive concern with dialectics as a mode of thought
based on a ‘natural’ process – something is true because it is evident in the
material world – that begins to sound like the very transcendent, meta-
physical law he wishes to dispel.1 But Marx’s materialism is more subtle and
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14 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

is more concerned with the workings of political economy than with estab-
lishing a scientific method of dialectics that will span the study of history
and that of physics, chemistry and biology. The young Marx accuses Hegel
of the ‘crassest materialism’ when he treats human status differences and
property rights as the same thing – Marx wittily suggests that it appears as
if it is the land that inherits the property owner, since it is only the land
that endures (Marx 1975: 174–5). Marx’s own materialism is based on rec-
ognizing the distinction between politics – which attributes social status –
and the material world which includes both the life of humans and the
land upon which they work. This analysis also drives his critique of
Feuerbach’s materialism whom he accused of focusing on ‘abstract think-
ing’ and ‘contemplation’ instead of ‘practical, human-sensuous activity’ –
material human action (Marx 1975: 422). Following Feuerbach, Marx and
Engels set out the basis of their materialism as lying in production, through
which individuals produce their ‘mode of life’ – not just the physical and
material aspects but all aspects – while at the same time their nature
depends on the material conditions determining production.2
It is, however, in Volume 1 of Capital (1976) that Marx draws on the
material world of lived sensuous experience to explain the mechanics of the
capitalist mode of production. He describes the effects of work on the lives
and bodies of the working class (Marx 1976: Chapter 10, ‘The Working
Day’) which together with Engels’s (1845) account of the conditions of the
working class are key documents in the changing material civilization of
modernity. In later chapters Marx (1976: Chapters 14 and 15) discusses the
impact of machinery on the industrialized division of labour in manufac-
ture as it emerged from its evolution over the previous two centuries from
traditional handicrafts. Unlike Durkheim and Weber, when discussing the
division of labour, Marx explores the material effect on a worker of the con-
tinuous repetition of the same simple operation over a whole life which
‘converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that opera-
tion’ (1976: 458). He recognizes that it leads to an increased specialization
of tools as well as of the worker to produce a distinctive material culture of
production that reduces the total amount of labour power required for the
finished object but at the same time alters the worker’s relationship with his
tools and with the object itself. An efficient division of labour requires that
workers are brought together to live in a greater density than would be nec-
essary for handicraft production and, as Marx spells out, this interaction
affects social organization beyond work. Both geographical communities
and the communities of production or ‘guilds’ are social patterns linked
to the traditional organization of production. But it is the distinctively
capitalist organization of a division of labour within one workshop or factory
in which all contribute to the production of a final commodity while none
own the means of production, that brings about the particular material
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 15

form of life of the proletariat that ‘attacks the individual at the very roots
of his life’ (1976: 484). The material civilization of individual workers
suffers as they become subjected to the requirements of capitalist produc-
tion and community identity is displaced by their commodified relation-
ship with the capitalist and the factory.
Machinery transforms the material life of the worker, not simply by the
replacement of him or her as a source of power, but by taking over and
linking together tools to replace a series of workers (Marx 1976: 494–5).
Mechanized tools can become much larger and more powerful than could
be handled by even groups of workers and they prompt further mechaniz-
ation within an industry or factory. Industrial machinery, as well as pro-
viding motive force, takes over the worker’s skills in manipulating tools and
dictates the pace, force and placement of action and so the worker has to
‘adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an
automaton’ (Marx 1976: 546). The factory itself becomes an extended form
of the machine in which the worker’s freedom, both physical and mental,
is constrained and directed according to the requirements of the machine.3
Beyond the factory, machine production also changed human relations as
women and children were employed to replace male labourers – at a lower
rate of pay, of course. As Marx puts it, ‘Previously the worker sold his own
labour-power, which he disposed of as a free agent, formally speaking. Now
he sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer’ (1976: 519). The
working day is also lengthened because the machinery is a capital invest-
ment that can operate independently of the rhythms of day or season.
The machines do have a material life of their own, which again Marx
spells out; they deteriorate both through wear in use and through the
ageing or degradation of material over time, whether used or not (1976:
528). But the material life of machines means that they are best used inten-
sively so their attendant workers were also to be used intensively by speeding
up the machines, despite the greater exhaustion and risk of injury. The
workers of the industrializing world did not accept these changes in their
material life without complaint and resistance and again Marx carefully
documents these struggles (1976: 553–64). The resistance of workers
through strikes provided further encouragement for the capitalist to intro-
duce machines to replace them, especially with ‘self-acting’ tools. If the
price was right, most workers could be replaced by automatic machinery
and those workers who remained were easily replaced by other workers
because skill was embedded in machines rather than in workers. The
increase in productivity stimulated all sorts of other economic activity,
most importantly it stimulated consumer demand – as the material con-
ditions of the factory workers declined, the material possibilities for the
extending middle classes increased.4 As wealth was created within a local-
ity, there was an increased demand and possibility for public works (canals,
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16 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

docks, bridges, tunnels, etc.) and ancillary industries (Marx mentions gas-
works, telegraphy, photography, steam navigation and railways, 1976: 573).
Laying-off workers as they were replaced by machines also created cheap
domestic labour and led to an increase in ‘the number of modern domestic
slaves’ (Marx 1976: 575).
Marx pays close attention to the changing material culture of produc-
tion, based on the reports of factory inspectors, children’s employment
commissions, public health reports and so on, to provide a detailed
account of the material process of alienation that he had earlier discussed
in the abstract in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1975: 322–34).
He may stand out among classical social theorists for his detailed account
of material civilization as regards production, but he has hardly anything
to say about the changes in everyday material life that came with industri-
alization. Despite his distinction between ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value that is
central to his account of the commodity form in Capital, Marx does not
discuss use-value and how it is realized in material life. The distinction is a
technical one which enables him to analyse the economic relations of
exchange-value independently of the ways in which goods affect the
routine activities of everyday life. For Marx, use-value ‘has no existence
apart from’ its physical properties whereas exchange-value is a ‘form of
appearance’ since it is an abstract relational value, independent of use and
‘therefore does not contain an atom of use-value’ (1976: 127–8). But this
analysis treats use-value as a constant quality of the object and disconnects
it from the ways in which goods are used. Use-values are not discrete, con-
stituting a single function for a single material form because any given
object may have more than one use (a bucket may be for putting slops in,
for getting water or for turning upside down to sit or stand on). Use-values
will vary according to social circumstances (buckets for carrying water have
extra value when the water is cut off and it has to be carried from a stand-
pipe) and these varying circumstances of use will interact with exchange-
values. In other words, there is more than an atom of use-value in
exchange-value and use-value has a social dimension that spills over into
exchange in a complex series of ways.
These problems with Marx’s theory of use- and exchange-value have
been commented on before many times and in much greater detail (e.g.
Baudrillard [1972] 1981; Sahlins 1976). Baudrillard argued that use-value and
utility itself became a ‘fetishised social relation’ in Marx’s writing because it
was based on an abstraction of a system of needs (Baudrillard 1981: 131). His
solution was to add a third dimension of ‘sign-value’ to the commodity to
account for the cultural processes that connect use- and exchange-values.
Use-values are negotiated in a social context and while in modern society we
may readily point to the role of advertising and sign exchange in prompting
us to recognize new use-values, it must be the case in any human society that
imitation is one of the ways that use-values are recognized and taken up. A
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 17

new form of plough or water fountain is its own advertisement that will
attract interest and replication if it demonstrates a use. Marx asserts that the
exchange-value of commodities is ‘totally independent of their use-value’
(1976: 128) on the grounds that while use-values are qualities in things,
exchange-values are merely to do with quantity. He argues that commodities
are ‘merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour’ (Marx 1976:
128) but this is because, for theoretical purposes, he has abstracted the com-
modity form from use so that ‘It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn
or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished’
(Marx 1976: 128).
Marx seems to recognize a more complex relationship between con-
sumption and production in a famous section in the Grundrisse (1973)
where he says ‘consumption mediates production, in that it alone creates
for the products the subject for whom they are products … a garment
becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no
one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural
object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption’
(1973: 91). This recognition of the continuity between the work of produc-
tion and the use of consumption suggests that exchange is based on more
than relative quantities of commodities. Later in this passage Marx discusses
consumption as the ‘motive’ for production that suggests ‘an internal
image, as a need, as drive and as purpose’ (1973: 91–2). Consumption as a
form of production and the role of art in responding to production are
alluded to, suggesting that both use and beauty are social products.5
However, these brief notes by Marx stand alone and apart from his sub-
stantive discussions which address political economy.6 In Capital (1976)
Marx explains at length the operation of money as capital and the manip-
ulation of the labour market to extract surplus value, but he defines the
material needs of a worker for social reproduction as an average (Marx 1976:
129). The complexity of use-values in the lives of workers and the signifi-
cance of consumption in the relations of capitalism are never tackled.
The strangeness of Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-
value is linked to the investment of labour power in the object. What Marx
does not explore are the variations between commodities and their varying
capacity to meet material needs and the variations in the material relations
by which commodities are produced and, with a few exceptions such as
Baudrillard and Sahlins, there has been no substantial rethinking of the
nature of use-value.7 It is the way that something is taken up in the various
material activities of humans that determines its use-value and will have an
impact on its exchange-value. As material civilization develops, so will use-
and exchange-values – they are not simply determined by the quantity of
labour power congealed in them. Although Marx brings a materialist per-
spective to understanding how modern society has been transformed in
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18 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

terms of production, his analysis does not provide a sufficient basis for a
sociological grasp of the material civilization of modernity.

Simmel: value and money

Classical social theory can be seen as a response to Marx’s analysis of the

process of change that brought modern societies into being. Among the
classical theorists, Simmel responds to the political economic analysis of
modernity with a sociology of ‘forms’ and of the transformation of ‘socia-
tion’ in modernity that were consequent on changes in the material life of
modernity (Simmel 1950). The sociological ‘physiognomies’ that he
explores (the stranger, the metropolitan, the adventurer, the miser, and so
on) emerge in the context of the material bustle of the modern city and the
practical changes in the lives of people that produced new types of social
relations (Simmel 1971a). In distinction from Marx, he argues from a phe-
nomenological position that cultural value originates in subjective desire
for the object that lies outside the individual; the object is, he says, a
product of consciousness and may of course be another person or have an
abstract form (Simmel 1990: 66). The object formed by desire may,
however, be material – a thing, a good or a commodity – and it is through
subjective enjoyment or consumption that the value of the object is
effaced.
Aesthetic value in the object is somewhat different and depends on
maintaining a distance in which the subject recognizes some autonomous
significance inherent in the object; pleasure is derived not from direct con-
sumption but by contemplation, by reserve and remoteness (Simmel 1990:
73). Now it is in the exchange of objects that social subjects exchange
values and value becomes an objective characteristic of the culture of their
society. For Simmel, exchange is the purest form of interaction between
social subjects, and in the case of material exchange involves sacrifice, for-
going the usefulness of the good that is exchanged (1990: 82). This is an
account of the exchange-value and money system that is grounded in a
very different orientation to material existence than that of Marx. Where
Marx sees the work of production, Simmel sees the pleasure of consump-
tion. Whereas Marx sees exchange-value as a product of capitalist social
relations, Simmel sees it as a fundamental social relation with a direct sub-
jective cost. Whereas Marx sees money as a symbolic erasure of the true
value of goods in the labour that went into their production, Simmel sees
money as the symbolic representation of the objective cultural determina-
tion of value in goods.
Simmel’s perspective that the basis of culture lies in the exchange of
value, means that he is sensitive to the impact of cultural shifts in the material
life of a society. He responds to the impact of changing modes of transport,
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 19

street lighting, domestic technology and to the importance of outward

appearance, adornment and fashion. Whereas Marx emphasized the impact
of modern production techniques on the workers and the economy of pro-
duction, Simmel commented on how they changed material relations
within societies to give their general social life a modern quality. The sheer
volume of objects, their increasing autonomy and their specialization
changed the relationship between social subject and the object, reducing
the personal involvement with them and increasing social distance. As
Simmel put it: ‘Objects and people have become separated from one
another’ (1990: 460). His account of money recognizes that its materiality
can substitute for the complexity of social relations needed to engage in the
assessment and negotiation of value. If the process is autonomized, as it is
with the slot machine, the direct human interaction of exchange is substi-
tuted altogether.
Just as money interposed itself in human interactions, so new tech-
nologies interposed themselves in subjective relationships with the material
world itself to produce ‘a freedom from direct concern with things and from
a direct relationship with them’ (Simmel 1990: 469). The example he gives
is the typewriter which reduces the individual and subjective form of hand-
writing to mechanical uniformity and, in removing the most personal
element, allows the individual to guard their subjective spirituality. Simmel
recognized the cultural significance of technology and its predominance in
shaping the style of life in modernity with the consequence that the social
subject became more individualized and more able to turn in on her or
himself by substituting relationships with material objects for social rela-
tionships. He regretted the impact on the spiritual and inner life of modern
human beings and pointed out that, as against the enthusiasm for electric
lighting, ‘the essential thing is not the lighting itself but what becomes
more fully visible,’ and, as against the speed of communication enabled by
the telephone and telegraph, ‘what really matters is the value of what one
has to say’ (Simmel 1990: 482). Rather than seeing modernity as a period of
the social mass, he saw its significance and intellectual potential as located
in the form of objects and machines; he warned not of the revolt of the
masses against their slavery but ‘the revolt of objects’ against theirs (Simmel
1990: 483).
Unlike Durkheim’s discussion of the increase in physical density within
modernity as having directly moral effects, Simmel recognizes that the
increasing density of population in metropolitan cities leads to physiological
and mental effects that in turn create a ‘blasé’ attitude, not only towards
people but also towards things. The close proximity of many people to each
other required developing a disinterest in their lives and their individuality,
a reserve that would treat them as more akin to objects than to social sub-
jects. The close proximity to things of increasing variety and complexity is
managed by dealing with them through the intermediary of money which
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20 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

‘hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and
their uniqueness and incomparability in a way that is beyond repair’
(Simmel 1971a: 330). Simmel’s sociological interest was, however, in the
new forms of sociation, especially those exclusively concerned with socia-
bility, that emerge in modernity to substitute for the increasingly mechan-
ical social relations surrounding economic interaction. One of the reasons
why his remarkable essay on fashion does not date is precisely because he
does not discuss fashions at all – he does not discuss the lived relations with
clothes, only the cultural dynamics of imitation and differentiation that
fashion realizes (Simmel 1971b).

Traditional social theory

Marx is alone among the classical sociologists in claiming to be a ‘material-

ist’ and addressing the material life of people and while Simmel takes a con-
trasting perspective on what shapes modern societies, Marx develops an
analysis of social forms rather than pursue their material dimension. What
the other, later, classical sociologists do is to respond to some of the themes
raised by Marx and tease out the significance of the social transformations
of modernity, often distinguishing the social from the economic.
Durkheim’s The Division of Labour (1933) is a prime example of this; he says
hardly anything about the division of labour as such, treating its material
form as understood, and discusses instead ‘social solidarity’ and the ‘con-
science collective’. There is no attempt to understand what labour is or even
how the practices of labour are changed by its increasing division.
Durkheim says: ‘Things, to be sure, form part of society just as much as
persons, and they play a specific role in it … We may say that there is a
solidarity of things whose nature is quite special and translates itself outside
through judicial consequences of a very particular character’ (1993: 115).
However, it is only the juridical nature of property law and its relation to
mechanical solidarity that he goes on to discuss while any other role for
‘things’ in social solidarity is left aside. Further on in The Division of Labour,
Durkheim does recognize that the shift to modernity is linked to the chang-
ing material needs and pleasures of workers so that ‘individuals really feel
the need of more abundant products or products of a better quality’ (1933:
272). But, bizarrely, he explains this in terms of the ‘more voluminous and
delicate brain’ of the industrial worker which ‘makes greater demands than
a less refined one’ (Durkheim 1933: 272) such as that of the agricultural
worker. The refining of needs for products is not something that Durkheim
discusses beyond suggesting that, like sex, once experienced, desire for the
pleasures of things becomes established as an everyday need. It is the quin-
tessentially immaterial aspects of society that interest him and they need to
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 21

be grasped by intermediary indicators such as the legal system, itself a cul-

tural process that is treated as primarily of ethical significance.
Weber’s (1978) sociology is more oriented to social action than
Durkheim’s attempts to reduce the abstract qualities of societies to ‘facts’,
but Weber’s themes are also persistently immaterial: economic relations,
meanings and motivations, power, regulation, law, authority, religion, the
city, music and, above all, rationality. It is the development of a mode of
thought, instrumental rationality, as it is applied to the relations between
men and women that fascinates Weber. But he has very little to say about
the relation between that same mode of thought and the material world,
even though it is the locus in which, arguably, it first demonstrated its effi-
cacy in the development of machine technology. Weber’s analysis of the
division of labour, unlike Durkheim’s, does recognize the differentiation
between trades but his interest is in how people are organized into economic
units that have sociological characteristics rather than in what people do in
any material sense. The utility of goods is the desirable or practical service
that they provide but how this is adjudged or lived out is of no interest to
Weber. Wants are never specified or discussed but the various social arrange-
ments by which they are met are set out. The variability of need, want and
desire, and the tension between aesthetic and functional dimensions are
overlooked as Weber explores the mechanisms of the market and the his-
torically emerging logic of economic systems. For Weber, the material tra-
jectory of human lives is always mediated by economic relations and it is
these that he discusses.
It is the capacity to plan and act systematically within economic action
that provides the model for instrumental rationality (Weber 1978: 63–74).
Action is rational for Weber when it is ‘determined by expectations as to the
behaviour of objects in the environment and other human beings; these
expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the
actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends’ (1978: 24). And it is
‘consociation through exchange in the market’ that is the ‘archetype of all
rational social action’ (Weber 1978: 635). Where Simmel saw the distance
between people and between people and objects as an unfortunate conse-
quence of the materiality of modernity, Weber sees the impersonality and
matter-of-factness, even the distance of its process from the material
exchange of goods, as being the qualities that make the market rational.
Surprisingly, Weber does not explore the origins of means–ends rationality
in the practical action of working with things or in the technological devel-
opments that drive the industrialization and modernization that bring
about the economic relations of modernity. He specifies that ‘[o]vert action
is not social if it is oriented solely to the behaviour of inanimate objects’
(Weber 1978: 22) thereby ruling out by fiat precisely what this book is about
– that interaction with inanimate objects is one of the ways that culture is
transmitted. Weber does not countenance the possibility that action in rela-
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22 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

tion to objects is ‘meaningful’ and that such action could be called social
because it ‘takes account of the behaviour of others’ (1978: 4) – even
though the behaviour of another might have specifically contributed to the
particular form of the object. His approach to sociology is one that
addresses social action as that which happens between social actors and,
while this may occur in a material context, it has no bearing on the social
meanings involved. The idea that objects in any way mediate social rela-
tions, even those of economic production, is just not entertained within
Weber’s sociology.
Marx provides a quite detailed analysis of a changing material civiliza-
tion in the sphere of production but has little to say about the changing
materiality of use or consumption. Simmel may not analyse the material
civilization of production or political economy but he does recognize the
impact of material life upon the changing social sensibilities of modern
people; he describes the substitution of material relationships for social
relationships and some changes in the relations between people and things.
However, although there is an awareness of the material context of society
that seems to be totally absent in the writing of Durkheim or Weber, even
for Simmel it is an occasional theme; his principal sociological interest is in
relationships between people that produce affiliations, groups, conflict or
sociability. The central themes of these classical sociologists are predomi-
nantly ‘immaterial’ overlooking the significance of material civilization in
the creation of society. What is absent from Durkheim, Weber and Simmel
is any discussion of the material relations of, for example, work or of the
consumption and use of material objects. Nor does their sort of sociology
consider the routine, habitual, everyday consequences for ordinary people
of what were a dramatic set of changes in material life brought about by
industrialization.

Theories of consumption

In Marx and Weber we find a concern with the social formations that arise
from the emerging economic arrangements of modernity that have remained
a consistent theme in sociology ever since. Simmel stands somewhat apart
from Marx and Weber in his interest in the sensibility that individuals bring
to interactions which, in turn, produce the cultural sphere. Rather than see
money, exchange or social groups as determined by economic processes, he
sees them as emergent features of sociation, inextricable from the formation
of culture and the play of complex interests that extend beyond the eco-
nomic. But it is Thorstein Veblen, more an economist than a sociologist,
who identifies the social dynamics of taste and discrimination as a driving
force in the shaping of modern societies. Veblen’s account of conspicuous
consumption allows that the external, material form of social life, that
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 23

which is visible as part of the style of life of social groups, is indicative of

social structure and is linked to the dynamic of social change. The economic
imperative of ‘interests’ that for Weber remain hidden within the concept
of rationality, for Veblen becomes expressed as emulation: ‘With the excep-
tion of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is
probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic
motives proper’ (Veblen 1925: 85). In pecuniary societies, wealth, beyond
meeting purely physical wants, is expended on conspicuous waste, that is
consumption that is visible to others and in its excess serves to demonstrate
social standing. Members of society follow a standard of living that is equiv-
alent to those who share their class or community; through habit and con-
vention they feel obliged to be seen as members of a particular stratum.
They participate in a material life by consuming goods and services and
engaging in social activities that conform to the norms of their social
group. The driving force of consumption may be the visible emulation of
the standard of the peer group, but Veblen points out that canons of
decency and taste are established within the social stratum that extend to
goods that are unlikely to be seen such as underclothes, kitchen utensils
and functional household apparatus (see, for example, his discussion of
spoons, 1925: 94–5). The standard of living extends from habits of con-
sumption to habits of thought, including those that apply to aesthetic stan-
dards. Taking possession of that which is beautiful and expensive, whether
for adornment, display or merely ownership, is to demonstrate pecuniary
status and yet the possession of that which is beautiful but of little mone-
tary value – such as readily available cut flowers – accords negative status.
Veblen does address the materiality of consumption whether it is clothes,
furnishings, gardens or household equipment. But he sees in it simply a
sign of social status. Even, and here his argument begins to turn in on itself,
the withdrawal from invidious display and comparison is linked to a new
mode of signification as the leisure classes indulge in social reform and
doing good, thereby showing their lack of need to work.
For Veblen, it appears that material life is primarily about display and
emulation; it is the way which the individual lives out their position within
social structure. He has little to say about how the life of the individual is
shaped by the material situation in which they act but this is because his
writing about pecuniary culture is built upon an understanding of human
culture as being motivated by the ‘instinct for workmanship’. For Veblen,
an instinct is the ‘conscious pursuit of an objective end’ (1914: 5) that
becomes a habituated disposition in a social context and while it is applied
through the intellect, nonetheless has a biological basis and is inherited.
The instinct for workmanship has as its end the ‘ways and means, devices
and contrivances of efficiency and economy, proficiency, creative work and
technological mastery of facts’ that contribute to the life of the individual
and sustain the social group (Veblen 1914: 33). Since instinctual propensity
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24 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

is a characteristic of the species, it is slow to change and develop but

becomes externalized within the culture through the system of technology
by which the material life of the group is maintained. But culture is also the
source of a contamination of the instinct through religious or other beliefs
or through the impact of institutions that maintain, for example, class dis-
tinctions. These cultural forces create contradictory imperatives that stop
the instinct for workmanship from being as efficient and masterful as it
might otherwise be. Religious beliefs or institutional constraints will cut
across the most efficient work practices and inhibit technological develop-
ment.
Veblen describes the various ways in which different races of human
beings applied the instinct of workmanship to create distinctive material
cultures that pragmatically made use of accumulated skills to transform the
material world around them, particularly through working the land and
breeding domestic animals. Cultural systems emerge to control the means
by which material wealth is obtained, initially through the power of a sov-
ereign or priestly class. Modern material civilization, however, emerges
when control is established not through force but through ownership and
rights in property, the system that Veblen calls ‘pecuniary culture’.
Pecuniary culture is competitive according to price and so the principle of
efficiency leads to mechanization and to an increase in the scale of pro-
duction. But while the machinery is owned by individuals, knowledge of
how to use it resides in the community and sometimes in certain groups of
workers who do not own the material equipment with which their skills are
realized. Somewhat like Marx, though in a far more abstract style, Veblen
describes how machines substituted for the human actions of handicraft
production; ‘They are, as they aim to be, labour saving devices, designed to
further the workmanlike efficiency of the men in whose hands they are
placed’ (1914: 238).
For Veblen, the instinct for workmanship, of human effort intelligently
and efficiently used to transform the material world for human ends,
underlies the emergence of science and technology and even the logic of
accountancy. This ‘postulate of contact’ – work as effort applied directly by
the body to material stuff – has its origins in the instinct for workmanship
but becomes transformed in machine industry as ‘conceptions of mass,
velocity, pressure, stress, vibration, displacement and the like’ in which an
impersonal form of human action is taken as the model of technology and
becomes a habit of thought in modernity (Veblen 1914: 330). What is strik-
ing, however, is that despite this detailed account of the development of
material civilization, Veblen does not apply the same principle of human
interaction with the material world when it comes to consumption. Veblen,
like Simmel, is sensitive to the impact of emulation on shaping culture but
he has no account of the pleasure taken in the object that has been pro-
duced. Just as with Marx and Weber, want, need and use are taken by
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 25

Veblen as features of the human condition that are self-explanatory and

that do not vary in the way they are realized.
Veblen’s lead in describing the emulatory function of consumption, of
the desire for material goods as based in the social imperative to mark dis-
tinction, has been followed in much later writing on consumption by his-
torians (McKendrick et al.; the contributors to Brewer and Porter 1983;
McCracken 1988), and anthropologists (Sahlins 1976; Douglas and
Isherwood 1979; Miller 1987). Sociologists such as Campbell (1989),
Corrigan (1997), and Slater (1997) have combined this concern with the
symbolic nature of the material of consumption with economic and ideolog-
ical interests. However, the dominant theme has been to explore what and
how things mean, including what things mean in relation to individual iden-
tity, but much more importantly what they mean in relation to group or
class identity. The material objects of consumption are treated as signifiers
of social class and status, telling us about their owners as individuals who
have acquired or inherited wealth and the capacity to read and recognize
these signs. What is overlooked is how objects are lived with, how their
form leads to certain types of actions and curtails others, or how the pres-
ence of the objects within a life affects the bodily experience of those who
use them. The tendency within the discussion of consumption has been to
reduce material culture to a significatory system and to a focus on practices
to do with desiring and acquiring objects to achieve social emulation and
display status.
For example, Grant McCracken (1988) is unusual among writers on
consumption in focusing not on the ideas or motivations behind con-
sumption or on the practices of acquisition but on the possession of mate-
rial objects. He develops a theory of ‘patina’, the small signs of visible wear
and tear that accumulate on the surface of objects as they age, in which
these material marks are to be understood as an indicator of social status.
Whereas Marx treats the ageing of machines as a practical and an economic
problem, for McCracken, the ageing of material possessions is merely a sign:
‘In Western Societies, this physical property is treated as a symbolic prop-
erty … exploited to social purpose … seized upon to encode a vital and
unusual status message … of suggesting that existing status claims are legit-
imate’ (1988: 32). The patina on inherited silver plate, for example, is a
‘kind of proof of the family’s longevity and the duration of their gentle
status’ (McCracken 1988: 32). McCracken theorizes about patina with the
help of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, Veblen’s conspicuous consumption and
Peirce’s concept of the icon and proposes a ‘history’ of patina that eventu-
ally gives way, as a symbol of status, to the purchase of that which is new
and fashionable. Patina in the modern world still functions to symbolize
status but there are ways of cheating – such as buying that which is already
old – which mean that it no longer works as a simple indicator of social
status. McCracken unusually does discuss practices of ownership that
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26 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

involve an embodied relationship with the objects. He describes a series of

rituals that sustain meaning (e.g. ‘grooming rituals’ – the cleaning and
maintenance of objects such as the car) and erase meaning (‘divestment
rituals’ – redecorating a house to divest traces of the previous owners). But
his discussion of interaction with material objects and with their signifi-
cance in material civilization is restricted to their symbolic value which, as
is the case with most commentators on consumption, is simply to do with
social status. The complexity of material life is not explored even in this
context; is there any possibility of intrinsic pleasure to be derived from
contact with these objects? Perhaps engagement with objects that are well
fashioned of attractive materials provides its own enjoyment, perhaps
contact with objects that have a biography that parallels that of the family
is also important in terms of identity and belonging (see Dant 2001). And
the practices of living with such objects may not simply be rituals that mark
status but involve practical problems that may affect how they are enjoyed.
For example, patina may be too rapidly acquired if the family silver is
treated roughly or it may be obscured by being polished too eagerly.
‘Use’ and ‘enjoyment’ involve social and cultural processes that go
beyond the symbolic display of social status What we choose to eat our
meal off, whether it is a silver, china, glass, plastic or paper plate depends
on the material culture we live in as well as the economic and cultural
resources we have available. Our choice will also be linked to other aspects
of material culture – such as cutlery, tables, dishwashers – as well as to the
practices of food preparation and serving that we plan to use. But further,
it will be linked to the occasion, the social event that the meal recognizes.
The plate that is appropriate for a ceremonial meal or a family occasion may
well be different from the one we feel comfortable with for a picnic or a TV
dinner.
While social status may always be an issue in consuming for use and
enjoyment, emotional, practical and other cultural factors both inform and
shape our choices. Whatever the range of factors that bear on our choices,
what is central is what we actually do; what plate we use and what practices
it entails (polish it, put it in the dishwasher or throw it in the bin). It is the
lived materiality of our bodies interacting with the materiality of objects
that generates social significance of a range of types. The specificity of
objects and actions both reflects and generates cultural conventions but
significance is always limited by the practical and material constraints of
our bodies and the objects they interact with.

Material civilization

There is a strand of thought within French social theory that takes a rather
different view of the significance of material culture that will affect the
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 27

argument of this book. In Chapter 4 I will refer to the writing of Mauss,

Parlebas and Warnier from within anthropology, Tisseron within psycho-
analysis, Latour and his colleagues within sociology and, in Chapter 5, most
importantly I will refer to that of Merleau-Ponty from within philosophy.
In French writing on consumption there is a similar emphasis on the repre-
sentation of social status through some form of conspicuous consumption, as
discussed above (e.g. Baudrillard 1981, 1998; Bourdieu 1984). However,
there is at the same time an interest in the practices by which consumption
is realized and how material culture is appropriated (e.g. Baudrillard 1996;
Bourdieu 1990). Most commentators treat status as a simple continuous
hierarchy; Bourdieu’s (1984) very significant contribution was to introduce
a lateral dimension so that taste in consumption could be used to more
finely discriminate between class fractions that enjoyed different amounts
of economic and cultural capital. But Bourdieu’s rather problematic con-
cepts of habitus and practice open up the potential for studying embodied
relationships with the material stuff of life (1984, 1990).8 Baudrillard’s
analysis of atmosphere and the sensuous engagement with materials such
as wood and glass also points to the lived-with nature of material culture
beyond its simply significatory or social status functions (1996). Other
theorists of consumption within this French tradition such as Lefebvre
(1971, 1991a, 2002) and de Certeau (1984) have also touched on the prac-
tical dimensions of lived relationships with material objects. De Certeau’s
collaborative work (1998) provides an exemplary and detailed empirical
account of some of the practices of everyday life that are both material and
embodied and at the same time linguistic and communicative.
There is in this body of work a theme of a developing and changing
material civilization through modernity that is not dependent on the
importance of signification and status. This theme is exemplified in the
work of Fernand Braudel who provides an historical overview of material
civilization that points to the limitations in the traditionally economistic
perspective of the sociological approach I have discussed in previous sec-
tions. Writing in 1979, Braudel proposed an approach to history that did
not overlook the complexities of economic life in the way that he felt that
traditional economic history had. Instead of the traditional approach that
saw the development of pre-industrial Europe as a ‘gradual progress towards
the rational world of the market, the firm and capitalist investment’ (1992:
23), he wanted to draw attention to the routine, everyday activities of ordi-
nary people that amounted to the production of economic wealth and also
to the consumption of goods. Traditional economics had focused on the
institutions of the market, the firm, banks, the state and the developing
forms of capitalist investment such as the joint stock company. Even Marx
had focused on the mode of production and the transformations at an insti-
tutional level of ‘money’ and ‘capital’ that had brought about wage labour,
the factory and the alienation of workers from the means of production.
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28 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Braudel wanted to turn the attention of economic history to something

more basic and practical that involved not just the capitalist and the
worker, but everyone, including those on the margins of formal production
such as children, women at home and people who were sick or elderly or
disabled. The lives of all these people together constituted a ‘rich zone, like
a layer covering the earth, I have called for want of a better expression mate-
rial life or material civilisation’ (Braudel 1992: 23).
Braudel does not prioritize the zone of material civilization but argues
that it must be recognized as contributing to the economic history of soci-
eties. He proposes a dialectical approach that will consider the market
economy, the actions of key economic actors as well as the material life of
everyone else. The mechanisms of capitalism are not to be found at any one
level of economic processes but need to be understood as flowing between
them. To shift the emphasis away from traditional economic concerns with
the market and decisions by states, cartels and corporations, Braudel begins
his three-volume history of economic development by setting out the
changes in material civilization between the fifteenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. His account of the development of different dimensions of material
life – demography, food, costume, lodging, technology, money and towns
– provides the background for the account in later volumes of what are
more usually recognized as economic activities (Braudel 1992: 27). Braudel’s
history shows the very slow progress of material civilization over three cen-
turies because there was no pressing need for change. He inherited from the
earlier Annales historians Fevbre and Bloch, a broad-ranging approach that
addressed changes over long periods of time (the longue durée, the epoch)
and across different cultures, and his survey shows that while the pace of
change varied in different parts of the world, it was often only slightly dif-
ferent and with relatively little impact. Braudel was keen not to focus on
the lives of the wealthy as Veblen and Sombart had done, but to pay atten-
tion to local ways of doing things and the ordinary material life for most
people. There were changes and innovations that had local rather than
global impact and there was often a chain reaction as changes in one sphere
of life affected changes in another. This process of gradual and incremental
change in material civilization, having lasted for three centuries, began to
speed up during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the impact of
industrialization spread throughout material life.
For example, water has always been a central component in the material
life of human societies and as civilization has developed so there have been
changes in the way that water has been drawn into that life. In early
modern Europe there were fountains, aqueducts and cisterns before the
Industrial Revolution but they were few and far between and technically
very limited (Braudel 1992: 228–31). Traditional societies had, however,
been built around water and towns and cities had developed from early set-
tlements which were close to a substantial supply of running water. For
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 29

early settlements and right through to the Industrial Revolution, rivers had
been a key source of drinking water but larger settlements had also needed
sufficient volume to provide water for cleaning, washing and the removal
of waste products. Rivers had also been a means of transport as well as inter-
rupting cross-country routes of travel. In Braudel’s approach to history, the
importance of a material such as water is linked to how a city can grow, how
its food culture develops, how agriculture evolves and how labour is used.
He discusses, for example, how prior to the Industrial Revolution 20,000
carriers earned their living carrying Seine water to Parisians for drinking.
The river water was of course polluted as it was used for bathing and its
banks were an open lavatory (Braudel 1992: 310). Nonetheless, Seine water
was ‘considered excellent for health’ while at the same time being ‘sup-
posed to bear boats well’ because it was muddy and therefore heavy
(Braudel 1992: 229). The river water was treated as a natural purgative,
although foreigners found it unpleasant, and it was regarded as much
tastier than the well water from the left bank. Daniel Roche (2000), an his-
torian who continues Braudel’s approach to understanding material civi-
lization, explains how the quality of local well-water affected, among other
things, the taste of the bread. The waste water that Parisians threw out
soaked down through cesspools, latrine ditches, gutters and graveyards to
infiltrate and contaminate the underground water and there were disputes
about the source of water – river, well or fountain – that should be used for
bread-making (Roche 2000: 148–9). Steam pumps began to appear towards
the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century a
rapid series of developments separated polluted and fresh water. These tech-
nological changes were linked to demands for improved hygiene and
increasing recognition that pollution of the drinking water was responsible
for cholera epidemics and the quasi-endemic typhoid. Different ways of
drawing and using water, whether privately owned or shared, affected social
arrangements: ‘The collective wells in streets and squares, the private wells
in urban courtyards brought together every day, just as in villages, neigh-
bours of both sexes, servants, users of all kinds’ (Roche 2000: 149).
The transformation of the way that water is moved and used has con-
tinued apace since industrialized technology began to provide Paris with a
clean and uncontaminated supply of fresh water and the safe removal of
soiled water over the course of the nineteenth century. Since that time,
those who live in the industrialized and wealthy world have come to take
water for granted; it flows from the taps in our homes and is abundant for
all the pleasures and uses we can incorporate it into. We can buy electric
fountains for the garden, paddling pools for the children, automatic water-
ing and sprinkling systems for flowerbeds and greenhouses along with
hoses and high pressure jets for cleaning everything from the car to the
stonework on the patio. In the house we can have automatic washing
machines, dishwashers, power showers, baths, multiple sinks and ‘water
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30 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

closets’ and a central heating system based on hot water circulated in radi-
ators – all drawing water from an apparently inexhaustible mains supply.
Although we have grown up with this ready availability of water, in the past
50 years material civilization has evolved as we use more water than our
parents’ generation; we have more showers, deeper baths, put more water
on our gardens, wash our cars more often and feel more indignant when
tap water becomes contaminated or the supply is interrupted for some
reason. During the twentieth century the capacity to dam, store and pump
water long distances has increased so that our state bureaucracies can plan
to create housing developments, hotels and green spaces (such as golf
courses) where none would have been possible in the past. But this is an
increasingly invisible and privatized material culture of water and the social
life of the well has disappeared as the delivery of water has gone under-
ground to emerge in each separate home. Roche describes how just a couple
of centuries ago the smell of an unwashed body indicated prosperity and
says that ‘the French, associating strong smell with good health, kept up a
long-lasting collective distrust regarding all ablutions’ (2000: 158). Today
our cultural values have reversed so that the unwashed body stands out
offensively in the crowd of frequently washed and fragrant bodies.
As we read these historians of everyday material life, we are struck
by how different everyday life was just a couple of hundred years ago.
But, Braudel points out, although the ideas of Voltaire’s age would not be
so different from the ideas of our own, his material life would contrast dra-
matically (1992: 27–8). Braudel’s work shows how with the coming of
industrialization, material civilization changed dramatically after the slow
and steady pace of earlier historical evolution – we only need to contrast his
descriptions with our experience of the world we know today and its recent
history. It is remarkable that the process of material civilization – which has
carried on at a stunning pace throughout the twentieth century and of
which water is only a small aspect – has largely been overlooked by sociol-
ogy. The classical sociologists tried to grasp some of the sociological impacts
of the economic upheavals that came with industrialization but they
largely overlooked the detail of the changes in material life which also have
social consequences. Braudel does not try to analyse the social impact of
material civilization, he takes his task as merely to note the changes in
material life that occurred during the pre-modern period, the centuries of
industrialization and capitalism. His interest is in how material life under-
pins economic relations rather than social relations, although Roche
explains that the group of French historians surrounding the journal
Annales – Lucien Febvre, Robert Mandrou, Guy Thuillier and Fernand
Braudel – used the theme of everyday material life to develop earlier histo-
rians’ understanding of the process of civilization (Roche 2000: 3–5). The
Annales historians questioned the economists’ model of homo oeconomicus
and instead adopted anthropological methods to observe the individual
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MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 31

and collective practices and actions of ordinary people in order to under-

stand civilization. The sociological reader will recognize homo oeconomicus
as precisely the bugbear that Baudrillard attacks in his Consumer Society
(1998) and Roche goes on to mention the Annales historians’ attention to
the topics of memory, communication, attitudes and habits that constitute
culture through ordinary lives as expressed in Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of
‘habitus’.
Braudel’s concept of ‘material civilization’ is a way of understanding
how societies cohere through the ordinary interaction between our bodies
and the material culture given to us by the society we live in:

For civilisations do indeed create bonds, that is to say an order,

bringing together thousands of cultural possessions effectively dif-
ferent from, and at first sight even foreign to, each other – goods
that range from those of the spirit and the intellect to the tools of
everyday life.
(Braudel 1992: 560)

As an approach to history, the idea of material civilization enabled Braudel

to connect the detail of ordinary lives to the slow but continuous flow of
history and to a broad geographic range of social experiences. It enabled him
to argue with Weber and Sombart that the rationality of accounting methods
and the moral distaste of usury were far from originating in a Protestant,
European tradition that could be linked to the emergence of capitalism,
because they had arisen in Catholic and Arabic cultures centuries earlier and
had later been transported to Protestant European ones (Braudel 1982). And
against Marx, with whom he had much more sympathy, he argued that
capitalism was far more complex in its emergence than being the result of
an economic transition from feudalism that followed an evolutionary logic
of economic systems. Braudel had more in common with Marx’s interest in
the changes in the material life of industrialization in contrast to the ten-
dency to emphasize the importance of ideas in the historical process.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that the transition to modernity that was the
focus of the classical sociologists was largely studied without taking account
of the rapid and dramatic changes in material civilization that it brought.
They focused on solidarity, sociality, rationality and political economy but
paid little attention to the ordinary, practical, everyday, material life of the
members of society who were experiencing this transition. How people get
water, how they boil kettles, how often they wash are things that in the
flow of everyday life are taken for granted. But it is precisely the changes
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32 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

in these material features of life that affect general well-being and health
and have a direct impact on social relationships. I have argued that Marx’s
materialism did lead him to report the impact of changing practices of work
on the material life of the working population and to make some remarks
about the material civilization in general. But Marx had little to say about
the use of commodities or about the effects of a developing material culture
on the everyday life of the population. Simmel was more interested in the
impact on material life of modern societies and how changes such as the
typewriter, slotmachines and electric light were affecting the social subject
and sociation in modern societies. Again, however, this is not a theme that
is uppermost in Simmel’s writing and it is one that is strikingly absent in
the writings of Weber and Durkheim on the transition to modernity.
The classical sociologists had almost as little to say about consumption
and the desire for commodities as they did about their use and effects, but
a recent strand of work in history, anthropology and sociology has begun
to fill in the missing component in the classical account of modernity by
articulating the features and the importance of consumption. Some of the
discourse around consumption has provided insights into developing the
material civilization of modernity and, in an earlier book, I attempted to
identify some of these different contributions to understanding the material
culture in a social context (Dant 1999). However, the study of consumption
has tended to focus either on the ways in which commodities are appro-
priated through buying and selling (advertising, shopping, desire for the
new, the appeal to individual identity, etc.) or it has attempted to articulate
consumption as a way of social structural alignment, through social class,
emulation, ostentation and the habitus. Rewarding as these studies have
been, they have often overlooked the mundane, routine ways in which
material objects are taken up in everyday lives. Even when materiality is an
issue in studies of consumption, as with McCracken’s account of patina dis-
cussed above, it is treated primarily as a symbolic representation of social
status.
How, then, to study material civilization in late modernity? how can
we understand how objects mediate culture to people through the ordinary
ways in which they use them? I do not intend to describe or survey the
material civilization of late modernity as Braudel has done for its earliest
stages because there is not sufficient social or historical distance for such an
overview. Instead I will work towards developing an approach to material
interaction that would be consistent with Marx’s analysis of the impact of
machines on working lives or Braudel’s of the material life of an epoch, but
would allow for more complexity and detail in understanding the flow of
material life. But before I do, there are other discussions of materiality that
can contribute to our understanding of materiality and sociality in late
modernity.
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3 Technology and modernity

Introduction

Following Braudel, I have suggested that material civilization is to do with

the ordinary and everyday actions of people with objects – what I will call
material interaction. As material civilization progresses, so the everyday life
of human beings is changed by the increasing number and complexity of
the human-designed and man-made objects that people interact with. I
have argued that while Marx describes the impact of such objects on the
process of production, sociology has largely had little to say about the sig-
nificance of objects in social life. An exception is the sphere of technology
which has attracted particular attention from philosophers and sociologists
in the twentieth century. During the twentieth century technology
brought about a dramatic and rapid change in the material life of people
throughout the world but most particularly in the rich, industrialized West.
As Donald Schön put it: ‘A man of fifty in 1965 has seen too many changes
in transportation, communication, warfare and industry to believe in the
stability of technology’ (1967: 200). Today we might put it that a woman of
50 has seen too many changes in all these things as well as in her everyday,
personal and domestic life to believe that the materiality of human exis-
tence is stable. What were transformatory technologies in the middle of the
twentieth century – the car, the television, military surveillance and
machine-controlled production – have become ubiquitous throughout the
western world and have transformed global relations. In the new millen-
nium it is computer technology, the Internet, the mobile phone, genetic
modification of crops, advances in surgery and the manipulation of fertil-
ity that provoke the view that technological change is characteristic of our
society. As important as the changes themselves, however, is the increased
likelihood that a man or a woman, of any social class would be enjoying
these technological advances.
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34 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

What is of significance for sociology is that the increasing tempo of

technological change has changed the pace of material civilization and this
has led critics to argue that technology has changed humankind’s relation-
ship with nature and the relationship between individual and society. Put
simply, the critics suggest that technology has altered the human relationship
with their material environment in ways that inhibit their full potential as
human beings. In the sphere of social theory, these critiques have empha-
sized how the individual has become subordinated to a society driven by
technology. At its most extreme, this is the argument that the shape of
history in modernity is ‘technologically determined’, that is, that the form
of society and the pattern of individual lives are determined by the objects
that human beings have created. More interesting and persuasive, however,
are the recurrent arguments around the theme that technology meets some
human needs – for warmth, food, fuel, transport, entertainment, and so on
– but at the cost of something essentially human that no machine can sub-
stitute for – imagination, creativity, ideas, passion, love. The debate is about
the materiality of human existence that technology supports and the imma-
teriality of human existence, its anima or soul, that technology threatens.
In this chapter I will discuss the work of some of the key critics of tech-
nology who are concerned about how it is shaping modern society and
modern lives. It is Martin Heidegger’s elliptical critique of how technology
threatens the relationship between human beings and the world they live
in that overshadows all later interventions that I shall discuss; Marcuse,
Ellul, Winner, Hill and Feenberg. But I will begin with the prescience of
Lewis Mumford’s early comments that are remarkable in their anticipation
so early in the century of the impact of technology that had not yet been
imagined when he was writing.

Mumford

Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) was first drafted in 1930
and is a work of history and commentary with philosophical, religious and
political overtones. Mumford’s key theme is the significance of the
‘machine’ – which he distinguishes from a tool in its independence from
the skill and motive power of its operator – in the technology of the early
part of the twentieth century. A continuum runs from the hand tool manip-
ulated by its operator to the automatic machine that runs more or less inde-
pendently of any operator with variations in the application of motor
power and control over tools.1 The advance of technology is oriented to
enhancing the quality of human life:

In back of the development of tools and machines lies the attempt

to modify the environment in such a way as to fortify and sustain
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 35

the human organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of

the otherwise unarmed organism, or to manufacture outside of the
body a set of conditions more favorable toward maintaining its
equilibrium and ensuring its survival.
(Mumford 1934: 10)

Mumford is pointing to the centrality of technology to the material life of

human beings, their embodied existence. Tools extend human capacity to
meet material needs for clothing, shelter and warmth, while machines
relieve humans of much of the physical effort of doing so and, in capturing
in their design the capacity to form, also relieve humans of needing to repli-
cate or continually perform with skill.2 The history that Mumford writes
about is how tools and machines have become central in human culture,
shaping various parts of our lives, not only at work but at home and at
leisure. It is, however, production that has led the way in drawing ‘technics’
into social and cultural development and Mumford refers to the connection
of human relations, skills, tools, machines, apparatuses, and utilities that
constitute a technological complex as ‘the machine’ (1934: 12). The civi-
lization that emerges with the increasing adoption of technics is, however,
not simply one in which the human organism is sustained by tools and
machines. For Mumford, the modern, industrialized era of the twentieth
century is one in which the flow of human life is even more ‘disrupted’
than in previous centuries because the machine has had effects that were
not intended or planned. The clock provides a key trope for Mumford as a
mechanical device that has had cultural effects far beyond its mechanical
innovation as an object that incorporates precision engineering, standardi-
zation, automatic action and the containment and use of determinant
amounts of power (1934: 14–15).3 It has ordered time not just for machines
but literally for everyone who wakes to the alarm clock and whose daily
pattern of work, meals, travel and meetings is regulated according to the
quantified segments of clock time. It is the interconnectedness of machines
such as the clock with human practices and institutional systems that pro-
duces the technological complex of late modernity. Behind the use of elec-
tricity, for example, is a technical system of generation and distribution,
not to mention the financial and administrative bureaucracy that is invisi-
ble to the user of an electric-powered machine but which is implicit in the
availability of that machine for use when it is required. It is this embed-
dedness of machines within a technical infrastructure that is characteristic
of the relation between technics and civilization in the twentieth century
that Mumford describes as ‘the machine’.
‘The machine’ has created what he calls a ‘purposeless materialism’, an
excess of things, of the felt need to fill our lives with stuff. This is not the
philosophical materialism of Marx, yet Mumford anticipates by some thirty
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36 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

years the critiques of consumerism offered by Marcuse (1991) and

Baudrillard (1998):

There is a disproportionate emphasis on the physical means of

living: people sacrifice time and present enjoyments in order that
they acquire a greater abundance of physical means; for there is
supposed to be a close relation between well-being and the number
of bathtubs, motor cars, and similar machine-made products that
one may possess.
(Mumford 1934: 273)

This is not a critique of materialism defined or driven by social status like

Veblen’s (1925) concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’. This is a much
more corrosive materialism that displaces the immaterial dimensions of
life: fantasy, thought, imagination and creative effort. Instead of emotion
leading to singing, it leads to putting on a record, instead of thoughts of a
friend leading to imaginary conversation in reverie, it leads to picking up a
telephone. This critique of the diminution of human capacities does have
resonance with Simmel’s critique of the effect of the typewriter that was
mentioned in Chapter 2. For Mumford, the material means of consumer
goods had become – as early as the 1930s – an end in themselves that was
symbolic, not just of class status, but of ‘intelligence and ability and of far-
sightedness’ (1934: 274). Goods were produced and consumed in excess of
need or use as the habit of making more and fitting more stuff into life
became standard cultural practice. His critique was not simply that these
goods substituted for human capabilities but that they also modified
human capacities so that photography, the telephone and the radio ‘recul-
tivated’ the eye, the voice and the ear. There is here a transformation of the
embodied, material relationship with the world that nonetheless has an
impact on social relationships because it is the culture, the way of relating
to other people in society, that is affected.
Now, for Mumford, these changes were both a threat to human nature
and culture but also had potential for good beyond the easing of material
life. Automation disconnected machines from human action, taking them
out of the realm of continuous human control and thus breached the con-
tinuity with human intention. We can see this as an interruption of the
‘intentional arc’ that Merleau-Ponty traces between humans and the series
of objects that they work with and on (see Chapter 5). But while machines
threatened to displace the vital sensibilities of human beings, they also had
the potential to enhance them. The machine brought new challenges to
aesthetics as the environment became increasingly inhabited by machines
and their products: ‘But face to face with these new machines and instru-
ments, with their hard surfaces, their rigid volumes, their stark shapes, a
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 37

fresh kind of perception and pleasure emerges: to interpret this order

becomes one of the new tasks of the arts’ (Mumford 1934: 334).
Perhaps alone among critics of technology, Mumford recognizes the
achievements of Cubist, Constructivist and Futurist artists in rising to this
challenge and in Brancusi he finds the epitome of bringing together an aes-
thetic sensibility of organic material and form with an understanding of the
potential of the machine to enhance and revise the possibilities of both.
Mumford sees that the new machine arts threaten to displace more tradi-
tional handcrafts such as engraving or woodcutting, not least because the
limited embodied skill required offers access to just about anyone.
Photography, for example, may be much easier than woodcutting to
acquire as a technical skill but that does not mean that all photographs
share the same aesthetic value. The exceptional skill of photographers such
as Alfred Stieglitz and Eugene Atget are able, he says, to ‘restore to the eye
… the stimulus of things roundly seen as things, shapes, colors, textures,
demanding for its enjoyment a previous experience of light and shade, this
machine process itself counteracts some of the worst defects of our mechan-
ical environment’ (Mumford 1934: 340).
Mumford’s critique of technology is remarkable both in the specificity
with which he records the shifts in material civilization over the previous
millennium but also because he closely relates these changes to their
impact on culture. His work offers a caution about the impact of machine
technology in the past two hundred years, spelling out its threats to the
working and personal lives of people, as well as the risks of a culture that
has seemed frequently in thrall to each new invention. But his conclusion
is that a ‘dynamic equilibium’ can be reached instead of the headlong rush
to carve a linear history of technical progress (Mumford 1934: 430–1). He
calls for three moments of balance that remain pertinent to any current cri-
tique of technology. The first is equilibrium between man and nature: con-
servation and restoration of soils, forests, minerals and metals. He also calls
for reliance upon kinetic sources of energy (sun, falling water, wind), the
recycling of metals and a restoration of over-urbanized metropolitan areas.
The second is equilibrium between industry and agriculture where he
argues against specialized farming for world export and in favour of mixed
farming and market gardening for local production. Mumford hoped that
this trend in agriculture would reflect the ‘localism’ of industry that fol-
lowed the migration of technics from country to country and the absence
of industrial focal points. His third moment of balance was for equilibrium
in population growth which would involve migration away from those
areas least equipped to support a large population to those rich and devel-
oped areas with the potential to do so. He would be saddened today to see
how little balance in these areas had been achieved despite repeated calls
along the same lines throughout the twentieth century.
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38 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Although Technics and Civilization remains Mumford’s key contribution

on the impact of technology on modern civilization, he wrote on many
similar themes in later works, particularly The Myth of the Machine (1967).
There he argues, in many ways against his own earlier work, that technics
has played a much less significant part in the development of human civi-
lization than it is usually given credit for. Both tool use and machine devel-
opment were dependent on social and cultural capacities – most particularly
language, aesthetic response and knowledge transmission – that are often
overlooked in accounts of materiality. In distinguishing the emergence of
human culture from merely animal modes of existence, his wide-ranging
historical analysis identifies, as the archetypal machine, a device composed
of human parts that he calls the ‘megamachine’:

Only kings, aided by the discipline of astronomical science and sup-

ported by the sanctions of religion, had the capability of assem-
bling and directing the megamachine. This was an invisible struc-
ture composed of living, but rigid, human parts, each assigned to
his special office, role, and task, to make possible the immense
work-output and grand designs of this great collective organisation.
(Mumford 1967: 189)

The ‘megamachine’ is a sociological form, akin to Weber’s bureaucracy, that

involves power located in a single authority able to direct the intentional
actions of a whole series of human beings to bring about transformations
in the material environment. It was the technology of the ‘megamachine’
that built pyramids, castles, fortifications, aqueducts, tunnels and terraced
agriculture long before contemporary mechanical technology began to
transform the material world. That a coherent plan of material action is
given legitimacy by a single authority and is then applied by the embodied
actions of others has been the mode in which material civilizations have
been shaped for millennia.

Questioning technology

Whereas Mumford begins with a long view of how technics contributes to

civilization, Martin Heidegger begins his critique by thinking how human
beings and objects come together in technology. In his essay, ‘The question
concerning technology’ (1977a), originally delivered as a lecture in 1955,
Heidegger challenges an instrumentalist account of technology that is
based on causes and on means–ends relationships. Such an account
appears, he says, so obvious as to appear ‘correct’ if not ‘true’ (Heidegger
1977a: 6) but by thinking through the process of traditional technology,
that of manual, craft production in a workshop, he shows its limitations.
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 39

Heidegger uses the example of a silver chalice made for ritual purposes in
which the causes that bring the object into being are fourfold: the material
(silver), the form (chalice), the final purpose (a sacrificial rite) and that
which brings about the effect (the silversmith). Rather than a linear, single
causal chain, of means bringing about ends, causes are blended together to
effect a ‘bringing forth’ or poiēsis which is also a ‘revealing’ as the chalice is
brought forth into appearance by the ‘occasioning’ of the four causes. The
silversmith is not the sole cause of the manufacture of the final object but
is rather ‘co-responsible’, contributing the distinctive capacity for ‘pondering’
on the other three causes (Heidegger 1977a: 8). For Heidegger, technology
is not a mechanical process of things causing others that can then simply
be utilized instrumentally in the world by human beings, but is a more
complex process of ‘bringing forth’, or ‘revealing’ that which is concealed,
that is fundamental to the truth of Being: ‘Technology is a mode of reveal-
ing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and
unconcealment take place, where alētheia, truth, happens’ (Heidegger
1977a: 13). Unlike the bringing forth of the natural world (the growth of
plants, for example) technology involves knowledge. Tekhnē is a mode of
knowing that includes forethought and planning, which anticipates the
effects of the bringing forth through the fourfold process – the revealing of
making depends on the prior revealing in anticipating what is to be made.
What Heidegger’s critique resists are two ideas that are so often tied up
with technology. First, that technology is simply the result of human inge-
nuity and instrumentality in manipulating the material world. He argues
that the material world itself is involved in this process, providing possibil-
ities and constraints, contributing to whatever is ‘brought forth’ or revealed
by technological action. Second, Heidegger is arguing that technology is part
of the process of Being-in-the-world which, as a consequence, is a much
more subtle process than that which is either under the control of a single
human or even of human beings as a collectivity or society. The poiēsis or
‘bringing forth’ that is technology is an aspect of human knowing of the
world, of the confrontation between Dasein and her or his world that is
prior to any specific culture or technological society. In traditional tech-
nology this takes the form of knowing ‘how to’ that is a practised and
shared knowledge of how to transform the material world; knowledge pre-
cedes the action of materially changing the world. Modern technology
extends this ‘how to’ knowledge to systematic, scientific knowledge that
can anticipate what the end product will be and how it will fit into use. This
type of knowledge may be in another person than the one who actually
makes the thing, as happens when the designer of an object is quite inde-
pendent of its manufacture. The other key feature of modern technology
for Heidegger is the storing of energy that is released in the object (the
hydroelectric dam, the aeroplane, the car). Like handcraft technology,
modern technology is also, says Heidegger, a ‘revealing’ but one that is
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40 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

dependent on modern physics as an exact science. And this changes the

character of ‘bringing forth’ to a ‘challenging’ that requires energy to be
extracted and stored. Energy which is concealed in nature (in coal, in the
heat of the sun) is unlocked, transformed, stored and distributed. This ‘chal-
lenging’ form of revealing takes on the characteristics of ‘regulating and
securing’ and is subject to an ‘ordering’. The process of extracting and
storing energy is not haphazard but is managed according to a system
which allows objects to be kept ready for use as a ‘standing-reserve’. Such
objects (e.g. an airliner) in standing-reserve are not simply held as ‘stock’ –
they are ready to be put to use once the order changes.
The thrust of Heidegger’s critique of the nature of modern technology
comes when he questions man’s orientation to its process. First, he argues
that man has also become part of the standing-reserve – his example is the
modern woodcutter who is made subordinate to a chain of order and chal-
lenge: cellulose, paper, newspapers. The technician in the modern garage
(see Chapter 1, note 4), who works with hand tools and manages the work
within his assigned job, is nonetheless in a chain of command, or a social
order, that includes the foreman, the garage manager, the garage owners, the
car manufacturers and their service specifications, the MOT, health and
safety regulations, and so on. We can see that ‘man’ is standing-reserve chal-
lenged into the technical work of car repair and maintenance by a social
system that precedes him and specifies him (his qualifications, his hours of
work, rates of pay, etc.) in much the same way as the machine tools he works
with. This is a long way from the craftwork of the silversmith making a
chalice. Heidegger argues that ‘man does not have control over unconceal-
ment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws’
(1977a: 18) – in other words, it would be supremely arrogant to claim that it
was man that had brought about the nature of standing-reserve. Whatever
is ‘brought forth’ depends not only on man and his intentions: ‘The uncon-
cealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man
forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him. When man, in his way,
from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely
responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it’
(Heidegger 1977a: 19). Here the intentional actions of human beings are
constrained to operate within whatever technological system prevails, so
that choice and creativity are severely curtailed. While the potency of
modern technology extends human power over the material world as
against traditional technology, the possibilities of ‘unconcealment’ are
restricted to those modes or revealing ‘allotted’ by the paths of technology.
Modern technology is no ‘mere human doing’ says Heidegger, as he
names the ‘challenging claim’ which ‘gathers man’ to ‘order the self-reveal-
ing as standing-reserve “Ge-stell” [Enframing]’ (1977a: 19). This way of
describing the impact of modern technology both avoids any causal
account or any simple historical or anthropological account which would
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 41

see technology as the outcome of the combined effects of individual

human ingenuity. As Loscerbo puts it: ‘man, prior to all his ordering of
nature in general, is himself already put to the challenge’ (1981: 239), that
is to say, Gestell is a property of Being. Gestell or ‘enframing’ here means
more than giving a framework to – it invokes the idea of a calling forth, a
gathering and a challenging claim (Heidegger 1977a: 19, fn17). Enframing
is the essence of modern technology but it is much more than the range
and variety of technologies available in the world. Indeed, Gestell is itself
outside of technology, a quality of Being that becomes the driving force of
technology and its adoption in the ordering activities of human beings. Its
revealing concerns nature as the storehouse of the standing energy reserve
and ‘man’s ordering attitude and behaviour display themselves first in the
rise of modern physics as an exact science’ (Heidegger 1977a: 21). The
enframing that is the essence of modern technology is a dynamic that is
prior to human control and thus is always beyond it and, as such, a ‘danger’
(Heidegger 1977a: 26).
We could say that the work of the modern garage is ‘enframed’ by the
industrial complex of which it is a part. Rather than the modern car being
a made object that is operated until it fails, it is designed to be maintained
and repaired with regular inspections and the replacement of the oil, brake-
pads, spark plugs, and so on, that significantly extend the life of the car. The
work of the garage technician contributes to this enframing in that his skills
in carrying out replacement of parts, in undertaking sequences of checks
(for MOTs and for servicing) are already part of the ‘revealing’ that has been
achieved by the modern automotive industry. Through both systematic
testing and through experience accumulated in the business of maintaining
cars, a set of routines have been established which will reduce the chances
of the failure of the vehicle. The technicians’ embodied, personal experi-
ence of cars and their workings, manifested as skill in their everyday work
practice, operates within a context that shapes and moulds it; what is as
important are the techniques and standards that are made available to the
technician through training, through manuals4 and through regimes for
procedures issued by manufacturers or by the garage owners.5
For Heidegger, the enframing of modern technology takes the control
for interaction with the material world out of the hands of the individual
and embeds it in systems that are partly social and partly technical. And
this produces the danger that humans do not realize that the process is
beyond their control. The arrogance of humans means that they believe
that they control technology, that it is their instrument to manipulate the
material world. As social and political systems are established to steer tech-
nology, the complexity of the fourfold process of causation is easy to over-
look (in a way that it isn’t for the craftsman who constantly confronts his
materials and who struggles to produce form). The creation of a standing-
reserve produces the potential for massive damage or destruction and here
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42 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

lies the limitation of human beings’ power to subordinate the material to

their instrumentality by technology. The way that Heidegger analyses
modern technology shows that it is ‘enframing’ that is its essence even
although it is ‘nothing technological’. It is a process of revealing or uncon-
cealment that orders modern technology: ‘In Enframing, that unconcealment
comes to pass in conformity with which the work of modern technology
reveals the real as standing-reserve. This work is therefore neither only a
human activity nor a mere means within such activity’ (Heidegger 1977a: 21).
It is science that creates the distance between the real as standing-reserve and
the human activities of technology. Science enables the planning and cali-
bration of the effects of modern technology in advance of any work upon
materials or form and thus alters the fourfold nature of causality. The
human agent and the form of material objects become subordinate to the
science that predicts how nature will respond and prescribes human inter-
action with materiality. This is how enframing reveals the real as standing-
reserve in a process that is larger than any individual can grasp and which
‘starts man upon the way’ and which Heidegger calls, in his gerund-forming
style, ‘destining’ (1977a: 24). The danger in enframing is veiled and disguised
and this is what is most worrying about it (1977b: 37). But in confronting
the essence of technology through thinking, there is the possibility of a
‘turning’, a turn in, a turn homeward that makes clear the coming to pres-
ence of Being: ‘When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being
flashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up’ (Heidegger 1977b:
44). Thinking holds the possibility of bringing about ‘insight into that
which is’ and disclosing the coming to presence of technology but
Heidegger points out that certain modes of what in ordinary language we
might call thinking are already technological – those calculative attempts
to reckon on reality, the use of psychology to enumerate the symptoms of
fate, the use of historiography to chart the future, are parts of technology
and do not disclose the truth of Being.
Heidegger’s critique does not call for a rebellion against modern tech-
nology or a return to traditional technology. He does not offer any simple
solution but argues that humans need to confront and engage with the
process of technology through thinking rather than presuming it to be their
instrument: ‘So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we
can never belong to what will be’ (1977b: 49). The ‘destining’ of modern
technology is not determinative of humans’ role in Being; it may suggest a
route and offer a fate but not one that has to be obeyed blindly and without
alternative. Heidegger refers to a hydroelectric plant on the River Rhine as
one of his examples of modern technology; it is easy to recognize as a tech-
nological project that requires far more than the ‘how-to’ knowledge with
which a windmill might be built. Whereas the windmill takes advantage of
the wind that it converts into the turning of grindstones for flour milling,
it does not store it as energy (Heidegger 1977a: 14), whereas the hydro-
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 43

electric plant stores the energy of moving water behind a dam that is
released according to the need for electric power. The natural forces that are
harnessed in the hydroelectric plant could not be managed without the
planning of physical structures using a scientific understanding of the
behaviour of materials and energy. The form of both the dam and the tur-
bines are calculated in all their dimensions before building commences; the
potential to generate power is known in advance. Once built, the water
behind the dam can be held as a standing-reserve to be ordered by manag-
ing the flow in response to demands for electric power. Even before it is
built, even before it is designed, the hydroelectric plant becomes a destiny
for those who will be affected by it – as soon as it is agreed to build it. This
may involve political and economic decisions that have to be made before
technology is invoked. And once the decisions are made, the ‘bringing
forth’ or ‘revealing’ that is technological activity seems to be destined by
those decisions which are not themselves technological. We can under-
stand this process as enframing in that it follows a pattern that seems to be
set by the world rather than by design or technology.
What Heidegger’s critique argues is that human freedom resides in
looking and listening, which seems to suggest being willing to resist the
destiny that appears to be set with the decision to build: ‘For man becomes
truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so
becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained
to obey’ (1977a: 25). The danger lies in accepting the inevitability of
destiny, of acceding to the impulsion to proceed down a path that appears
to be a technological imperative, and takes two forms. First, of treating
the individual as standing-reserve (the workers who die in the process of
building the dam? those whose homes and livelihoods are destroyed by its
building?); the other of treating the individual as ‘lord of the earth’, as
being able to wield technology as their instrument (Heidegger 1977a: 27).
But there is a ‘saving power’ that lies in the destiny of enframing, it is
humans’ capacity for knowledge, their desire for the truth through ‘catch-
ing sight of what comes to presence in technology instead of merely staring
at the technological’ (Heidegger 1977a: 32). Perhaps this is what happens
when we question the need for a new hydroelectric plant, when we explore
what happened in the past with other such plants and consider the alter-
native ways of meeting the demand for more electric power. Science may be
part of the bringing forth that is modern technology but it can also be used
to resist what might appear to be technological imperatives; enframing
brings with it both danger and ‘saving power’.
Heidegger provides a critique of technology that questions whether it
has developed in such a way that it restricts the potential for authentic
being among humans. The technology of the early twentieth century – the
aircraft, the hydroelectric dam, the car – affects all human existence by fun-
damentally changing the relationship between human beings and nature.
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44 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

These types of technology seem to incorporate a ‘logic’ or irresistible path

for future human action that determines a wide range of human actions
(e.g. using aircraft as a standard means of transport, using electric power for
many purposes) and supervenes in the consideration of alternative paths
for human actions. Heidegger’s interest is as a philosopher rather than as a
sociologist or political commentator but later sociologically oriented cri-
tiques such as those of Ellul and Marcuse draw on both Mumford’s histori-
cal critique of the emerging dominance of technology and Heidegger’s argu-
ment that modern technology changed the relationship between human
beings and the society in which they live.

Critical theory and technology – Marcuse

In the Frankfurt School tradition, Herbert Marcuse articulates a critique of

technology that builds on Marx’s analysis of the technological changes in
the mode of production and draws on Heidegger’s critique of the nature of
existence. Like Marx, Marcuse sees that technological innovation in the
process of production – the development of machine tools, production line
assembly, automatic machines – increases the alienation of those who work
with these machines. Unlike Marx, however, Marcuse emphasizes the
extension of the principles of technology into the economy. For Marx, the
logic of capitalism co-opted the potential of technology to enhance profits,
promote capital accumulation and extend the control over the workforce,
but for Marcuse, technology becomes a feature of capitalist economics
itself.
Marcuse’s account of ‘technological rationality’ as the logic of advanced
capitalism develops, in a slightly different direction, the theme of ‘instru-
mental reason’ most explicitly articulated by Max Horkheimer. For
Horkheimer, instrumental reason applied a particular form of thinking to the
material world; reason that oriented means to specified ends. It entails some-
thing of Heidegger’s concept of the instrumentality that lies behind technol-
ogy, but in thinking of it as a mode of reason, of thought, of abstraction, it
also captures something of Heidegger’s concept of ‘enframing’, of a mode of
bringing forth or revealing that is not itself technological. For Horkheimer,
instrumental reason generated forethought and planning which created a
material culture that increasingly bore the marks of modernity:

The objects we perceive in our surroundings – cities, villages, fields

and woods – bear the mark of having been worked on by man. It
is not only in clothing and appearance, in outward form and emo-
tional make-up that men are the product of history. Even the way
they see and hear is inseparable from the social life-process as it has
evolved over the millennia … The sensible world which a member
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 45

of industrial society sees about him every day bears the marks of
deliberate work: tenement houses, factories, cotton, cattle for
slaughter, men, and in addition, not only objects such as subway
trains, delivery trucks, autos, and airplanes but the movements in
the course of which they are perceived. The distinction within this
complex totality between what belongs to unconscious nature and
what to the action of man in society cannot be drawn in concrete
detail. Even where there is a question of experiencing natural
objects as such, their very naturalness is determined by contrast
with the social world and, to that extent, depends on the latter.
(Horkheimer 1999: 200–2)

The phrase ‘instrumental reason’ both captures the idea of reasoned

thought being oriented towards instrumental ends and the idea that
thought itself is an instrument applied to have a transformatory effect on
the world. Marcuse’s concept of ‘technological rationality’ (1998: 44) has
slightly different connotations, suggesting that rationality lies not simply
in processes of thought that use reason to progress towards specific goals
but is also embedded in the practices of technology: techniques and tech-
nics, the ways that machines operate and constrain their interaction with
human beings.
Marcuse argues that the pursuit of individual self-interest was allied to
the principles of economic rationality until mechanization began to trans-
form the nature of economic production with the effect of favouring ‘giant
enterprises of machine industry’ (1998: 43). Technology favoured large eco-
nomic organizations, undermining the interests of the individual at the
same time as achieving a domination of nature. Independently powered
machinery could transform natural materials at greater speed, with greater
strength and quicker than any single individual or even groups of workers
could achieve. In the place of the economic self-interest of the individual,
a technical principle of efficiency, something that could be subject to cal-
culation independently of the individual’s entrepreneurial skills, was
applied to the process of production. This techno-economic logic favoured
large organizations and ones that maximized their mechanical efficiency
through the use of whatever technology was available and applicable. In
setting out the principles under which advanced capitalism was emerging,
Marcuse showed how it was steered by a technologically oriented ‘appara-
tus’. The ‘apparatus’ was neither the economic machinery of capitalism, nor
just the firm, or corporation. As well as these institutions, it also included
the ‘devices’ and organizational features characteristic of an industry
(Marcuse 1998: 44, fn6): techniques, machine tools, routine strategies and
processes. The human practices had been developed alongside machines as
part of the research and development efforts that were beginning to
become an established part of industrial production early in the twentieth
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46 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

century. Instead of a form of thought, instrumental reason, generating the

apparatus, Marcuse’s ‘technological rationality’ was generated by the appa-
ratus which was both social and technical – rather like Heidegger’s enfram-
ing. The mode of calculative and objective thought of instrumental reason
had become materialized in machines, machine processes, work practices
oriented to machines and bureaucratic structures. Marcuse argued that it
was the apparatus that determined the form and kind of commodities that
were to be produced and at the time that he was writing – during the rapid
economic gearing up of the United States during the Second World War –
this was a reasonable analysis. However, long before the end of the twentieth
century, feedback mechanisms responding to the practices of consumption
had been built into the production process (market research, focus groups,
product testing) so the ‘apparatus’ has been extended into the consuming
side of everyday life (Baudrillard 1998).
The problem with the technological rationality of the apparatuses of
modern societies is, for Marcuse, that they suppress individuality. Drawing
on other critics of technology such as Marx, Veblen and Mumford, he
points out that the human operator becomes subordinate to the automatic
machine as its assistant or attendant. This makes work more ‘matter of fact’,
requiring less thought, spontaneity or imagination and the routinization of
the material life of people at work turns them into a mass or collective and
suppresses their individuality. Rather like Heidegger and Mumford, Marcuse
is careful to point out that this is not a consequence of technology itself but
the way that technology becomes embedded in the social organization of
advanced capitalism: ‘Technics hampers individual development only
insofar as they are tied to a social apparatus which perpetuates scarcity, and
this same apparatus has released forces which may shatter the special his-
torical form in which technics is utilized’ (Marcuse 1998: 63). The very
mode of collective action under technological rationality could inhibit
technical development as workers are less likely to use their imagination to
solve practical problems. Instead, management, especially ‘scientific man-
agement’ becomes the vehicle of technological rationality in which human
practices are subject to a quantitative and comparative technical analysis –
the same impersonal methods are applied to machines and humans alike.
The embodied material practice of workers – their ability to interact freely
with objects following the intentionality embedded in the object – is cur-
tailed as behaviours and routines become rationalized, standardized and
specified.6
In One-Dimensional Man ([1964] 1991) Marcuse extends this analysis
from the institutions and technology of the ‘apparatus’ of production, to
the technology of consumption and everyday life. What Heidegger calls
‘enframing’, Marcuse calls the ‘introversion’ of technological rationality
into embodied practice that affects everyday life relationships with material
objects, shifting individuals’ sensibility away from their emotional and
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 47

mental lives towards what he calls the ‘objective order of things’ (Marcuse
1991: 147). In place of the dialectical play between Eros and Logos tradi-
tionally characteristic of knowledge, technological rationality generated a
one-dimensional style of thought characterized by ‘false consciousness’ as
it became suborned to a ‘growing technical ensemble of things and rela-
tions which included the technical utilization of men’ (Marcuse 1991: 149).
The rewards for participating in advanced capitalist society were material, a
higher standard of living expressed in terms of access to things in the way
Mumford had described. But for Marcuse, the material of consumption
carried with it ideological connotations so that:

The means of mass transportation and communication, the com-

modities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of
the entertainment and information industry carry with them pre-
scribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional
reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the
producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products
indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness
which is immune against its falsehood.
(Marcuse 1991: 14)

In accepting the rationality of advanced capitalism, individuals consume to

create a material life that they feel reflects their personal needs. What they
overlook is how technological rationality has created a social mass whose
material needs are basically the same – while each individual in the mass
perceives them as personal and tied to their sense of identity and difference.
Consumption generates conformity and restricts criticism; once production
has been organized according to the principles of technological rationality,
then the cultural acquiescence of consumers was all that was needed for the
emergence of one-dimensional society.
Marcuse’s solution to the problem is not so far from Heidegger’s ‘think-
ing’; Marcuse wants to see a restimulation of thought and criticism incor-
porating a ‘reconciliation of Logos and Eros’ that might lead to liberation
(Marcuse 1991: 171). Like Heidegger and Mumford before him, he recog-
nizes that technological development cannot be reversed, material civiliza-
tion cannot be made to go backwards, but Marcuse wants to invoke a sub-
versive mode of thought that could embrace the negative and the irrational
to counterbalance scientific reason and thus lead to human liberation.
However, he recognizes the capacity for technological rationality to absorb
and dispel the power of negative thought in a ‘harmonization’ that would
not be liberatory. One example of this process that he sets out is this:

I ride in a new automobile. I experience its beauty, shininess,

power, convenience – but then I become aware of the fact that in
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48 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

a relatively short time it will deteriorate and need repair; that its
beauty and surface are cheap, its power unnecessary, its size idiotic;
and that I will not find a parking place. I come to think of my car
as a product of one of the Big Three automobile corporations. The
latter determine the appearance of my car and make its beauty as
well as its cheapness, its power as well as its shakiness, its working
as well as its obsolescence. In a way, I feel cheated. I believe that
the car is not what it could be, that better cars could be made for
less money. But the other guy has to live, too. Wages and taxes are
too high; turnover is necessary; we have it much better than
before. The tension between appearance and reality melts away
and both merge in one rather pleasant feeling.
(Marcuse 1991: 230–1)

This example nicely presents the dilemma of the modern liberal. We know
that we are caught up in a material society that is both seductive and repel-
lent, that provokes positive and negative feelings, that we are ultimately
ambivalent about. We are realistic about the nature of commodities and
consumer society, can see through advertisements and are reluctant to trust
the material goods on which our daily lives depend. In Marcuse’s example
the ambiguity of feeling about the car and its origins is not all felt at once;
its beauty is felt in one moment (as we wash or polish it), its imminent
decline in another (when it fails to start). But Marcuse’s point is that what
might seem to be a negative, critical, moment, what appears to be a dialec-
tical response to the materiality of advanced capitalism, is in fact simply an
obfuscation of the distinction between rational appearance and irrational
reality. The negation is absorbed within the positive to produce a harmony
– we continue to live with the car. Indeed, the negative responses to the car
have fed into the progress of consumer society; during the latter half of the
twentieth century cars got smaller, lower power options were offered, body-
work was dipped to resist rusting, workers earned higher wages – better cars
were made for less money. This is how the materiality of everyday relations
between human beings and the things around them has improved but
within the logic of technological rationality and advanced capitalism. If
there is a risk that harmonization of the negative will allow the enduring
dominance of technological rationality, Marcuse also recognizes that tech-
nics itself can be used to undermine it. Technology, he said, ‘has rendered
possible the satisfaction of needs and the reduction of toil – it remains the
very base of all forms of human freedom’ (Marcuse 1991: 236). All that
would be needed to make technology work for liberation would be a criti-
cal approach to the application of technics that identified the ‘discrepancy
between the real and the possible, between the apparent and the authentic
truth’ (Marcuse 1991: 233).
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 49

The technological society – Ellul

If Marcuse’s analysis of the changing relationship between society and

materiality is informed by the critiques of Marx and Heidegger, Jacques
Ellul ([1954] 1965) arrives at many similar conclusions from an altogether
different route that draws on a religious conception of the essence of
human being. From an analysis of how technique7 had migrated from the
machine to human practices, he argues that modern societies had become
during the twentieth century ‘technological societies’. Administrative and
organizational practices have come to be modelled on the principles of the
machine in which goals are specified and the efficacy of means is calcu-
lated. Plans and standardized procedures follow what has been systemati-
cally learnt and practices and procedures are set out in advance based on
their calculated effects. Techniques modelled on the efficient machine had
come to be applied in cultural practices such as political administration,
police power, medicine, pedagogy, and propaganda that make ‘man himself
the object of technique’ (Ellul 1965: 22). A form of human engineering had
emerged as advertising, propaganda and personal relations techniques were
applied in fields such as sport and medicine, helping to create a mass
culture and suppress the critical faculty of individual thought so that ‘the
human being becomes completely incapable of escaping the technical order
of things’ (Ellul 1965: 396–7). This concern with the effects of technique on
consciousness parallels Marcuse’s criticism of the effects on the media,
managerial psychology, therapy and language that absorb technological
rationality (see e.g. Marcuse 1991: 88–93, 110–11, 200–1). In a similar vein,
Ellul points to how the techniques of education, counselling and vocational
guidance utilize strategies that have worked with material technology at the
same time as serving to bend humans to compliance with that technology
(1965: 344–63). Although techniques had been applied for millennia in
narrow, local spheres of action, the process of industrialization had seen
their spread through all aspects of life with little political or religious resist-
ance – what is lost is spontaneity and authentic individuality.
Ellul provides a rather different emphasis from previous critiques by
arguing that it is the impact of technological society on the range of possi-
ble practical and spiritual actions of individuals that is curtailed by the pre-
scribed and automatic actions characteristic of technological society.
Technique invades all dimensions of modern life, transforming the nature
of work, of war, and domestic life. It reduces the physicality of human
action, reducing the degree of contact with physical environment, trans-
forming human bodily engagement with space, time and with speed. The
pilot of the supersonic aircraft provides a vivid example of this material
transformation of human being:
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50 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

The pilot of the supersonic aircraft at its maximum velocity

becomes, in a sense, completely one with his machine. But immobi-
lized in a network of tubes and ducts, he is deaf, blind and impotent.
His senses have been replaced by dials which inform him of what is
taking place. Built into his helmet, for example, is an electro-
encephalographic apparatus which can warn him of an imminent
rarefaction of oxygen before his senses could have told him. We can
say he ‘subsists’ in abnormal conditions; but we cannot say he is
adapted to them in any real human sense. And his situation is not
exceptional.
(Ellul 1965: 325–6)

The supersonic pilot’s embodied experience of technology is still quite

exceptional (it was even more so in 1964) but the progressive incorporation
of human bodily existence into technology has indeed developed along the
lines Ellul indicates. The modern car driver, for example, is distanced from
the external environment as climate and sound are technologically
managed. The ubiquitous lights and dials on the dashboard have been sup-
plemented in many modern cars by warning sounds, video-assisted revers-
ing, and ‘head-up’ displays projected onto the windscreen. Automatic
systems – such as ABS, self-adjusting suspension systems, light-sensitive
headlights, responsive power-steering, and so on – can mediate the interac-
tion between driver, the road and the world they live in.
As if picking up Heidegger’s example of the hydroelectric dam and
Marcuse’s suggestion that technology shapes ideology, Ellul uses the
Tennesse Valley Authority (TVA) as an example of how technology becomes
ideology. As well as generating hydraulic power and distributing it to the
neighbouring localities, the TVA became a symbol of regionalism, decen-
tralizing the political power of public and private, federal and local institu-
tions (Ellul 1965: 323). But the hydroelectric dam also illustrates how
nature is suborned to technology: ‘Just as hydroelectric installations take
waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the
natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer
any natural environment’ (Ellul 1965: 79).
As thought is separated from action, technique becomes ubiquitous,
colonizing not only the consciousness of modern people but also their
spirit: ‘The very assimilation of ideas into the technical framework which
renders them materially effective makes them spiritually worthless’ (Ellul
1965: 425). Technique has had beneficial effects not only in offering
freedom from famine and the opportunity of leisure but also in combating
inequities such as slavery. There may be ways of making techniques more
applicable to human beings rather than simply demanding human beings
to adapt. But what seems more likely to Ellul, anticipating the impact of
gene technology by many years, is that technique will produce a ‘super-
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 51

man’ through chemical means and even ‘embryonic conditioning’ that will
be better able to resist the vagaries of material existence (1965: 337).
Overall, technological society is no better than any previous society because
material gains must be weighed against losses in terms of the spiritual and
emotional dimensions of human being. Technological society is here to
stay so all that can be hoped for is to bring technique and the continued
existence of human being into harmony by one of two means (Ellul 1965:
429–30). The first is to generate new techniques that do not stand apart or
in opposition to the human being but blend more closely with its capaci-
ties. Writing in the very earliest days of computer technology, Ellul suggests
that the development of ‘thinking machines’ could be such a way forward.
The second is that we might rethink what it is to be a human being, adapt-
ing our conception of human existence to take into account the changed
material circumstances of technological society.

Technology in control?

There are a number of recurring themes in the critique of the relationship

between technology and society. One of them is the call for humanizing the
relationship, shifting the balance from technique back towards a more dis-
tinctively human dynamic of imagination and spontaneity that is not repli-
cated in technological systems, whether human or mechanical. This theme
emerges in all the critics I’ve mentioned in this chapter and it recurs in later
commentators. Donald Schön (1967), for example, bemoans the socio-cul-
tural effect of technology in stabilizing systems so that they inhibit inge-
nuity in creating new practices and indeed new technologies. Rather than
a stolid linear process of social progression dominated by technological
systems that he calls the ‘Technological Program of Modernity’, Schön pro-
posed an ‘ethic of change’ that would accept the decline of stability and
embrace a phenomenological approach to invention that ‘demands starting
from where, in fact you are – not where you thought you were ... It requires
priority for the here and now … the priority of immediate experience’
(1967: 206). His calls for including the openness to change of the inventor
and the artist echo Marcuse’s emphasis on the aesthetic dimension in
modernity and Heidegger’s on the importance of thinking.
These critics are responding to the passing of cultures that were domi-
nated by a religious order of belief, in which technology was subordinate to
spiritual ideals. Modernity, and the industrialization that has accompanied
it, on the one hand, deposed God as the arbiter of value and, on the other,
replaced Him with the mundane value of technology that follows that prag-
matic principle – ‘does it work?’ Science has provided a systematic
hermeneutics of the lived-in world that if it does not exactly generate tech-
nology, nonetheless legitimates and explains it, providing an ideological
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52 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

support that enables modern technology to harness the resources of a

whole society, as with the building of hydroelectric plants, space travel or
the development of networked technologies (telephones, computers, power
systems, water systems). It is with the move of technology out of mere
material arrangements into the systematic planning of material and social
projects that modern technology emerges and threatens to become an
autonomous and self-directing force. Human social arrangements, as all the
critics remark, come to be designed according to a mode of thought that is
materialist before it is human or spiritual. This appears to be the destiny of
the technological societies that have emerged in the twentieth century,
where materiality precedes sociality and where the pace of change speeds
up as technology drives the culture to constantly catch up.
Another recurrent theme in the critique of technology is that of the
automatic machine, one that acts on its own to transform the material
world, apparently independent of direct human intention. This theme, that
we can see in Marx’s, Mumford’s, Marcuse’s and Ellul’s response to tech-
nology, threatens ultimately to remove the human element altogether. In
Langdon Winner’s scary phrase, it is not the automatic machine that threat-
ens the humanity of society but ‘Autonomous Technology’ (1977). This is
one aspect of the ‘danger’ that Heidegger warns us about; the fear of man-
made objects is extended to include a fear of the social organizations that
incorporate them. It is more than reasonable to fear a machine over which
human beings have lost control; the airplane in which the mechanical con-
trols fail or the car whose driver is drunk or passes out are very unpre-
dictable and dangerous objects. But what becomes really scary is when such
dangerous machinery is put in the hands of a technical organization that
seems to operate in an autonomous and unaccountable way. The paradigm
case halfway through the twentieth century was the nuclear bomb whose
awesome power not only could kill vast numbers of people – some very
slowly – but also devastate landscapes, making them hideous and uninhab-
itable. The threat of these types of objects to the materiality of our world
and our lives is of course intended but they are ‘safe’ as long as they are
either used properly or, in the case of nuclear weapons, never used at all.
The issue becomes one of control. Sufficient technical safeguards and
rational political systems should ensure that the deterrent effect maintains
a status quo, a balance of power that controls such objects and does not use
them. But can the political and technical systems ever be deemed truly ‘fail-
safe’?
During the latter half of the twentieth century another type of concern
has emerged about the unintended consequences of ordinary technology
designed to enhance the material conditions of existence. The polluting
effects of technology designed to enhance mobility (particularly by air and
by motor vehicle) threatens our material environment in a variety of ways
with both short-term and long-term impacts. The effects of major schemes,
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 53

such as those for generating nuclear and hydroelectric power, are recognized
to be far more complex than was originally thought. The consequences of
genetic modification of crops, of genetic alteration of human cells and even
the social and cultural impact of innovations in reproductive technology, are
difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate. Underlying these fears about
specific technologies is a fear that technology as a social system has become
self-producing, taking on a life of its own, directed by its own logic of cumu-
lative innovation and thus independent of the control of humankind.
Winner explores this fear that human beings have lost mastery of their
world but reminds us that the whole point of technology, whether mechan-
ical or social in form, is that it should determine at least some aspects of
human existence. Technology works precisely when and because it deter-
mines either some material event in the world or some human action.
Whether it is a machine or a technical organization, the whole point is to
produce a definite and predictable outcome: ‘technology succeeds through
the conquest of disorder and the imposition of form’ (Winner 1977: 75).
We cannot have technology without some measure of technological deter-
minism and without ceding some human autonomy to the technology as
the intended choice of human actors. However, Winner recognizes that
technology brings unchosen and unintended consequences, such as the
atmospheric pollution generated by the car’s internal combustion engine
and the accidental injury to road users. Often those who suffer unintended
consequences are not those who intentionally put the technology into use.
Car drivers gain mobility but cyclists are more likely to experience death or
injury without any gain. More complicated still are those victims of the
damaged environment, both now and in the future, who are separated in
space and time from any gains from the technology that caused the
damage.
Winner suggests that one of the reasons that technology has become so
potent in modernity is precisely because it exceeds our intentions and pro-
duces unintended consequences. Provided that there is a sufficient material
reason to proceed, then the unintended consequences will be treated as a
necessary evil or, as is often the case, will be found to be beneficial and will
be embraced: ‘Each new variety of apparatus, technique or organization
expands the sphere of human possibilities to a degree which, in the nature
of things, remains uncertain’ (Winner 1977: 98). The example Winner uses
is the computer; if it had been treated as nothing more than a calculating
machine, then we would not have the flexible communications and infor-
mation storage devices we have today. The unintended consequences of
computing power were seized upon and developed without regard for the
originating intentions behind the device. The effect, Winner argues, is to
produce ‘technological drift’ rather than a trajectory of development that is
either reducible to human intentions or to determination from within
‘technique’ or ‘technological rationality’. History, technological development
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54 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

and cultural change cannot be specified as ‘determined’ either by the

human mind or the material constitution of the world. Both interact
together in shaping change that is manifest both in the material world and
the social world.
The politics of technology is tied up with issues about who gains, who
loses, how a balance can be made and by the difficulty in differentiating
between human and material elements within these systems. The politics
is made more complicated by the way that different technologies (say, elec-
tronics and aircraft building) become entangled in technological systems in
which what are in fact human interests may appear as a technological
imperative. Winner points out how this can lead to what he calls ‘reverse
adaptation’: ‘the adjustment of human ends to match the character of
available means’ (1977: 229) which is exactly the sort of danger envisaged
by Heidegger, Marcuse and Ellul. Rather than technology being designed to
solve practical problems, we adapt to what has been invented – just think
of the mobile phone – and the socio-technical system does its best to
encourage us in our adaptation. Design is not the consequence of simply
articulated human intention but the result of the interaction of sub-systems
within a technological system. Winner argues that the politics of technol-
ogy is about the way that technological systems become self-controlling –
autonomous – through the effects of reverse adaptation. These systems can
control markets, political regulation, institutional aims as well as creating
and extending ‘needs’ and crises (Winner 1977: 241–51). The technology
does not act as an independent agent but within a social situation it appears
as if it is such an agent with its own imperatives. The political context that
might aspire to control technological systems involves a variety of compet-
ing interests, some of which are tied into the system and others of which
may be ignorant of the consequences of a technology. As Winner accepts,
interests and knowledge are connected but both are also affected by educa-
tion and class status.
There are, however, ‘megatechnical systems’ in which the personal and
social interests of individuals, groups and classes are subordinated to or co-
opted by a ‘technological imperative’ in which ‘a chain of reciprocal
dependency is established in which the various aspects of a given technical
operation overlap and require each other’ (Winner 1977: 101). These
aspects include the dependence of advanced technologies on other tech-
nologies and on material and economic resources. For example, to be a
socially useful means of transport, the automobile requires manufacture,
repair, fuel supply, highways, and so on. The technological imperative over-
rides group interests, Winner claims, because whatever group is making the
decisions is forced to follow the pragmatic requirements of the technologi-
cal imperative. Until you have a viable alternative to the motor car, you
have to keep investing in the road system to enable people to get to work;
otherwise the economy grinds to a halt with socially disastrous conse-
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 55

quences. The technological imperative becomes more potent, the more

complex, far-reaching and interdependent that technological systems
become. The agency that authorizes technical development becomes
increasingly obscured, embedded deep within social and technological
systems, such that responsibility for making decisions becomes increasingly
difficult to identify. Winner alerts us to the political complexity of tech-
nology that means when things go wrong, it is difficult to blame either the
materiality of the technology or even the individual who invented or
‘created’ new things. Technology only appears to be ‘autonomous’ or a
determinative historical force; in fact, it is impossible to separate it from
economic, social and political forces.
If Winner identifies the political complexity of modern technological
systems, Stephen Hill (1988) picks up the slightly different theme of their
cultural embeddedness. He argues that the symbolic significance of techno-
logical artefacts depends on a negotiation between the life-world in which
they are used and the cultural context of world-views that surrounds them
(Hill 1988: 46). This perspective gives Hill a way of analysing the impact of
technologies that are imported into cultures in which they were not devel-
oped. If in the receiving culture the ‘alignment’ between technology and
culture is poor, there can be damaging effects, sometimes for the technology
(as with the Cook Islanders who buried their pick-up truck after a year, Hill
1988: 112), and sometimes for the culture (the transformation of traditional
fishing techniques in Sri Lanka through the introduction of mechanized
boats and nylon fishing lines, Hill 1988: 76–8). Hill’s critique is focused more
on cultural imperialism than on the relationship between technology and
society but it does allow him to make the point that technology, and partic-
ularly technological artefacts, are always dependent on other cultural
resources. These are first of all, knowledge (of how an internal combustion
engine works) and, second, a technological infrastructure (the network of
spare part suppliers). Together knowledge and infrastructure constitute a
‘technological frame’ (Hill 1988: 160) that makes its own demands on
society for resources and cultural change. This theme not only echoes
Winner’s ‘technological systems’ but also the impact of ‘technique’ in Ellul
and ‘technological rationality’ in Marcuse. There is a difference, however, in
that other critics are keen to emphasize the integration of technological
thinking within the culture whereas Hill treats it as a distinct ‘text’ which is
just one of a number in modern cultures so that the ‘tragedy’ of technology
is ‘the submission of human purpose to the external systematic ordering of
human affairs by the industrialised technological frame’ (Hill 1988: 230).
Hill’s solution is a political ideological one:

once accepted into industrial society, the cultural values of the

technology text have had power to command the human consti-
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56 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

tution of cultural meanings into alignment with the central values

of the text itself. The task of reshaping the culture–technology
nexus is to break this alignment at the gateways where the values
of the technology text have entered wider culture, and to reassert
a culture of ‘autonomy’ within everyday life.
(Hill 1988: 240)

But this seems to ignore the embeddedness of technology in the everyday

lives of people; it is not an abstract belief system but a set of lived, practical
arrangements. The ‘culture–technology nexus’ is a set of technologies that
have been taken up and incorporated; everyday life cannot be autonomous
from technology since it is part of it.
The themes of technology as culture and technology as politics are con-
joined in Andrew Feenberg’s (1999; 2002) writing on technology. Rather
like Hill’s ‘technology text’, he refers to a ‘technical code’ to describe the
conjunction of technological innovations with social interest as, for
example, the assembly line which blends technology and culture to achieve
both functional effects in terms of production and social power in the form
of control over workers. His argument is that the inventions and discoveries
of technology are things that really work in themselves and are socially
neutral but when they are taken up in a social context, they are shaped and
joined together in particular configurations that reflect the interests of
those holding power.8 He suggests that technology might be available for
capitalism to sustain its hegemony but it might also be available as a
resource that could be adopted for socialist ideals. Feenberg’s critical per-
spective on technology argues that it is not necessarily an anti-human or
anti-society force and as an example he anticipates Negri and Hardt’s analy-
sis in Empire (1999) by arguing that computer technology is not only useful
for control but also for communication and ‘any technology that enhances
human contact has democratic potentialities’ (2002: 92).
But here we have the problem that Marcuse calls ‘harmonization’
where technology can appear to be both good and bad and its development
seems to respond to the politico-cultural tensions that surround it. The
motor car is not only a commodity whose technological development has
been driven by the desire of capitalist enterprise to exploit markets. It is a
useful, liberating device that has become safer, more reliable, longer-lasting
and uses scarce resources ever more efficiently. There is considerable debate
about the way that hegemonic interests have shaped the emergence of the
petrol car over the electric car (see, for example, Schiffer 2000 who argues
that it is the gendered behaviour of the majority of purchasers that was
important in the gasoline car becoming dominant in the middle-class
market). But there is also a debate about new forms of ‘zero-emission’ cars.
Manufacturers have responded to critics of petrol technology by producing
a range of hybrid electric vehicles which seem likely to challenge the dom-
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 57

inance of petrol engine cars in the next few decades (Motavalli 2000: 108).
Where Marcuse sees a process of steady incorporation within the hege-
mony of technological rationality, Feenberg sees a dialectical relation in
which the political effects of cultural tensions feed into technological devel-
opment. However, Feenberg does make an interesting move in distinguishing
two levels of technology: ‘primary instrumentalization’ is about ‘functional
constitution’ which involves ‘reifying’ natural objects and transforming them
to serve a use, and ‘secondary instrumentalization’, which is to do with the
‘realization of the constituted objects and subjects in actual networks
and devices’ (1999: 202). Primary instrumentalization involves ‘decontextu-
alization, calculation and control’ – the sorts of processes that we normally
associate with the application of technological rationality to bring new tech-
nologies into being. Secondary instrumentalization, however, is the more
practical level of incorporating new technologies into the material life of a
society. It is at this secondary level that political intervention can affect how
technologies are incorporated within a society and the ‘reverse adaptation’
can be resisted. Once technologies have been formed in the primary process,
they cannot be undone but how they are modified for later use is something
that is not determined by technological imperative.
In Gilbert Simondon’s concept of ‘concretization’, of how new tech-
nology becomes everyday stuff, he suggests that technological innovations
have to adapt to demands that may be disconnected or even incompatible.
Feenberg gives the example of the house that gets its heat from the sun
rather than from burning fossil fuels so that the need for heat and light as
well as environmental constraints are built into the design (1999: 217).
Concretization does not follow a simple logic of technological rationality
but reflexively responds to adapt function to the context of use, thereby
shaping technologies to their social and natural environment – the inverse
of Winner’s ‘reverse adaptation’. The difficulty with Feenberg’s argument is
that it does rather sound like modern capitalism doing good business.
Because there is an increasing ideological commitment to the environment
among customers – no small matter as Feenberg would no doubt point out
– then house builders will begin to make new houses more ‘environmen-
tally friendly’. But prior to this ideological shift, capitalist enterprises have
long since recognized that there are a variety of ways of appealing to con-
sumers so that multiplying function has become a standard strategy of tech-
nological development. Cavity walls, double glazing, loft insulation,
thermal building blocks are all, in the UK, subject to building regulation
standards that periodically change to improve the conservation of heat and
so energy. Consumers, however, appreciate these effects both in terms of
lower fuel bills and having an easier house to heat and keep warm; the
process of concretization seems to be well integrated within capitalist soci-
eties. Mobile phone technology was initially driven by the idea of separat-
ing the functionality of the telephone from a location fixed through wired
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58 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

connections. But along the way other related technologies have been inte-
grated (SMS, WAP, imaging, games, clocks, and so on) to increase function-
ality within the device with a response from customers that has varied over
time. Now the integration of other technologies is not driven simply by
customer demand but by technological exigency; the overlap between cell-
based pager technology and cell phone technology, the potential for data
transfer between computer systems by telephone, the digitization of images
as mere data, the development of liquid crystal displays for a number of dif-
ferent purposes. In other words, new functionality arises out of any context
as an idea that is possible and is then tried out on actual customers where
it may be successful (SMS) or not (WAP) according to how it is integrated
into the context of useage.
Feenberg’s concept of secondary instrumentalization does point to the
complexity of how technologies are taken up and integrated into our every-
day lives and how this has an impact on how, and even whether, the tech-
nology is successful. This is a useful counter to the tendency amongst critics
of technology to imply that an imperative logic links the materiality of
technology to its social networks. Feenberg also hints at how a political
resistance to technology does not need to operate at the level of planning
and design but can have significant effects at the level of consumption,
adoption and usage. This does provide an opportunity, for example, to
argue that sustainable technology should be integrated into the everyday
material practice of a society even while the technological systems lag
behind the recognition of its importance. Feenberg proposes a strategy of
‘democratic rationalization’ to ‘signify user interventions that challenge
undemocratic power structures rooted in modern technology’ (1999: 108).

Conclusion

The emphasis in this chapter has been on drawing out the themes of the
major critics of technology who have seen it as not only changing material
civilization but also as changing the relationship between material life and
social life during the twentieth century. There is in the critiques of Mumford,
Heidegger, Marcuse and Ellul a concern that a new form of materialism,
introduced as technology which binds humans to objects in new ways, has
changed the course of history. While the basic thrust of their arguments is
for the reassertion of immaterial human values – those of the human spirit,
of imagination, of spontaneity, of aesthetics and of emotion – they often
overlook the way that these are inseparable from the material lives of
human beings and of society. Their warnings were appropriate and it is not
too late to resist arguments that claim a technological imperative, the ‘must
have’ of technologies that will have enormous material benefits (those in
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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 59

favour of genetic engineering spring to mind) but which involve the cre-
ation of a standing-reserve of forces that are beyond our imagination.
The later critics of technology have responded to these themes to point
out the political and cultural features of technological systems, re-empha-
sizing the interrelationship between technology and society, re-articulating
the continuity between materiality and sociality. There remains an argu-
ment that has not been persuasively rebutted and that is the Marcusian
political interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘danger’. Industrialization has
brought a mode of technological thinking that when allied with social
forces strengthened by that thinking, is remarkably resilient to resistance,
threatening the spiritual and material freedom of humankind as it adapts
and responds to complaints and disagreements:

Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the
technical veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslave-
ment. With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom – in the
sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus – is perpetu-
ated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts.
(Marcuse 1991: 35)

Although the critics of technology have given us salient pointers to the cul-
tural dynamics of technology, advising that things are more complex than
they at first appear and that history is not already written within the tra-
jectory of technological innovation, they have avoided dealing with the
practical and detailed ways that materiality is being altered in technologi-
cal societies. Before moving towards the embodied nature of being with
materiality and attempting to develop the beginnings of a method of
analysing material interaction, in the next chapter I will turn to look at the
relationship between material agency and human agency. One of the char-
acteristics of technology that its critics have recognized is that it is not a
‘thing’, not an entity with an internal logic that determines its progress but
a merging of material and social components that produce patterns of
action that are both material and social. What happens then, when we
begin to distinguish between the agency of people and the agency of
things?
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4 Agency, affordance and

actor-networks

Introduction

The debate about the relationship between technology and society dis-
cussed in Chapter 3 treats technology as a process which we found to be
entangled with the processes of society. What that debate tends to overlook
are the more practical relationships between people and things as individ-
ual beings which mediate culture and sociality. In this chapter I want to
begin to explore some ideas about how material objects are constituted in
relation to individual people. From the perspective of the individual,
objects are incorporated into the life of a person and extend his or her being
in the world, both the material world and the social world. Looked at from
the perspective of society, the object is a vehicle of the intentions and
designs of the culture that can shape the actions of the individual. The
various approaches I will explore suggest that material things have some
measure of ‘agency’. To be sure, they have never, at least as yet, been able
to demonstrate sufficient autonomous intention or reflective awareness to
be equivalent to human agency. Instead objects acquire agency from the
human actions which form them, including those actions which take them
up into use; the agency of objects is essentially human agency transferred to
material objects. The term ‘agency’ refers to the power to do or to act and,
conveniently, the word also refers to the power to act on the part of
another. My telephone answering machine operates as my agent, respond-
ing on my behalf to calls intended for me. To act in this role it must iden-
tify itself as being my agent (through the message it gives callers) and accu-
rately record messages for me to deal with later. Its actions stand in my
stead and yet no one is under the illusion that it is me (except those who
start to respond immediately when they hear my voice and then feel irri-
tated and cheated when they realize it is just a machine). Although I might
claim the answering machine as my agent, it is also the agent of the culture
through which it acquired its specific characteristics of design and manu-
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 61

facture and through the material context in which I use it, that is to say, a
telephone network of companies, exchanges, lines and codes.
Marshall McLuhan was fascinated by the way that technology merged
with human society to extend the power of people to act in their world,
both communicatively and physically:

To extend our bodily postures and motions into new materials, by

way of amplification, is a constant drive for more power. Most of
our bodily stresses are interpreted as needs for extending storage
and mobility functions, such as occur, also in speech, money and
writing. All manner of utensils are a yielding to this bodily stress
by means of extensions of the body.
(McLuhan 1994: 181)

For McLuhan what was significant about the motor car as an extension of
the human body was not its signifying power of sexual or social status but
its power as a ‘hot, explosive medium’ of social communication that could
move people about much more quickly than the pedestrian’s legs or the
rider’s horse (1994: 221). McLuhan saw the impact of technology in its cre-
ation of objects that extended the embodied agency of individual humans
rather than becoming objects in themselves acting on behalf or in concert
with human agents. But the human activity of moving about their physical
and social environment was extended by the power of the car in a way that
revised existing social boundaries of class and status, changing the shape of
modern societies both geographically and culturally. As Horkheimer
reminds us, ‘the proposition that tools are prolongations of human organs
can be inverted to state that the organs are also prolongations of the tools’
(1999: 201).
In this chapter we will see how human agency is invested in material
objects through emotion, through meaning, through perception and
through interconnection. Sometimes the agency seems to be autonomous,
as in the artwork or the telephone answering machine, so that the object
acts independently of the human on whose behalf it works. In the language
that Alfred Gell develops, the agency of the object operates as an ‘index’,
pointing back to its human origins while apparently remote from them. At
other times the agency of an object is tied to its contact with a human so
that for Serge Tisseron, the emotions invested in the object are released as
it is incorporated into human actions. For James Gibson, the agency of the
object is discovered in perception as what the object ‘affords’ or offers to the
human who comes into contact with it. And for Bruno Latour, Michelle
Callon and their colleagues, the agency of the object lies in how it assists or
resists the networked actions of a series of actors including other objects.
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62 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Affect and agency

One of the features of late modernity is that a myriad of material objects are
created and used as tools; if we ever stop to think about them, we regard
them as ‘mere’ objects that do not in anyway compete with humans for
status as beings. Objects are there for us to use and dispose of in whatever
way we wish; we may treat them well or badly without any concern for
their rights or feelings because they have none. Just as people in other civil-
izations treated slaves or animals with little or no concern for their welfare,
so we treat objects as possessions, chattels over which we have complete
dominion. But when we are not thinking about it ‘rationally’, we do some-
times ascribe human characteristics to objects, just as we do to animals.
This is not quite the same thing as treating them as within the category of
human beings because if we are confronted with a choice or decision, we
will distinguish the human from the object (and those who do not are
regarded as rather odd). I swear at my computer accusing it of wilfulness
when it malfunctions although I’m slightly uncomfortable that I’m swear-
ing at the material object of the box of electronics rather than the software
which is the usual cause of the problem but which is too intangible to see
as a ‘thing’ with agency. I knew a Cambridge don who, it was whispered,
had burst into inconsolable tears when an irreplaceable bottle of vintage
brandy slipped from his hands and smashed on the floor. We can become
deeply attached to heirlooms or personal objects that we imbue with some-
thing of the character of a person, or a place or an experience. Such objects
transcend the status of ‘mere’ objects as we seem to love or hate them,
expressing emotions of tenderness or loathing through words or gestures
that we normally reserve for animate beings.
The French psychoanalyst, Serge Tisseron (1999) has identified a
number of aspects of emotional and practical relationships with material
objects through which they begin to take on something of the status of
human agents. Rather than simply seeing things as extensions of human
beings, as Marshall McLuhan seems to, he argues that the prosthetic quality
of objects is balanced by their ‘introjection’ or ‘inclusion’ within the
psychic states of those whose bodies they extend (1999: 133). As he writes
about clothes, monuments, art objects and the artefacts of our everyday
lives, Tisseron points out how individual contact with things is not merely
functional or simply symbolic but is also, at the same time, linked to our
individual identity and sense of self. One of the psychological theories that
he draws on is Winnicott’s concept of the ‘transitional object’ – Tisseron
uses the example of Linus, a character in the Peanuts cartoon strip, who
carries about a piece of blanket – that is treated as a replacement for the
mother figure (1999: 37). The ‘transitional object’ for the adult becomes
much more flexible and is manipulated for more complex purposes than
simply providing a sense of emotional security. Nonetheless, the intimate
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 63

relationship with the feel of a material, its smell, familiarity and the sense
of protection from the world beyond the self it brings, remains an aspect of
the way that we wear our clothes. Tisseron writes of the difference between
the outer clothes that present a social face projecting signs that the indi-
vidual feels comfortable with, while underclothes are more to do with inti-
macy and the sense of self that needs to be protected:

One can, for example, wear black undergarments and coloured

clothes, or the reverse. In the same way, silky materials can be
arranged between the body and the rough materials directed out-
wards, or the opposite. In the end, the volume of outer fabrics can
overlay clothes tightly like a secret wrapping. The dynamic of the
outer garments – more ‘sociable’ – and of the undergarments –
more ‘intimate’ – tells of the emotional and affective state of every-
one at every moment.
(Tisseron 1999: 46)1

The way that material objects provide a bridge between the inner psychic
life of the individual and the outer social life of the world around is not
fixed but varies and may involve contradictory or reversible meanings. In
writing about everyday domestic objects, Tisseron argues that meanings are
not fixed or stable but are managed by the individual to meet both the
demands of the situation and their emotional state. He refers to Bourdieu’s
concept of ‘habitus’ as he recognizes that relationships with objects often
originate in the common practices acquired from the society around us.
Nonetheless, objects can carry emotional and personal meanings so that
plates, bought by one’s mother, are brought out when friends come to
dinner, making links between the inheritance of emotional and practical
ways of being and the building of present relationships (Tisseron 1999: 78).
Each piece of domestic equipment is associated with memories – some
banal, some of deep significance – and is tied up with the personal history
of those who use them (see Dant 2000b). They are vehicles for carrying the
individual’s past and for enabling him or her to realize emotional as well as
practical relationships, with the self and with others. As he accepts Bourdieu’s
account of the habitus as a social origin of the practices, language and the
significances of material life, Tisseron points out that the individual does not
draw on a single habitus, and their behaviour is not determined in any
mechanical sense. He recognizes that Bourdieu’s concept is about disposi-
tions but prefers the account of Bernard Lahire (1998) who suggests that the
social actor calls on ‘schemes of action’ appropriate to the situation. These
schemes of action are not simply habits but ways of seeing, feeling, speaking
and making do, schemes of perception and understanding, that are based on
past experiences but are applied, not necessarily consciously, anew to each
situation (Tisseron 1999: 143).
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64 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

What material objects do for people then is not simply symbolic, not
simply a presentation of signs, but is tangled up with the practical arrange-
ments that the person lives out through the activities of their body. Such
bodily motor actions in the material world have an emotional quality at the
same time as carrying social meanings as signs. Tisseron expresses this in a
complex idea that combines the senses with emotions and motor actions of
the body: ‘The specific form of symbolization put into play in clothing is
from the first sensory-affective-motor’ (1999: 43).2 Material objects act as a
conduit that extends the agency of the body and the person into the world
while also providing a channel from the world back into the person. Things
are agents of the self but also of the society towards the individual so that
he refers to them as ‘reversible’ in the sense that they carry mem-ories,
signs, social relationships to the person but can then be used by the person
to express and manage personality and an emotional life. In a simple way
this is achieved by the actions which direct objects away from the person –
giving them as a gift, selling them, putting them away or hiding them. But
the way that objects are used can be more complex and more intimately
tied to the emotional life.
Objects used as tools can act as extensions of the body but they also
direct sensory information into the body so that they can become as part
of it (Tisseron 1999: 147). The American psychologist of bodily sensory
apparatus, James Gibson, also recognizes that while the proprioceptive
senses within muscles and joints distinguish what is in and what is outside
of the body, the visual systems of the body can deal with objects as if they
are part of the body:

This is what happens when a tool is used in place of the hand itself
for manipulating an object, as when grasping it with pliers instead
of with the fingers, or striking it with a hammer instead of the fist.
The felt action of muscles, joints, and skin is then rather different,
but the visible action is essentially the same and the visual system
can easily control the motor output. The situation is similar when
one uses the steering-wheel of a vehicle instead of one’s legs to
guide the direction of one’s locomotion.
(Gibson 1968: 36)

But Tisseron goes rather further to suggest that the psychic life of the person
is transferred to objects through which emotions are expressed and made
manifest. There is, for example, a pleasure in what he calls, following Ives
Hendrick, an ‘instinct of mastery’, when a person enjoys learning to use
something and then enjoys using it with skill (Tisseron 1999: 135). People
who successfully learn to drive will experience this sort of pleasure which is
about control over the object as a way of being in the world rather than a
sensual pleasure. The bodily engagements with objects may also extend
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 65

actions which might have been made within or against the body such as
wringing one’s hands or rubbing one’s skin. Such actions can both dissipate
and display emotion and a similar effect may be achieved, for example, by
cleaning the car (‘Some men seem, moreover, to spend more of their time
occupied with the bodywork that covers their car than with the skin that
covers their body’,3 Tisseron 1999: 150). So cleaning the car may be at the
same time a way of externalizing emotions, both releasing and dealing with
psychic tension. Using objects that make a noise such as a car or a vacuum
cleaner may also work to both express and absorb anger or anguish.
Tisseron suggests that tending or repairing objects or on the other hand
dealing with them roughly or throwing them away, are also ways of exter-
nalizing emotions that might otherwise either be suppressed or work back
on the body. The material relation between the human being and the objects
around him or her enables feelings and emotions to be pushed from inside
to out, from the psyche to the surface of the body and then beyond through
things. This psychoanalytic perspective on mundane relationships with
everyday objects goes further than incorporating them within rituals that
have social effects, as for example McCracken does (1988: 84–8, see also
Chapter 2 above), by recognizing that the agency of persons spills out from
their body into the objects with which their body deals.
In emphasizing the emotional engagement with objects, Tisseron sig-
nificantly modifies the idea, so characteristic of the sociological literature
on consumption, that they are simply signs. He argues that it is not only
through quasi-linguistic symbolizations that objects mediate between the
individual and the society that he or she lives in, but that it is through
gesture, such as the making or choosing of objects and the way they are
taken up in techniques and practices, that mediations are maintained and
achieved. As mediators between individuals and their society, objects
become involved in actions which are at the same time of symbolic and
psychological significance. This process of mediation is different from the
view of symbolic communication, characteristic of analysing mass media,
in which meaning is separated from the act in which it is produced. What
Tisseron argues is that every act of exteriorization is also an act of interior-
ization, symbolization in the material world is both social and psychic, col-
lective and personal (1999: 180–3). And in understanding the place of
material objects in a social world we must recognize that ‘Objects are not
only extensions of our motor or sensory organs. They are, more funda-
mentally, extensions of our mind’ (1999: 217).4

Art and agency

Tisseron incorporates screens, art and visual objects in his discussion of

how things mediate individual emotion and cultural understandings.
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66 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

However, the agency that he ascribes to objects emphasizes their capacity

as a vehicle for the feelings of particular individuals. When he discusses
memorials and art objects he describes how they carry shared understand-
ings and values but does not focus on the mechanics of this process. In
quite a different way, before his untimely death, the anthropologist Alfred
Gell set out a remarkable way of thinking about material objects, specifi-
cally art objects, as ‘the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social
agents’ (1998: 7). His interest was in setting up an anthropological theory
of art that did not presuppose the nature of the art object either in terms of
aesthetics or in terms of institutional structures that might identify it as
‘art’. Instead he developed a theory of the agency of objects in which the
art object could be a specific instance. Rather than being constrained by a
philosophical account of agency that would require that membership of
the category be consistent and stable, he argued that ‘things’ could be
treated as agents simply because that is how human beings from time to
time treated them. It is in attributing agency to objects, such as a little girl
treating her doll as if it had will and intention, that for social purposes
objects can be deemed to have agency. He points out that the admiration
accorded to Michaelangelo’s statue of David is on occasion equivalent to
the primacy with which a child treats her doll’s importance as a being in
the world. But it is through the mundane example of human relationships
with cars in contemporary culture that he makes the idea of things as social
agents ring true:

A car, just as a possession and a means of transport is not intrinsi-

cally a locus of agency, either the owner’s agency or its own. But it
is in fact very difficult for a car owner not to regard a car as a body-
part, a prosthesis, something invested with his (or her) own social
agency vis-à-vis other social agents. Just as a salesman confronts a
potential client with his body (his good teeth and well-brushed
hair, bodily indexes of business competence) so he confronts the
buyer with his car (a Mondeo, late registration, black) another,
detachable, part of his body available for inspection and approval.
Conversely, an injury suffered by the car is a personal blow, an
outrage, even though the damage can be made good and the insur-
ance company will pay. Not only is the car a locus of the owner’s
agency, and a conduit through which the agency of others (bad
drivers, vandals) may affect him – it is also the locus of an
‘autonomous’ agency of its own.
(Gell 1998: 18)

The car as prosthesis or bodily extension seems to constitute its agency

merely as an extension of its owner. But Gell is serious when he argues that
its agency is also autonomous. He describes his own Toyota – known to the
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 67

family as ‘Tollyolly’, ‘Olly’ for short – as a thing that he ‘esteems’, that is

‘considerate’ but if it were to break down in the middle of the night, far
from home, he would regard this as ‘an act of gross treachery’ for which he
would hold the car ‘personally and morally culpable’ (Gell 1998: 18–19).
What Gell is doing is to point out that while it may not be adequate for
philosophical purposes, for anthropological purposes, people do, from time
to time, treat things as persons. This does not mean that the object always
has the capacity of agency for all actors at all times, so that he sometimes
treats his car as an autonomous agent but in general he is perfectly aware
that it is a thing and as such has no mind, no intention and no will. Gell
points out that human agency is exercised in the material world and mind,
intention or will are only evidenced by some causal, material event in that
world. This, he argues, means that ‘it is not paradoxical to understand
agency as a factor of the ambience as a whole, a global characteristic of the
world of people and things in which we live, rather than as an attribute of
the human psyche, exclusively’ (Gell 1998: 20). The more effective that
objects are in being implicated in material, causal events in the world, the
more we are likely to attribute agency to them. This means that objects like
cars and other mechanical or semi-autonomous objects (such as computers
running programs) are more likely to be treated as having agency than
simple inanimate objects whose causal role is easily identified. The ‘black-
box’ effect, where the precise workings of an object are not known or
understood by those using it, promotes a tendency to suspect that there is
a ‘ghost in the machine’. However, Gell modulates his claim about the
attribution of agency by distinguishing between ‘primary’ agents who are
intentional beings and ‘secondary’ agents which are ‘artefacts, dolls, cars,
works of art etc. through which primary agents distribute their agency in
the causal milieu, and thus render their agency effective’ (1998: 20). As sec-
ondary agents, objects may lack intention but they do have causal efficacy;
what is ambiguous is where the intention that leads to the materiality of
causal efficacy actually lies. The breakdown of a car may originate with poor
servicing, design or manufacture of parts or even with poor driving tech-
nique (‘riding’ the clutch, ‘caning’ the gearbox, etc.). It also may arise
simply because components are worn out having reached the end of their
life as material entities. Identifying causal agency in such situations is often
difficult, even impossible, and may make little difference to future actions
(e.g. getting the car repaired).
In thinking through the agency of art and other artefacts, Gell refers to
them as ‘indexes’, invoking Peirce’s semiology where the object is a causal
or material sign rather than a signifier in a quasi-linguistic system. Smoke
is treated as an index of fire because that is what usually causes it, rather
than because of a social convention such as that which links a linguistic
sign to its material referent. The index falls somewhere between the ‘law of
nature’ of a physical cause and the ‘social convention’ of an agreed
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68 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

meaning to refer to what seems to be the case in the material world. The
artefact is then an ‘index’ of its origins, pointing to its maker and his or her
intentions, and to the culture it is inserted into. If the maker is forgotten,
as with the Kula shells in Melanesia, their originator is treated as the person
who is giving them away. The object also indexes the recipient, audience or
the person for whom the object is intended: ‘A Ferrari sports car, parked in
the street, indexes the class-fraction of “millionaire playboys” for whom
such cars are made. It also indexes the general public who can only admire
such vehicles and envy their owners’ (Gell 1998: 24). When the index is an
art object that represents something, its capacity as an index is through
some actual resemblance to that which it represents which stimulates an
inference or interpretation.
Gell’s theory was designed to show that artworks could be meaningful
to people from completely different cultures and from different times if
they were understood as social agents that referred to their makers, to their
representational origins in the world and to the audiences to whom they
were directed. He uses the theory to analyse the social relations around
what he called the ‘art nexus’ which is too specific for my discussion of the
social significance of materiality and agency. However, one theme that
emerges as he applies his theory to specific empirical instances which does,
I think, have general applicability, is that of the ‘distributed person’. There
is a common-sense idea of human agency as residing in the discreet self,
bounded by the materiality of the body and its incorporated mind. This is
perhaps a product of the increasing individualism, combined with the loss
of a sense of religious continuity between people, that has characterized the
trajectory of modernity. Instead of seeing our destinies as the result either
of fate or God’s will, modernity has come to be characterized by increased
emphasis on the construction of our own individual futures through a
‘reflexive project of the self’ (Giddens 1991). However, Gell explores the
artistic productions of various ancient cultures and shows that agency
ascribed to gods and other superhuman forces is also taken to inhabit mate-
rial objects and that the agency is distributed through them. From one
direction, he is suggesting that agency is not originally human but emerges
from the religious beliefs of a social group. From another direction, he sug-
gests that the agency of a human individual can be distributed through a
series of objects. I will briefly explore these two dimensions of distributed
person-hood as ways in which agency can exist within material objects –
both in ancient cultures and modern ones.
The first form is in effect idolatory in which material objects, shaped by
humans, are treated as having an agency which acts in the world. Magic,
for example, eschews scientific notions of cause and effect in the material
world because, argues Gell, it depends on a form of causation in which
‘intentions cause events to happen in the vicinity of agents’ (1998: 101). That is
to say, rather than see all causation as having to originate in physical forces,
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 69

magic sees the world of material causation as arising in human intentions

that are expressed and given material form in acts of magic. What is impor-
tant is the intense expression of intention that in the case of ‘volt sorcery’
involves an image of the victim, often made of wax, that is subjected to
injury or destruction with the result that the victim of the sorcery suffers
the same injuries. The person-hood of the victim is extended or distributed
into their material representations through which they become vulnerable
to material injury. Gell points out that this process is not restricted to
‘superstitious beliefs’ but also occurs, for example, in a contemporary photo-
graph of a person that is subjected to ridicule or caricature; ‘as social per-
sons, we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in
our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes and
our agency’ (1998: 103). Letting down someone’s tyres or posting dogshit
through their door is not just practically unpleasant but does damage to
their distributed person-hood.
Gell’s examples are predominantly from the anthropological literature
on Tahitian, Maori and other traditional cultures but he points out that the
buildings erected by western religions are also material manifestations of
God’s power and agency. They are of course also manifestations of human
agency in which there is an exchange of status and power around the idol-
atry of His agency. Ordinary people may treat the idea that God resides in
material forms with some suspicion and they are likely to have little diffi-
culty in distinguishing between the image or object and what it represents.
Nonetheless, Gell points out, referring back to the remarks about his car,
anthropomorphism or animism is not restricted to those who are confused
about the nature of the material world. That idols are not treated as ‘alive’
is attested to by the fact that when they show life – when the plaster saint
cries or bleeds – it is treated as a miracle, something quite beyond the
normal process of idol worship. When people believe that a material object,
such as a cathedral, carries some degree of social agency, it is not because
they believe that it is biologically alive and it is not important how alike it
is to living beings (Gell 1998: 125).
The second form of distributed person-hood that Gell describes is at
first sight rather more restricted. He argues that the individual can be seen
as embodied in their material products such as the œuvre of an artist; dif-
ferent works refer to each other across time as if they were extensions of the
artist’s mind. Using Marcel Duchamp’s œuvre Gell argues elegantly that
earlier works prefigure later works – he uses Husserl’s language of objects
that ‘protend’ future ones – and later works refer back to earlier works as a
retention of ideas and forms. Gell’s account of Duchamp and his use of
Husserl’s and Bergson’s conceptions of time to explore how agency is dis-
tributed over time into the material world is both fascinating and illumi-
nating. But his major point is fairly straightforward – human transforma-
tion of the material world occurs both in biographical time and historical
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70 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

time, both expressing the individual and tying that individual to the cul-
tural world in which they live. This distribution of person-hood is recover-
able by others at some other point in time – exactly as Gell does with
Duchamp. The expression of intentionality in any single creative act both
builds on and refers to previous creative acts and refers and responds to the
socio-material world around it. As Gell points out, this also happens in a
rather more mundane way with contemporary house extensions where the
owner’s intentions are realized in a material form that overlays the inten-
tions both of the original builder and previous owners. As we distribute our
person-hood in the material world in this sort of way, mixing it with those
of others, nothing is simply determined: ‘What gets built is whatever seems
the best possible compromise in the light of all the practical difficulties and
constraints entering into the situation; given that the decision to build
“something or other” has already been taken’ (Gell 1998: 257).

Affordances

Alfred Gell’s account of the agency of material objects situates them in

the material culture in which they originate and survive and, unlike
Tisseron’s, does not depend on particular lines of emotion and affect so
much as cultural practices and attitudes that establish and sustain that
agency. A version of the agency of material objects that attempts to avoid
either emotional or cultural lines of connection with the social world is
James Gibson’s notion of ‘affordances’. Gibson is a psychologist of the
senses who, without reducing sensory awareness to neurophysiology,
grounds his account in the biological possibilities of the human sensory
apparatus. In this account, the agency of humans does not imbue the mate-
rial objects around them, nor does ritual distribute human agency among
the things of the world. Human agency is solidly located in the physiology
of the human animal that includes a sensory apparatus not quite like any
other animal. One aspect of this sensory apparatus is the human capacity
for cognition but this is relatively downplayed in Gibson’s psychology,
operating as an aspect of the functioning of the senses rather than as their
centre of direction as in a full-blown cognitive psychology.
Gibson tries to understand how the human orients itself to the mate-
rial world in which it lives through the retinal image received in human
vision. He is particularly interested in how the senses operate when the
human is moving and how sensory information is organized to allow the
human animal to proceed with confidence. Once moving at any speed, in,
say, a car, the human perception, judgement and decision-making of the
driver operates more or less unconsciously, responding to the environment
more quickly than conscious cognition can calculate (Gibson 1982: 130,
fn10). The horse will add its own intentionality to that of its rider to avoid
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 71

obstacles or take opportunities; the car driver only has the mechanical pros-
thetic of the car to help. And yet, remarkably, most humans, given adequate
eyesight and controls that they can manipulate, are able to learn to drive
competently at speeds in excess of 30 miles an hour on roads full of obsta-
cles including other moving vehicles. Writing in 1938 about this impressive
extension of ordinary human agency through a material object that he calls
a ‘locomotion tool’, Gibson proposed that the driver perceives a ‘field of
safe travel’ where the car can go unimpeded (1982: 120). Bounding or
intruding into the ‘positive valence’ of this safe field are ‘negative valences’
or obstacles such as the kerb, parked cars and moving traffic. Within the
field are the invisible boundaries of the ‘minimum stopping zone’ and the
‘halo of avoidance’ around obstacles that are brought to perception by the
driver’s experience (Gibson 1982: 127). As Gibson presents this account
with line drawings of the road situation in plan format, these perceptual
categories appear as fixed material properties of the driver’s car. In fact, of
course, they are properties of the driver who has acquired them through
learning about what works and what is culturally acceptable. The field
would vary according to the speed of the car and the driver’s experience –
learner drivers progressively learn to ‘read’ the road ahead, some drivers will
confidently pass closer to obstacles than others. The driver will take into
account the material properties of the vehicle they are driving and modu-
late their attention to the field ahead according to the type of road, taking
into account the sorts of obstacles or dangers that it holds (Laurier 2004).
The road itself is a cultural as well as material construction with its regula-
tions, directions and signified injunctions that will shape the perceived
‘field of safe travel’ (see Horkheimer 1947: 98; Marcuse 1998: 46).
Gibson’s early account of how visual perception works in relation to
driving is rather fixed and mechanical, taking little account of human vari-
ability or cultural impact and only recognizing in passing that other
sensory channels – kinaesthetic, tactile and auditory – are involved (1982:
134). In his later work (Gibson 1979), he exchanges the concept of ‘valence’
for ‘affordance’ to refer to the perceived characteristics of material objects.
Rather than simply a negative or positive value being perceived in the
object, it is imbued with a set of properties and propensities which are
apparent to a perceiver. This more closely approaches a notion of agency in
which the object and human being interact than was found in his earlier
writing. As he rethinks the way that vision works, Gibson puts the emphasis
on the material environment rather than on what happens within the
body. This is not the material world of physics in which precise weights,
vectors and forces might be specified but the environment as it is perceived
by an animal, specifically a human animal, as it inhabits and moves
through it. Instead of regarding the eye and brain as the locus of vision, he
begins to think of it as a whole system, an ‘ambient optic array’, that
includes the head, the body and the ground which supports it. In other
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72 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

words, what we see is not just what is at the centre of our sight when we fix
on a point, it includes the background and what is in our peripheral vision.
This shift in perspective recognizes that the operation of vision occurs in
response to the environment so that what happens physiologically in
vision cannot be treated abstractly as a mechanism outside of the situation
in which it occurs. Think of the driver of the car again; he or she can see all
sorts of things in their peripheral vision that do not attract their attention
and as the eyes and head move to focus on specific things the field of vision
is continually changed and extended. This development of Gibson’s under-
standing of perception moves from a physiological psychology towards the
phenomenological approach to embodiment that I will discuss in the next
chapter.
All the body’s senses orient the animal to its environment but it is sight
which is most important in establishing the relationship between the mate-
rial body of the animal and the materiality of the environment. It is because
the body, or at least the eyes or the head, move while the ambient optic
array remains more or less static that we can make judgements about speed
and distance, for example. For Gibson, the environment is made up of a
medium (air or water), substances and surfaces that have properties to
which the body’s senses can respond. Light bounces off surfaces, travels
through the medium and is received by our eyes and sound emanates and
reverberates to be received by our ears. These properties of the material
environment are, for Gibson, not a set of physical properties to be described
and specified – although they are quite consistent with such a physical
account – they are ‘affordances’: ‘All these offerings of nature, these possi-
bilities and opportunities, these affordances as I will call them are invariant.
They have been strikingly constant throughout the whole evolution of
animal life’ (Gibson 1979: 18). If the senses are the way that the material
world is present for a human person, then this is also how they apprehend
their own body. Gibson argues that all the senses are to some extent ‘pro-
priosensitive’ as well as ‘exterosensitive’ (1979: 115). I can see my hand,
watch my feet in peripheral vision as I walk, smell the emanations of my
body, hear the sound of my own voice and, through what are usually
treated as the proprioceptors, feel the position of my limbs and body
through sensors in my muscles and joints. As Gibson points out, the senses
work together so that the information from the different senses is not pro-
cessed separately or distinctly, including the sense of our own bodies. This
view of sensory perception deviated from the traditional psycho-physiology
at the time Gibson was writing but it accords well with Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology, as we shall see in Chapter 5.
Although the word ‘afford’ is familiar, Gibson coins the neologism
‘affordance’ to point to the way in which an animal perceives the values
and meanings of things in the environment simultaneously with perceiv-
ing them as things. He says that affordance refers to the ‘complementarity
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 73

of the animal and environment’ in which it is the physical properties of a

material entity that offer something to the animal (1979: 127). His concept
then refers to the physicality of the material world in relation to specific
animals rather than being an attempt to objectively or abstractly account for
its physicality in terms of measurement and scales. The materiality of the
world offers possibilities to the particular materiality of an animal so a
kitchen chair will afford me the possibility of sitting down, resting my
trunk with my legs still supporting their weight, but for my cat it affords
the possibility of sitting down while supporting its whole body. The idea of
affordance neatly avoids the tricky idea of ‘function’ in which we become
concerned with the specific intention behind an object’s design and manu-
facture.
Gibson suggests that the origin of the concept of affordance lies in Kurt
Lewin’s term Aufforderungscharakter which has been variously translated as
the ‘invitation character’ or the ‘valence’ of an object (Gibson 1979: 138;
Marrow 1969: 56). There is a sense of direction, of the valence having a
vector of attraction or repulsion, that is phenomenological rather than
physical in Gibson’s taking up of this term.5 This chimes with George
Mead’s remarks that certain objects ‘call out’ to human beings to be used in
a certain way (1962: 278–80).6 However, what an object ‘invites’ or ‘offers’
is then a blend of the physical and cultural; the physical properties of
an object, be it a hill or a hammer, fit in with physical properties of
human bodies (or most human bodies) but the sorts of things they invite
are culturally specified. This would be accepted by Mead but Gibson is a
psychologist, keen to delimit the way that material objects can be used in
terms of the material relation of bodies and the world. As a result, he does
not recognize culture and its variability or the constraints it creates but
treats affordances as fixed properties of things:

The affordance of something does not change as the need of the

observer changes. The observer may or may not perceive or attend
to the affordance, according to his needs, but the affordance, being
invariant, is always there to be perceived. An affordance is not
bestowed on an object by a need of an observer and his act of per-
ceiving it. The object offers what it does because it is what it is. To
be sure we define what it is in terms of ecological physics instead of
physical physics, and it therefore possesses meaning and value to
begin with. But this is meaning and value of a new sort.
(Gibson 1979: 138–9)

This asserted immutability of affordances depends on the presumed stabil-

ity of the material world that is not shared by the social world. In fact, the
social world generates new ways of forming objects that may look different
but lend themselves to old uses or look much the same and lend themselves
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74 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

to new uses. The change in the material life of human societies that in
Chapter 2 I called ‘material civilization’ means that there are always newly
emerging contexts in which the affordance of existing objects is continu-
ally revised. But even within a moment of history material objects are taken
into human action in a variety of ways that is constrained but not deter-
mined by its physical properties. I can stand on my chair to change a light
bulb, I can jam it under a doorknob to act as a lock and I can use it as a
shield to protect me from an aggressor. The affordance is not simply a fixed
or physical property of the object or the environment because it is related
to the human agency that perceives what it offers. Different human agents
will perceive different agency in different objects although they may learn,
either by trial and error or from each other, what a specific object might
afford.
Gibson, however, in describing the material world in terms of what it
affords most adult human beings insists on treating it as constant and
unchanging; ‘An elongated object of moderate size and weight affords
wielding. If used to hit or strike, it is a club or hammer’ (1979: 133). But the
catch in this account is the ‘if used’ which makes affordance difficult to
operationalize in any definitional way. In general what an object affords is
how it can be used by a human but this leaves open the issue of variability
that Gibson does not confront; what I can wield as a hammer may not
afford such use by my rather frail mother. The adjustable wrench in a
toolbox may be finely engineered to be used for fitting on the hexagonal
heads of nuts or bolts in order to turn them … but it may also afford hitting
nails in. The wrench is also a hammer if I so use it, even though the owner
of the toolbox may be appalled at this ‘misuse’ of their wrench.
For Ian Hutchby (2001) it is the very resistance to cultural variability
that is appealing about the concept of affordance in understanding tech-
nology as against those theories that rely on a textual metaphor to describe
the social construction of technology (he uses Grint and Woolgar 1997 as
an exemplar of this tendency). Affordance suggests a real, physical world in
which objects are not reducible to texts that are always open to reinterpre-
tation: ‘different technologies possess different affordances, and these affor-
dances constrain the ways that they can possibly be “written” or “read”’
(Hutchby 2001: 447). The physical form of material objects constrains what
they can be used for – a wrench may be used as a hammer but it cannot be
used for sewing or boiling water in. Recent commentators like Hutchby and
Costall (1995, 1997) are attracted by the concept of affordance and have
attempted to ‘socialise’ it so that it can take account of cultural variability.
Hutchby does this first by attempting to distinguish between ‘social and
technological rules’ that delimit how an object is used and, second, by rec-
ognizing that affordance can be ‘designed into’ an artefact (Hutchby 2001:
449). The technological rules refer to what a human being can possibly do
with an object – use a wrench as a hammer but not as a needle – and the
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 75

social rules refer to moral constraints – I should not use someone else’s
wrench as a hammer. Alan Costall (1995, 1997) has also attempted to
‘socialize’ the concept of affordance by extending it to include ‘learning’
affordance from others, designing it in and specifying it by assigning mean-
ings and functions to objects in the social world. In this social version of
affordance there is a ‘morality of things’ (Costall 1995: 473) in which
people police each other’s uses of things – as when the owner of a wrench
says something like, ‘you’re not going to use it to hammer that nail are
you?’ when I ask if I can borrow it. In shifting the concept of affordance
from the physical to the social realm there is the risk of opening it up to
infinite interpretability – exactly what Hutchby fears from the social con-
structionists. Costall’s solution is to suggest that there is a cultural strategy
that specifies the prime purposes of objects in terms of their ‘canonical
affordance’ in which the name attached to an object defines the ‘meaning’
of an object and so what is should be used for (Costall 1997: 79). The
wrench carries its name because it’s canonical affordance is to wrench
things, such as pipes, nuts or bolts which it grips and affords a lever for
humans to turn or twist them with. Hammering is done with something
called a hammer which would be its canonical affordance. The assigning of
names to objects that are linked through the use of language to particular
practical uses is one way of asserting the consistency of their physical and
social functions. But this is some way from Gibson’s idea of affordance
which was precisely designed to specify human/object relations at the
material level in terms of the perception of physical properties. Costall’s
reformulation helpfully draws out the social relations with objects – design-
ing, making, adapting, learning to use, maintaining, policing and so on –
but then leaves ‘affordance’ as a fluid concept that is subject to interpreta-
tion and textualization which is precisely what Hutchby wanted to protect
Gibson’s concept from.
While Hutchby wants to use affordance to settle the physical properties
of an object in relation to human beings, it is impossible to get around
the reinterpretation of physical objects that occurs in their context of
design and use and which specifies their function and so what they actu-
ally afford.7 Costall’s introduction of the ‘morality of things’ moves the
discussion of the agency of objects a long way from the idea of affordance.
For Gibson it was simply a matter of perception – which he treated as a
material function of the human animal in which objects give out ‘stimulus
information’ (1979: 140). What he did not seem to recognize, despite his
‘ecological’ perspective, is that culture informs our perception, affecting the
way we see the world. As our organs of perception develop physically
within the body we learn how to use them from the cultural context of the
society around us. Other species also learn from their parents and other
members of their social group to use their bodies in certain ways. Some
other species have developed the capacity to use material objects in their
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76 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

environment to extend their agency; thrushes and sea otters using a stone
to break shells, chimps using leaves as shelters and grass stems as termite
gathering divides.8 But it is human beings that have become supreme at
creating material objects to meet their purposes; here, imagination and
mind create affordance at the immaterial level and continually mould and
remould the material world to achieve that effect. Neither the material
world nor the way that humans perceive it is sufficiently stable in the face
of cultural modification to be determinative of what things can do.

The actor-network

The concept of affordance is tempting because it seems to offer a way of

talking about the agency of objects and how they interact with humans at
the material level. At the end of the twentieth century it seemed to attract
a revival of interest outside the psychology of perception from commenta-
tors, including Hutchby and Costall, as a way of resisting the direction
taken by the sociology of technology over recent decades. Trevor Pinch and
Wiebe Bijker (1987) explain how the sociology of technology had devel-
oped from empirical and theoretical work in the sociology of science and in
the history of technology. Sociologists of science had traditionally restricted
themselves to studying the social context of science; institutional, political
and funding arrangements. However, by the 1980s they were arguing that
scientific discovery was not an internal matter of scientific practice leading
systematically to the truth but was a process of ‘social construction’
through which ‘truth’ was distinguished from ‘falsity’. The effect of a
number of substantive studies by historians and sociologists was profound,
as Pinch and Bijker put it: ‘scientific knowledge can be, and indeed has been
shown to be thoroughly socially constituted … there is nothing epistemo-
logically special about the nature of scientific knowledge’ (1987: 19). This
opening up of the practices of science as ways of understanding the mate-
rial world was linked to changes in the approach to the history of technol-
ogy that also began to explore the social contingencies that surround the
emergence of new technologies (e.g. Hughes 1983, 1987). In place of the
backwards reconstruction of technological successes that had been the stan-
dard approach, a new history of technology was interested in how social
relations shaped new technologies. This shift in the approach to science
and technology changed how social and technological relations were
understood and began to turn attention towards the objects in themselves.
The undermining of science as having the exclusive epistemological
warrant to study how humans dealt with the material world opened the
way for research that addressed the impact of social factors on emerging
technologies, both those that succeeded and those that failed. Pinch and
Bijker argued that it was not simply discoveries about the nature of things
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 77

that leads to technological development because social, political and eco-

nomic influences affect where and how human energies, ingenuity and
effort are invested and which discoveries are then seized upon and
approved. They called their programme for investigating technology in
society the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) programme and sug-
gested ‘not only that there is flexibility in how people think of or interpret
artefacts but also that there is flexibility in how artefacts are designed’ (1987:
40). They used the development of the bicycle to show how different types
of bicycle were developed, all of which worked but each of which was
subject to different cultural interpretations. It was the competition between
these interpretations rather than a rational technical progression that led to
the eclipse of the upright, exciting and dangerous ‘penny farthing’ bicycle
by the modern ‘safety’ bicycle with two wheels of the same size and pedals
driving through a chain and gear mechanism. The different interpretations
were not generated simply in the minds of engineers or technologists but
came from users and commentators, such as those writing in newspapers
and magazines. The issues of safety and comfort interacted with those of
speed and excitement, gender and age to create a range of responses to dif-
ferent bicycle designs. The language that Pinch and Bijker used to describe
the technological development of the bicycle (interpretive flexibility,
rhetorical closure, redefinition of the problem) was more reminiscent of the
analysis of a narrative than of practical, technological decisions.
If Pinch and Bijker summarized a shift towards recognizing the impor-
tance of interpretation in socially constructing the path of technological
development, Thomas Hughes (1983, 1987) pointed to the interconnected-
ness of causal processes impacting together as systems. Both these shifts
disturbed the rational, sequential, progressive model of technology as a
linear sequence of actions that solved problems to arrive at a final solution.
Hughes, writing about electricity and the light bulb from a historical per-
spective, pointed out the systemic and interdependent relationship
between the light bulb and the distribution of electricity; for one to be
developed it needed the other. Both are aspects of the same system and all
the technological problems across the system need to be solved before any
part of the system can be said to function. Instead of the metaphors of nar-
rative analysis, Hughes introduced the military phrase ‘reverse salient’ to
refer to the interruptions in smooth technological progress that often have
ramifications that are not simply solved by redesign since other parts of the
system are always implicated. What works for one part of the system does
not necessarily work for another part and ‘reverse salients are components
in the system that have fallen behind or are out of phase with the others’
(1987: 73). Hughes’s systems include both artefacts and humans so that in
an electricity distribution system, for example, the ‘load-dispatching center
with its communication and control artifacts’ switches a system of other
objects such as turbines, and generators but is also ‘part of a hierarchical
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78 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

control system involving the management structure of the utility’ (1987:

54). The utility itself will involve industrial scientists, engineers, managers,
and workers who are integrated into a larger social system of entrepreneurs,
businesses, advertisers, investors, government departments and consumers
that is in turn integrated into the material system of the various intercon-
nected pieces of equipment. Any one of these human or technical sub-
systems may generate a reverse salient and trying to remove it is almost
certain to affect every other part of the system.
The impact of the social construction of technology thesis, allied with
Hughes’s approach to technology as both physical and social system, was to
alter the relationship between sociology and technology that I discussed in
Chapter 3. The empirical studies in the history and sociology of science
began to offer support for the idea that technology is always cultural and
social and thus irreducible to its internal material features, which had been
a feature of the critiques of technology by Mumford, Heidegger, Marcuse
and Ellul. Instead of technology being something counterposed to society
that might determine it or be more or less ‘autonomous’, the social studies
of technology that emerged in the late 1980s began to show how society
and technology are integrated and mutually determining. A number of
edited collections brought together historians and social scientists inter-
ested in rethinking technology to address its political, moral and social
effects and influences in a radically new way (MacKenzie and Wajcman
1985; Callon et al. 1986; Bijker et al. 1987; Law 1991; Bijker and Law 1992).
This rethinking of society and technology emphasized how, far from being
determined by technology, society was a major force in shaping technology.
This displaced both the model of technology as the invention of individual
minds blessed with creativity and imagination and the model of techno-
logical knowledge as an adjunct to scientific knowledge about the material
world in which everything was there, waiting to be discovered like a lost
continent or the structure of DNA.
From within the new social studies of science a distinctive version
emerged that was particularly associated with the French authors Bruno
Latour, Michelle Callon and Madeleine Akrich and came to be known as
‘Actor-Network Theory’ or ANT. These authors took the themes of Hughes’s
systems and Pinch and Bijker’s SCOT approach but shifted the emphasis
towards the material artefacts to suggest that their agency was often as
potent in a network of actors as that of the human participants. The
‘actants’ or ‘non-humans’ that feature in ANT studies include living organ-
isms (microbes – Latour 1988a; scallops – Callon 1986b) as well as physical
objects (electric cars – Callon 1986a; transit systems – Latour 1996; lighting
systems – Akrich 1992; aircraft – Law and Callon 1992). The non-humans
are intermingled with humans to form a network so, for example, in
Callon’s study of the attempt to develop an electric car in 1970s’ France,
there are ‘accumulators, fuel cells, electrodes, electrons, catalysts and elec-
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 79

trolytes’ in addition to consumers, companies and ministries (1986a: 22).

Sometimes the non-humans appear to display intention – Michel Callon
writes that the scallops in St. Brieuc bay ‘must first be willing to anchor
themselves’ (1986b: 211) – but this can only amount to saying that within
the network the non-humans act as if they had intention. What is innova-
tive in ANT is recognizing that both humans and non-humans in the
network can resist or enhance technological development and the interplay
between one and the other produces the effects of what Hughes calls
‘reverse salients’. Social forces such as the presence – or lack – of cash or
political enthusiasm, interplay with technical forces such as the way that
fuel cells or electrolytes work as hoped – or not – to create the technology
… or not. The network may be understood as ultimately infinite since tech-
nologies interplay with the material world and social actors participate in
various complex relations that may be cultural or political at, finally, a
global level (Law and Callon 1992). However, ANT has a way of dealing
with the potentially infinite proliferation of actors and networks; it ‘black-
boxes’ sub-networks that appear, or are presented, as a single entity within
a particular network (Callon et al. 1986: xvi; Latour 1999: 304).
There are two departures in ANT from both the traditional social and
historical study of technology and the ‘systems’ and SCOT approaches of
Hughes, Pinch and Bijker discussed above. In ANT, the non-humans are
treated as if they had autonomous agency; they appear to act as if they exer-
cised will or intention. For example, in an illustration that Latour draws on
a number of times, a mechanical door-closer, sometimes referred to as a
‘groom’, is shown to be treated as if it were a human actor by human actors
in the setting (1988b, 1992a). Latour tells us about a ‘small written notice:
“The Groom is On Strike, For God’s Sake, Keep The Door Closed”’ that was
posted on the door of a room in which a meeting was taking place (1992a:
227). The door provided a way of allowing humans to pass through walls
and yet close the gap behind them and the ‘groom’ or door closer substi-
tuted for humans having to remember and expend effort to close the door.
With the door closed, noise and drafts could be kept out and those inside
can work in peace; the ‘groom’ accepted the ‘delegation’ of the task of shut-
ting the door (‘every time you want to know what a non-human does,
simply imagine what other humans or non-humans would have to do were
this character not present’, Latour 1992: 229). The door could be closed by
whoever goes through it or a particular human could be assigned to the task
of being doorman to open and close it for others and Latour is able to point
out that non-humans in this way enter into human relations of power. To
assign someone the task of being doorman is to exert power over them and
to assign the task to a mechanical door closer is for it to exert power over
those using the door. This is a physical power that may not be easy for the
weak – children, frail people or those in wheelchairs – to overcome but it
ensures that after all who enter, the door is kept closed. Latour and Akrich
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80 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

call this process by which the artefact works back on humans ‘prescription’
because it involves moral as well as physical effects; doors with ‘grooms’
shall be kept closed (1992).
The example nicely illustrates how humans and non-humans are inter-
twined in a set of relations that amount to a network in which it is difficult
to identify precisely where the agency for actions lies. Latour introduces the
idea of non-humans substituting for humans which is a characteristic
feature of much technology, especially that which seems to operate
autonomously or independently of a human operator. He also raises the
issues of power and morality, showing that material objects become vehicles
of social rules that are applied to humans and intervene in power relation-
ships between people. People have to learn to act in accordance with rules
and in accordance with the way that non-humans operate – people have to
learn to get through the door smartly or the door closer will catch them. It
is, Latour argues, an increase in the population of non-humans that
increases the ‘sum of morality’ (1992: 232) and comprises the ‘hidden and
despised social masses’ (1992: 227) that sociologists have failed to identify
in the modern world. The metaphor that Latour and his ANT colleagues fre-
quently use to describe how non-humans are caught up in society is that of
‘inscription’; the actions that have moral effects in our culture are inscribed
within the material objects that are produced in our culture. Latour is keen
on how objects police behaviour: road signs, blocks to prevent parking on
sidewalks, seatbelts and, one of his favourite examples, the ‘sleeping
policeman’ (1992: 244; 1999: 188). The traffic authorities build the speed
bump to slow down cars and thereby inscribe within it the moral injunction
that might be expressed by a real policeman or in a road sign. The material
object of the speed bump, road sign or speed camera ‘stands in for an actor
and creates an asymmetry between absent makers and occasional users’
(1999: 189). Moral authority is delegated to the materiality of the speed
bump which enforces it physically by jarring the bodies of drivers and dam-
aging their cars if they don’t slow down. The delegated moral authority of
speed cameras is sometimes transposed into legal action while interactive
speed signs simply remind the driver of their moral duty.
Despite Hutchby’s complaints about the use of the textual metaphor in
ANT, it does allow for the variability of interpretation of material objects
which often depends on where the interpreter is in the network. Objects are
reinterpreted and rendered as ‘texts’ in a variety of ways including reports,
diagrams, plans and of course their material instantiation – Latour’s (1996)
rather long-winded account of the failed Aramis urban transport system
demonstrates the variety of textual forms and interpretations that emerged
in the network. ANT incorporates both Hughes’s important recognition
that the material technologies of late modernity are increasingly intercon-
nected as systems and it allows for a ‘social construction’ of technology that
breaks from the traditional linear account of rational progress. And it goes
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 81

further by disturbing the separation that Hughes maintains between those

systems that are material and those that are social by suggesting that deter-
mination of technological change does not lie in its social dimensions but
may come from either both material or social entities. The effect of these
two modifications to the new programme in the social approach to tech-
nology set out by Pinch and Bijker (1987) is to attribute a level of agency to
the material objects in technological networks that had been more or less
absent before. This agency can be expressed as a moral quality that feeds
back on human actors through ‘prescriptions’ so that it is never clear pre-
cisely where the moral force originates; is it in human decisions or is it in
the serendipitous quality of artefacts? But what ANT fails to do is to study
closely the interaction or the lived relationship between human beings and
material objects. The empirical work is by and large lacking the detail and
precision of the more traditional social studies of technology and many of
the textual productions and interpretations are those of the sociologist
rather than the actors. It is noticeable that there are very few accounts of
the perceptual or tactile interaction between humans and objects in the
network, few detailed field observations, photographs or use of video to
study the process of the network that would allow the material objects to
have a presence in the accounts.9 What are found in the published studies,
are textual forms that are produced sometimes by the human participants
– engineers’ reports, publicity statements, transcripts of discussions, sum-
matory diagrams – but often by the sociologist. These can be excitingly
irreverent, entertainingly laden with irony and wit and full of interesting
conceptual moves – but these textual devices keep the sociologist in control
of the play of interpretations and keep the reader at a safe distance from the
lived workings of the network.

Conclusion

Elsewhere (Dant 2004) I have discussed Gibson’s affordances and actor

network theory in the context of considering how useful they are in under-
standing the assemblage of a human driver and a motor car that I have
called the ‘driver-car’. As against Gibson’s account of driving in which it is
the driver’s perception that is paramount, ANT does encourage us to recog-
nize that the car and its material form interact with the driver to produce a
network in which moral authority is exchanged between the two. Latour
(1992a) discusses how the integration of seatbelts with the car ignition or a
sound alarm is fine tuned to make the exertion of moral authority over the
driver acceptable; if it is too irritating it will be turned off or removed. In
another classic problem of the dispersal of moral responsibility between the
agency of humans and non-humans, Latour asks whether it is guns or
people who kill: ‘Which of them, then, the gun or the citizen, is the actor
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82 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

in this situation? Someone else (a citizen-gun, a gun-citizen)’ (1999: 179). As

Latour points out, the human agent is transformed by the possession of the
gun, but the gun is also transformed by being in the hand of someone
willing to use it. The possible actions of both human and non-human are
transformed by their combination into an assemblage but the difference
between humans and non-humans is left unclear. For example, with the
citizen-gun, Latour asserts: ‘Purposeful action and intentionality may not
be properties of objects, but they are not properties of humans either’ and
suggests that it is only corporate bodies that can bear the burden of inten-
tionality; individual decisions are always made in a legitimating social
context (1999: 192–3).10
To say that a gun affords killing is to say very little since it also affords
not killing but this does not stop Hutchby from claiming that the material
level of affordance is paramount: ‘the fact that a bullet fired from a gun has
effects on flesh and bone that are intrinsic to the gun and the bullet …
cannot be altered by social construction’ (2001: 446). Indeed, once the
bullet has left the gun, we could say that it affords terrible injury or death
to any animal in its path but while the bullet remains within the gun its
affordance is in abeyance; it may prove a very effective and safe deterrent
against an armed criminal. Alfred Gell has also commented on the same
issue of responsibility in discussing weapons and those who use them. He
ties the ‘secondary agency’ in the gun and the bullet to the ‘primary
agency’ of whoever uses it so that it is clear that the soldier has the respon-
sibility for a resulting death. But, as he puts it ‘The soldier’s weapons are
parts of him which make him what he is’ (Gell 1998: 20–1). The soldier may
carry the moral responsibility but the thing enables the formation of an
assemblage that has certain capabilities and this fits with Warnier’s praxeo-
logical account of the carrier of a gun as becoming ‘fused with his material
culture’ in everyday life (2001: 21 – see Chapter 1).
In an important sense all these perspectives are pertinent to under-
standing how materiality becomes entwined with sociality and no one per-
spective is paramount. Although his analysis is mostly concerned with the
emotional life of the individual, Tisseron reminds us that the interactions
between individuals and objects are not simply practical but are the way
that the emotional core of our beings is connected to the culture beyond
us. Alfred Gell shows how objects acquire agency that is not reducible to
their symbolic form and alerts us to how person-hood can be distributed
through material objects. The concept of affordance is ultimately unsatisfy-
ing because it equivocates about the flexibility of materiality in the light of
culture but it does make us look closely at the materiality of objects and
how they are fitted into human action. ANT reminds us of the complexity
of relations between humans and artefacts so that we can neither be sure
where responsibility or cause originates nor that sociality emerges through
the interaction between the two. But ANT is rather too concerned with the
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AGENCY, AFFORDANCE AND ACTOR-NETWORKS 83

transient nature of textual forms and pays little attention to the material
level of how human beings engage with things. Instead of seeing materiality
as being juxtaposed to society, it needs to be seen as an expression of both
individuality and society. It is ultimately a question of existence; the mate-
rial world is not distinct from the social world and nor can material entities
be treated as in any simple way distinct from human ones. In the next
chapter I will consider how the being-in-the-world that is human and social
is always and already cast in relation to the materiality of that world.
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5 Being-with materiality

Introduction

Writing about technology and society has, as we saw in Chapter 3, largely

taken the problems and issues to be of a wholly social nature, usually treat-
ing the material world of technology as somehow in opposition to the
social world of people. The main focus of those debates is on the political
realm and concerns the gross impacts of technology on society in the flow
of history. However, the debate about whether the social world shapes tech-
nology or whether technology shapes the social world actually pays very
little attention to the interface between people and their material world.
Recent debates about the material world have begun to focus more closely
on this interface by looking at the distribution of agency between people
and things which I discussed in Chapter 4. In the present chapter I want to
take that focus closer still by thinking about the interrelationship between
society as the lived-in bodies of people and the material world as the enti-
ties that they encounter. It is this interaction between people as material
bodies and things as material bodies that is the stuff of technology and the
material culture of a society. Because it is so close to the ordinary flow of
life, it is easy to take for granted and treat as something about which we
already know because it is so familiar. And yet it is in this taking for granted
of our material, embodied relationships with things that we can so easily
overlook the way that our material culture gives substance to the society we
live in.
To begin to look closer at this embodied, material relationship between
people and things I want to go back, both historically and to the simplest
and most basic aspects of the materiality of social action, to recover the
phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, whose later critique of technology
was discussed in Chapter 3, and the distinctive account of perception and
embodiment to be found in the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This
philosophically informed perspective will lay the groundwork for the study
of material interaction in Chapter 6.
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 85

Being with objects

It is not the intention here to provide a detailed account of Heidegger’s

early philosophy either in general or as it relates to the material world (see
Ihde 1990; Dreyfus 1991). Instead I will do considerable violence to the
coherence of Heidegger’s monumental Being and Time (1962) by dragging
some of his concepts and remarks from the text to help in understanding
how human beings relate to objects.

Dealing with things

To proceed with his inquiry into the everydayness of Being-in-the-world,
Heidegger asks what the entities within the world are and what their char-
acteristics as Being are, and how they constitute the ‘environment’ of
Dasein (1962: 93–95).1 His answer is that it is through our ‘dealings’ with
the things in the world in which we are immersed in everyday life that they
have ontological significance for us. Environment for Heidegger is not just
there, it does not have its own intrinsic qualities, but is oriented to the con-
cerns of the being who is dealing with it: ‘The kind of dealing which is
closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but
rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use;
and this has its own kind of “knowledge” ’ (Heidegger 1962: 95).
‘Concern’ (Besorgen) is, as always with Heidegger, a very specific word
which does not translate directly; it is one of the ways of being-in-the-world
for Dasein, with a more practical and less emotional connotation than the
English word, and refers to actions including producing something, looking
after something or making use of something.2 Whereas we might begin by
listing or naming the things we could see in our environment, Heidegger
begins by pointing to our lived relationship with them. He avoids a simple
theoretical account and suggests that how the material world exists for us
is constituted in our practical actions and how we make use of the things
around us. Rather than seeing things as having intrinsic value, he sees them
as significant for Dasein through how they are incorporated into everyday
activities as Zeug – usually translated as ‘equipment’ but more analogous to
‘stuff’, ‘gear’ or ‘implements’, that is, things that are used for a purpose and
are handled.
In thinking about the material world of a garage technician, for
example, we can imagine that his environment is taken for granted in that
it is familiar and unremarkable.3 For an outsider the large space is quite
remarkable with its high ambient noise levels (radio, amplified telephone
bells, engine noises, power tools, etc.); its mixture of natural light, fluores-
cent light and dark spaces; its variety of hard surfaces of brick and metal;
and its fullness with objects that are specific to the environment (tools and
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86 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

toolboxes of various sizes and equipment such as hydraulic lifts). But for
those who spend their working week in such a space, its structural order is
created by what they do in the space and how they take up things to work
with, how they move through the space and how things are placed relative
to each other. As Heidegger puts it, the characteristics of ‘thinghood’ and
‘reality’ are ‘substantiality, materiality, extendedness, side-by-sideness, and
so forth’ (1962: 96). The things in the environment are constituted through
how they fit into the process of what the technician does: ‘Equipment is
essentially “something in order to…”. A totality is constituted by various
ways of the “in-order-to”, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability,
manipulability’ (Heidegger 1962: 97). For Heidegger, ‘equipmentality’ is
never singular; one piece of equipment is always related to other equipment
and this is always the case in garages where one tool is selected from an
extensive range of possible tools.
It is precisely in terms of a hand tool, a hammer, that Heidegger
famously explains how equipment is incorporated into actions:

Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its

own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in
such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as
an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such
even in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowl-
edge about the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appro-
priated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more
suitable.
(Heidegger 1962: 98)

This passage extends the distinction that Heidegger makes between the
material object as a Thing and its significance as equipment to human
beings. But there are three other aspects that he is pointing out here that I
would like to emphasize. First, he is pointing out that the material world is
of interest to Dasein in terms of acting in the world. This is an embodied
and material action which happens in time; the state of concrete, material
things are altered through Dasein’s action and equipment is incorporated
into that action. Second, he is pointing to the knowledge that is part of this
process of action; Dasein knows what a hammer can do and that is part of
its equipmentality. However, that knowledge is embodied rather than
brought to consciousness as a thought or an idea – it is disclosed to Dasein
as for use in this type of action. Third, there is a meeting of Dasein and the
equipmentality of the hammer in the action that appropriates it and uses it
as something which ‘could not possibly be more suitable’. Even if it is a suc-
cessful appropriation, it is not predetermined; the head of the hammer
might have fallen off at the first blow, the hammer might be too small for
what it is to hit. The type of knowledge involved here is not of the object
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 87

but in the action; ‘hammering’ is not an intrinsic property either of Dasein

or of the object but are aspects of the human/object relation that are essen-
tial to being-in-the-world and are only fully realized in an active relation-
ship between the material object and the embodied being that is Dasein.

Readiness-to-hand
Equipment has its own form of being that is not determined by its
designed-in or its physical properties. For Heidegger, the things in the world
are available to Dasein as equipment through their ‘readiness-to-hand’
which both draws attention to their physical proximity to the human body
and to their significance as usable with that body for action.4 With
Heidegger’s hammer it is the ‘hammering itself that uncovers the specific
“manipulability” of the hammer’ and so reveals the being of the hammer
as equipment that he calls ‘readiness-to-hand’ (1962: 98). Just looking at
something, even looking at things ‘theoretically’, is not the same as
‘dealing’ with them. In a common-sense mode, when we turn our attention
to the world and the things in it, we apprehend it as a series of things in
themselves with properties of colour, shape, size, and so on. This is what
Heidegger refers to as ‘presence-at-hand’ but his phenomenology of Being
points out that this is a second-order appropriation of the world that stands
back to think about it rather than living in it.5 That thinking, he says, is
founded on a prior appropriation of the world as ‘ready-to-hand’ in which
things are taken up in use and activity: ‘To lay bare what is just “present-at-
hand” and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-
hand in our concern’ (Heidegger 1962: 101).
The sociologist in a garage takes up a reflexive mode, trying to grasp it
as present-at-hand, looking at a spanner and imagining how it might be
applied to a particular nut.6 But the mechanic simply takes up the spanner
or puts together the socket set without imagining or theorizing how it is to
be used, demonstrating that this is equipment that is ready-to-hand: ‘The
ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all … The peculiarity of what
is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness to hand, it must, as it
were, withdraw in order to be ready to hand quite authentically’ (Heidegger
1962: 99). In choosing a tool technicians did not measure the nut to be
worked on and rarely looked at the size markings on a socket or a spanner.
Their embodied knowledge of the task in hand enabled them to choose the
appropriate type of socket, extension, lever or power driver and the one they
needed usually ‘withdrew’ from those around it. Heidegger’s phrase, ‘ready-
to-hand’ reminds us that the orientation of material things in the world to
Dasein is embodied and engaged; it is through touch, through manipulability,
through bringing them into the body, as into the hand, or at least into
contact with the body, that they break free from the environment and have
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88 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

relevance as a distinct entity. To be available as ready-to-hand, things are

identified through what Heidegger calls ‘circumspection’ – a form of sight
that includes both ‘looking around’ and ‘in order to’. Here Heidegger’s
jargon reminds us of the unremarkable way in which sight and touch are
part of each other and both are part of action that realizes Being in the
world. Rather than a distinctive action of looking, a looking that is an
action complete in itself, ‘circumspection’ is that form of sight which is part
of the flow of a familiar action. Circumspection is a bodily capacity to
orient the material form of the body – including its brain – to other mate-
rial entities that may be partly achieved through a movement of the whole
body and even of the hands rather than through some specific action of the
eyes or the organs of sight. On a number of occasions in our corpus of data
we see technicians looking through boxes of tools or collections of parts
that have been removed and set out on the floor. The mechanic moves his
body, his head and the tools or parts as he looks through them in a very
clear form of ‘circumspection’ in that he is trying to draw into his hand –
quite literally – the appropriate object for his next task.7
It is concern with things that organizes circumspection but sometimes
what is needed for the task in hand is not available; it may be broken or
simply missing. Such things identify themselves with a quality of ‘unreadi-
ness-to-hand’ as they become conspicuous and stand in the way of the
work proceeding.8 Now for Heidegger this makes both the thing and the
task for which it was needed become explicit, so he says that the context of
equipment is ‘lit up’ and ‘the world announces itself’ when something is
unready-to-hand (1962: 105). As the flow of work is interrupted, the task
becomes something different and the way that the world of things and
activities is appropriated by the person becomes ‘thematic’, that is, it is
the thing in-itself that becomes of concern as its brokenness or absence
has to be dealt with. It is at the point when something goes wrong that
the human has to stand back in a reflective mode and consider what things
are, that the world becomes present-at-hand and objects take on qualities
as things in themselves. So what happens when the missing tool or a
replacement part is found? Heidegger explains that Dasein inhabits the
world spatially, and things are brought into readiness-at-hand by their
movement in space that he calls ‘de-severance’ [Ent-fernung] or ‘abolishing
their remoteness’.9 This is not to do with objective, physical space but to do
with drawing the thing into the current action: ‘for the most part, de-sev-
ering is a circumspective bringing-close – bringing something close by, in
the sense of procuring it, putting it in readiness, having it to hand’
(Heidegger 1962: 139–40). Then the work can proceed.
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Merleau-Ponty

Although Heidegger’s investigation of Being is concerned with far more

than the few concepts I have extracted from it, it is significant that he
begins his phenomenology by trying to grasp the relationship of human
being to the material environment and the things within it. It is clear that
he sees this relationship as embodied from the start; it is precisely not with
conceptual thought or knowledge that our engagement with the world
around us begins. However, Heidegger has very little to say about the phys-
icality of embodied being and how this shapes our relations with the mate-
rial world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty responds precisely to this theme in his
major work, Phenomenology of Perception (1962), which attempts to address
the link between the ‘in-itself’ of being-in-the-world and the being-for-itself
of conscious reflection, by analysing phenomenologically the relationship
between the inside and the outside of the body.10
Just as Heidegger’s ontology begins by stressing the continuity between
what we can recognize as human being and its material environment
through its ordinary action, Merleau-Ponty stresses the integration between
the exterior world that is made available to perception and the interiority
of human being. In doing so he is going against two strands of scientific
thought which had presented very different perspectives on human engage-
ment with the world. On the one hand was the ‘behaviourist’ who saw the
body as a mechanistic system that responded to stimuli with autonomic
responses – a system that could be explained in terms of functionalist
rationality. On the other was the ‘mentalist’ who saw the body as a system
driven by a brain processing information received through the senses
before deciding how to act. Both perspectives set apart human being and
the world it inhabits as entities in themselves – ‘There was no longer
any real for-itself other than the thought of the scientist which perceives
the system and which alone ceases to occupy any place in it. Thus, while
the living body became an exterior without interior, subjectivity became
interior without exterior, an impartial spectator’ (1962: 56). Merleau-Ponty
was in good company in this critique of both behaviourism and psycholo-
gism; the American traditions of symbolic interactionism and pragmatism
(particularly the writing of Mead 1962, 1980) and the European ordinary
language tradition of philosophy are also deeply critical of both these
‘scientistic’ approaches to understanding human being. But what is dis-
tinctive about Merleau-Ponty’s response to the two scientistic traditions is
his focus on the materiality of the body; questions of consciousness, of self,
of mind and of being cannot be addressed independently of the embodied
form they take.
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90 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Form
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the body as an integrated whole so that ‘sub-
systems’ such as perceptual senses, the motor system or cognition cannot
be considered as independent and linked by mechanical connections. This
holistic approach owes much to Gestalt psychology, so he argues that what
affects one part of the body’s being interacts with all other parts which
together constitute a form: ‘there is a form whenever the properties of a
system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its
parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while main-
taining the same relationship among themselves’ (Merleau-Ponty 1983:
47). The idea of the form is that the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts and is counterposed to a functionalist or anatomical perspective that
breaks down the whole into sub-systems but Merleau-Ponty is going further
in suggesting that the structure of behaviour takes on the quality of a form;
it is not mind that directs body or body which acts mindlessly. Much of
what Merleau-Ponty has to say about the structure of behaviour could be
applied equally to other animals as to human beings – all animals, and no
doubt many other higher organisms, respond to the world as a form that
produces patterned behaviour. My cat will look at the chair and then at the
radiator and appear to ‘decide’ (I have no idea what mental process are
involved) where to sit. Whether the radiator is on, whether the chair is
warm from having been sat in, will affect the resulting action but not in a
simple determinative way that could be exactly predicted. Once the ‘deci-
sion’ is made, the cat’s motor processes of getting to the spot and getting
comfortable also follow a form or pattern but are never precisely repeats of
what she did last time.
This sort of structured behaviour we share with cats but Merleau-Ponty
distinguishes a type of behaviour that we do not share with animals but
which is nonetheless structured in a remarkably similar way.11 This is the
symbolic interpretation of signs. Animals respond to signs (the fridge door
works for my cat) but not symbols; for Merleau-Ponty one way that this dis-
tinction is realized is that a symbol for a human being becomes the ‘proper
theme of an activity which tends to express it’ (1983: 120). He gives the
example of reading music to play an instrument in which there is a direct
correlation between a symbol (a musical note) and a motor action. The
experienced musician simply plays the music without translating individual
notes into particular actions but this is not simply a subconscious mechan-
ical response because the player is aware of the form and will usually notice
a transcription error as a deviation from it. Indeed, the same sorts of actions
lie behind an interpretation of the written music and the player who knows
how to play an instrument could even construct melodies by ‘improvising’
without the symbols being present at all. This capacity to improvise can also
be independent of the instrument so that a musician (Merleau-Ponty uses
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 91

the example of an organist) can play on an instrument they have never

encountered before. Provided that it has the form of an instrument they are
familiar with, the improviser can produce music that has never been played
before: ‘The character of the melody, the graphic configuration of the
musical text and the unfolding of the gestures participate in a single struc-
ture, have in common a single nucleus of signification’ (Merleau-Ponty
1983: 121). What ‘music’ is cannot be reduced to any one of these three
interconnected systems – melody, musical text, bodily gesture – and they
share a single structure, a single ‘nucleus of signification’.
In the garage we saw precisely this human capacity as the technicians
worked on makes and models of cars that they had not seen before with
considerable confidence. The braking systems, the steering mechanisms,
exhaust pipe and the fuel systems, for example, are much the same on most
cars and can be treated as part of a form. They may be of different sizes and
types of materials and they may not be fitted in precisely the same way –
the number and location of bolts may vary, for example. But nonetheless,
cleaning brakes, replacing exhaust pipes, and so on are routine tasks which
the technicians we observed were happy to carry out on just about any
vehicle they were presented with. With an unusual vehicle, much like
Merleau-Ponty’s organist, they would inspect it briefly before deciding
whether or not they could proceed as usual. In the main, technicians used
the ‘gestures’ that they knew were effective in proceeding with a task, much
as we can imagine that an organist would have a number of standard tunes
‘at their fingertips’ and not require any sheet music or improvisatory skills.
But there were occasions when we saw technicians resorting to the sheet
music of their skill; the manuals that gave measurement tolerances, torque
settings and diagrams showing the arrangement and interconnection of com-
ponents and fixings. There were also many occasions when things were not
exactly as expected and they had to ‘improvise’, or feel their way through the
task. On these sorts of occasions they would often ask colleagues for advice
and in many instances in the data we can see brief consultations during
which they are attempting to grasp the form – both material and symbolic –
of the task in hand.

Embodiment
Our bodies are material entities but are, for us, not quite like any other
thing. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the body is ‘that by which there are
objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and
touches’ (1962: 92). The reason why I cannot observe my body in the same
way as I can observe other things is because it is my body that I use to take
up a perspective: to look from this angle, to redirect my gaze, to stand back,
to move closer. And the same happens when I look in the mirror; seen in
the mirror, my body ‘never stops following my intentions like their
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92 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

shadow’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 91). Of course the parts of the body can be
viewed as objects – so I can look at my hands and turn them over much as
I might any other manipulable object – but the body as a whole cannot be
seen in this way. The body in the mirror is no more than a simulacrum that
‘refers me back to an original of the body which is not there among things,
but in my own province, on this side of all things seen’ (Merleau-Ponty
1962: 92).
It is our body that situates all other objects in space and time and pro-
vides us with a perspective through which we can judge the relative posi-
tion of other objects. Touch as well as sight are the means through which I
make contact with the outside world and even contact with myself; my
right hand can touch my left. For Merleau-Ponty the capacity to touch is an
orientation rather than simply a response of nerves in the skin so I can put
my hands together and they can alternate the roles of touching and being
touched. In the same way, pain in an extremity is not felt as the source of
pain to some inner being, the pain is felt in the locality in which it is. And
again, the awareness of movement in my body is not of something being
moved, as might be the case if I were to move an object, but is awareness of
me moving – as he says ‘I have no need to look for it, it is already with me
– I do not need to lead it towards the movement’s completion, it is in
contact with it from the start and propels itself towards that end’ (Merleau-
Ponty 1962: 94).
The sense of being a body that is not divided into parts or organs, that
is complete with all its parts interior to itself and therefore always distin-
guishable from objects which are outside, is what is involved in having a
‘corporeal schema’ or ‘body image’. The body image is that part of being
that means we always know where we are; we can feel the space that we
inhabit in the world. For Merleau-Ponty, body image or body cenethesis12
is not a construct that is the product of sensory information, of growing
awareness, or cumulative experience but is in some way anterior to the
sensori-motor unity of the body. It is only through the completeness of the
body image, the sense of being in this body, that I can have awareness of
what is exterior to it. Body image is then to do with the spatiality of situa-
tion rather than position (‘where am I?’, not ‘where is it?’) and yet it can be
dynamic as when my body takes up a situation in relation to other objects
and my body image is oriented to them according to its actions. In this
sense Merleau-Ponty describes the body as being a ‘third term’ in the figure-
background structure; the body faces ‘figures’ which stand in front of it and
‘backgrounds’ is what is beyond them. It is from the situation of the body
in space that all other orientations follow and make sense: top and bottom,
right and left, in front and behind.
The concept of embodiment that Merleau-Ponty establishes is that of a
phenomenal body that can be contrasted with a scientifically apprehended
body. The latter will have a determinate structure, a geometrical form,
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 93

specifiable qualities and limitations and could be summarized by a series of

measurements. But the phenomenal body is present to us as beings-in-the-
world as something not only involved in a concrete setting, in relation to a
situation and to tasks but also ‘open to those verbal and imaginary situa-
tions which he can choose for himself or which may be suggested to him’
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 108). The phenomenal body can then reckon with
the possible and entertain possible actions as extending from the current
situation and tasks.

Field
For us our bodies are permanent, always present and the means through
which a phenomenal field is apparent to us – and in that sense our body
cannot be a part of that phenomenal field. Merleau-Ponty argues that the
only way to approach the relationship between human being and other
beings in the world is through understanding the ‘phenomenal field’ that
emerges through lived experience to produce the system ‘self–others–
things’. As against classical, objective science this involves

[a] return to the world of actual experience which is prior to the

objective world, since it is in it that we shall be able to grasp the
theoretical basis no less than the limits of that objective world,
restore things to their concrete physiognomy, to organisms their
individual ways of dealing with the world, and to subjectivity its
inherence in history.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 57)

The language of a science, such as the measurements of ergonomics, will

produce a very limited account, fixed like a snapshot, whereas Merleau-
Ponty’s concept of the ‘phenomenal field’ relocates us in the position of the
perceiving, experiencing being that apprehends the material and social
world as it acts within it. Lived experience involves the process of time so
that ‘field’ always has the character of an incomplete space that evolves.
Things are not discrete entities, although they may well be distinct beings,
because they always exist in relationship with each other and in relation to
the perceiving being. This ‘gestalt’ of relationships is what the ‘phenome-
nal field’ is; a patterning of the experienced world that is partly material but
not exclusively so. Things and other beings are related to each other and to
the perceiving being, through their associations and connections both in
the present and in the past. The ‘phenomenal field’ of garage technician
might include other technicians, customers and administrative staff, but it
always includes the material objects (cars, tools, equipment) and the mate-
rial environment (sounds, smells, textures, spaces). It will also contain
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94 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

traces of his past experiences of that space: paths taken, work done, talk
uttered and tools used that give it meaning and a temporal depth.
Much of the interaction within the field will be between human beings
and material objects but there are also social interactions between techni-
cians, customers, foremen, managers, and so on. For a given technician
their phenomenal field, for long periods of time, will be the underneath or
the inside spaces of a car and various zones nearby (workbench, toolbox,
array of parts) – the field is not, however, an ‘inner world’ or a mental fact
but a lived-in space. The objective sciences of physics and engineering have
much to say about the causes of wear or damage to a car that could be
linked to the appropriate repair. But such accounts are of limited use in
understanding what the car technician actually does, or how they grasp the
situation in their phenomenal field and develop a course of action. How
they perceive a task is determined not by scientific principles but by how
they usually carry out their work in that particular field. And while their
normal courses of action may have been influenced by scientific principles,
it is their routine way of responding to objects and events within the field
that will shape how their work proceeds.

Perception
The ‘mentalist’ psychologist tries to identify cognitive processes that
respond to information received from the senses to direct attention, attrib-
ute meaning and make judgements. But Merleau-Ponty argues that these
cannot be distinguished as mental events that happen independently from
perception because they are entailed in the very process of perceiving. Every
perception involves attention being directed towards something, ‘sense’
being made of it and a judgement arrived at, at least to distinguish one
thing from another.13 Perception is not, for example, separate from the
body’s motor system; what the eyes see is not simply what is put in front of
them but is connected to the way that the eyes, head and body move. It is
in turn linked to what is stored in memory and what the person’s inten-
tions are so that ‘the organism contributes to the constitution of the form’
of a perception or an action (1983: 13).
If we think of an ordinary activity like putting on a pair of shoes, what
Merleau-Ponty is suggesting, is that we do not apprehend the shoe as a set
of individual stimuli – seeing each shoe, seeing the hole for the foot, seeing
the laces, feeling each of these components first with hands and then toes
and so on. What we ‘see’ (with our eyes and our hands and feet through
which we complexly combine perceptual information) is our shoes and
what we ‘do’ is put them on. We grasp the shoes as a form and our bodily
action follows a pattern that corresponds to that form, so putting shoes on
is something we can do more or less without thinking while perceptions
and actions fit the form. This example shows that consciousness is only
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 95

tangentially involved in the process and yet we would easily recognize that
putting on the shoes is an intentional act, one which accords with our
being-in-the-world and is not pre-determined. There may be moments of
conscious engagement, even something we might call thought, such as
choosing which shoes to wear today or looking for the left shoe which is
out of sight under the bed. But even these conscious engagements, which
are clearly dependent on a working in concert of mind and body, do not
demand much of our powers of thought.
We tend to think of judgement as a product of reflective thought but
Merleau-Ponty argues that judgement is part of perception in the flow of
ordinary experience in which we make distinctions and attribute meaning.
He points out that perceptual illusions occur when we attribute a particular
meaning to what we perceive – we make a judgement – that in the light
of later information we accept was inaccurate. To illustrate this, he uses
the example of Zöllner’s illusion in which the two pairs of vertical lines
appear to be converging from top to bottom whereas they are in fact parallel
(see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 Zöllner’s illusion

Our immediate perceptual judgement is that the vertical lines are converg-
ing – it is only on reflection that we realize they are, in fact, parallel.
Whereas the intellectualist perspective sees this as a ‘mistake’, Merleau-
Ponty argues that the auxiliary lines alter the meaning of the main lines as
we perceive them. Before we can see them as parallel, we must first make
the perceptual judgement of their relationship as converging that takes into
account the meaning of the diagonal hatching: ‘perception is just that act
which creates at a stroke, along with the cluster of data, the meaning which
unites them – indeed which not only discovers the meaning which they
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96 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

have, but moreover sees to it that they have a meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:
36). But Merleau-Ponty goes further, to argue that even reflective judge-
ment which appears to be nothing but a cognitive act, depends on memo-
ries of previous perceptual experience and memories of ideas, including
those from the community of thinkers. Memory brings into play not only
judgement entailed in perception but also judgement in terms of the truth,
or not, of an idea. The operation of judgement is always situated in a par-
ticular body with its particular experiences and even analytical reflection
cannot cut it off from those experiences.
Instead of the mentalist view of perception operating through the
senses to generate an ‘objective’ picture, Merleau-Ponty describes looking at
an object as being ‘to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things
in terms of the aspect which they present to it’ (1962: 68). He is referring to
the capacity to see the front of an object and be able to imagine it from
various angles and retain its image, even when it is obscured by other
objects, based on what we already know of objects and the field.14 This
extends to the continuity of objects in peripheral vision that remain
‘dormant, while, however, not ceasing to be there’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:
68) and provides a series of ‘horizons’ that orient the viewer and constitute
the perspective by which the phenomenal field gains structure. Merleau-
Ponty argues that perception ‘as seen from the inside’, that is as we experi-
ence it, is a ‘re-creation or re-constitution of the world at every moment’
and cannot be grasped as a causal process of stimulation from outside,
acting on a discrete system within the body (1962: 207). His holistic
account of perception understands sight as integrated and inseparable from
the flow of life within the body in which perceiving and thinking are inter-
twined with the operation of the senses and the experience of culture.15
What is perceived is ‘intentional’ because it is already caught up in the
rhythm of existence through which we come into relations with external
beings. The quality of being that inhabits materiality and objects within a
field Merleau-Ponty describes with physiological metaphors; the body is
‘geared’ to the world, ‘anchored’ to it or able to ‘grip’ it (1962: 253).
This embodied engagement enables both perception and motor activity;
I am geared to the world when I have a clear perception of the field and
when my motor intentions can be realized within that field. The sharpness
of perception and action is important because it must be sufficient to
provide a ‘perceptual ground’ and so a basis for life in which being is ‘syn-
onymous with being situated … and oriented’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 250).
The field of perception is constituted in space but also intertwined with
time to provide a ‘field of presence’.16

There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world
exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This
captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 97

which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens

upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous ‘functions’
which draw every particular focus into a general project.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 254)

The ‘subject beneath’ is the body that is familiar with the material world,
that contains knowledge gained through cultural experience of how things
work; it is this embodied subject that knows how to respond to the world
of objects, knows how much force to apply, what the significance of visual
and tactile information is. Perception depends on prior experience which is
both cultural and material to make meaning of what is present in a current
field. Merleau-Ponty discusses the difficulty of recognizing faces and their
expressions when they are seen from upside down – we take it as ‘natural’
that faces are the ‘right way up’ because that is how we have usually
encountered them (1962: 252).

Habit and embodied knowledge

Our knowledge of the world emerges through our bodily engagement with
it. Although Merleau-Ponty is critical of the behaviourist account of reflexes
as mechanistic responses to stimuli, he understands the reflex as a pre-con-
scious way in which the body orients itself to the world and the objects
within it. Reflexes situate my body as a being-in-the-world in a way that
I take for granted and may not give thought to:

The reflex, in so far as it opens itself up to the meaning of a situa-

tion, and perception; in so far as it does not first of all posit an
object of knowledge and is an intention of our whole being, [is a]
modalit[y] of a pre-objective view which is what we call being-in-the-
world.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 79)

What responds to stimuli to give them meaning is my body which deter-

mines my responses in accord with its ‘aims in the world’, its ‘possible oper-
ations’ and ‘the scope of our life’. It is the continuity and consistency of my
bodily being in the world that are prior to specific stimuli and enable me to
ascribe them meaning. This embodied sense of what it can do Merleau-
Ponty calls the ‘habit-body’ and distinguishes it from the ‘body at this
moment’, the experience of current actions (1962: 82). The habit-body is
the taken for granted sense of embodiment with which we enter each new
moment but it is vulnerable to being altered by the experiences of that
moment. This is not for Merleau-Ponty a double mode of being-in-the-
world since there is a flow between these two layers of embodied being; the
experiences of ‘body at this moment’ become progressively integrated into
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98 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

the habit-body in which the past is always available as part of the present.
As Merleau-Ponty sums it up: ‘the ambiguity of being-in-the-world is trans-
lated by that of the body, and this is understood through that of time’
(1962: 85).
Habits and skills, including those that utilize objects, are acquired in
this cumulative way within the ‘habit-body’ and so are available for action
in the current moment and for making sense of what is present in the field
– it is ‘a grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor
significance’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 143). The examples that he gives are of
a woman who wears a feather in her hat but keeps a safe distance from
things that might break it off, the car driver who can enter a narrow
opening without checking the width just like someone walking through a
doorway,17 and the blind man whose stick is used to extend the scope and
radius of his touch: ‘To get used to a hat, car or stick is to be transplanted
into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own
body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or
changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments’ (Merleau-Ponty
1962: 143).
This conception of habit recognizes that it is a largely unconscious
process but that it nonetheless involves knowledge that has been taken into
the body. It is an extension of that type of knowledge that we already have
about our bodies – position, strength, possible movements, the conse-
quence of actions for the body – that we do not have to think about.
Knowledge of my body can be subjected to thought and to reflection and
‘extending’ it with a tool will undoubtedly require consciously reviewing
what the information received ‘means’, as when someone newly blind
learns to use a stick. What it means for the use of such an object to become
a ‘habit’ is that the user no longer needs to interpret the pressures on the
stick but simply perceives through it; ‘It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension
of the bodily synthesis’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 152).
Whereas Gibson sees an object such as a hammer having the ‘affor-
dance’ of hammering (see Chapter 4), for Merleau-Ponty the object must
first be assimilated within the actions and intentions of the body. This may
involve watching others or taking advice and it may involve practice and
experiment. If I am learning to use a hammer for the first time, once I have
found how to grip and lift it, I need to work out how to direct it forcefully
at the nail head utilizing the particular properties of the hammer (the dis-
tribution of its weight, the lever effect of its handle). For the joiner who uses
the same hammer daily, this learning process is in the past and like the hat-
feather wearer, car driver and blind-stick user, the hammer is not the focus
of perception or of conscious thought; perception is of the nail that is
hammered, not the hammer that is wielded. The habitual use of the object
means that knowledge about how to use it, including what its effects are
likely to be, are taken into the body and, in use, the object becomes effec-
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 99

tively part of its user. Recalling the example of the typewriter, Merleau-
Ponty says that ‘the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank
space into his bodily space’ (1962: 145).
David Sudnow’s (2001) detailed account of learning to play jazz piano
describes the stages of acquiring the embodied skill to produce on a key-
board, the music he had previously enjoyed listening to. He had to acquire
an abstract understanding of the harmonic and melodic possibilities of
chords and tunes through being shown by a teacher and through tran-
scribing from records. Along with this theoretical understanding he had to
acquire two types of bodily facility. First, his hands had to be able to
produce on demand the full range of chord shapes and melodic runs which
meant learning the positions and sequence of fingers and how to make
smooth transitions from one hand to the other or from little finger to
thumb and vice versa. This kind of physical training, a sort of fitness for the
hands, meant instilling the movements into the habit-body by repetition.
What began with his mind controlling the operations of his fingers pro-
gressively became habitual so that he could play the various scales in any
key, moving smoothly between one and the other without thinking.
Second, his ear had to become attuned to the harmonic possibilities that a
particular chord sequence opened up; the chord progression had to become
a habit of mind so that he could hear both what was happening now and
what was upcoming. These two types of bodily learning had to be put
together to improvise jazz piano solos around standard tunes. The risk of
such playing is the development of ‘slick licks’ so that a given chord trig-
gers a particular melodic move, more or less regardless of the sequence of
chords. Instead what Sudnow had to develop was a sense of the range of
possible melodic moves that would work harmonically – both in the phys-
ical space of the keyboard and in the temporal space of the musical
sequence – so that he was free to play and develop a personal response to
the musical form, to what had gone before and to the musical situation
created by the other players.
The unusual situation of a mature person determined to learn some-
thing as difficult as improvised jazz piano while reflecting on the process
means that Sudnow’s account is unparalleled. But everyone follows the
same sort of learning process, often to a much more limited degree, many
times in their lives as they learn to type on a keyboard, drive a car, cook a
meal, and so on. Merleau-Ponty does not disregard the significance of
reflective, conscious thought in the lives of human beings, but the effect of
his philosophy is to point to how much of what is characteristically human
is actually embedded in the patterned, habitual nature of everyday actions.
Sudnow shows how some aspects of conscious thought have to be trans-
formed into habitual actions of the body, so that other dimensions of con-
sciousness can be brought into play. The example of his piano playing
shows how acquiring embodied skill in the habit-body enables human
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100 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

beings to express themselves as distinct individuals, drawing on their

culture to create something that is distinct and original. Unlike most
animals, humans have very few definite instincts that direct their actions
so the acquisition of embodied habits ‘does at least give to our life the form
of generality, and develops our personal acts into stable dispositional ten-
dencies’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 146). The body is a repository for patterns of
actions that appear to be ‘natural’ or ‘instinctive’ but have in fact become
habits, skills or ‘dispositional tendencies’ through being learnt from the
culture.

Intentionality
It is intentionality that gives direction to perception and action in the
material world while linking the material engagement of the body to its
mindedness, both in the consciousness of the moment and in previously
acquired habits and dispositions. In his preface to Phenomenology of
Perception, Merleau-Ponty reminds us of Husserl’s distinction between
‘intentionality of act’ and ‘operative intentionality’ (1962: xviii).
Intentionality of act is where judgements are consciously applied to present
situations so that, in the future, past actions can be attributed to a specific
expression of will. This is what is ordinarily meant when we ask someone
what their intentions were – it is anticipated that the answer will be easily
forthcoming since the person’s mind would have been ‘made up’ prior to
their actions and the intentions that directed their acts would have been
present in consciousness. The concept of ‘operative intentionality’ spreads
the mindedness of intentionality to those acts of which I would not readily
say ‘I intended to do that’ but which I nonetheless take ownership of as
being mine and not the result of some alien beast working through me.
This form of intentionality underlies our orientation to bodies and things
in space (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 243), our very motility (Merleau-Ponty 1962:
137) and all those routine and taken-for-granted actions that we perform
regularly without bringing them to consciousness. They may border on the
autonomous actions of my body (the yawn that I could choose to stifle) or
be activities of considerable complexity (the 10 miles I drive through a city
while thinking about something completely different). Operative intention-
ality incorporates habits and the adoption of cultural practices and ways of
doing things which are treated as ‘natural’ and not subject to question in the
routine course of life. For Merleau-Ponty the intentions embedded in
routine, habitual and ordinary behaviour produce the ‘antepredicative
unity of the world’ (1962: xviii) – that is, it makes the world a coherent and
unified environment before an objective stance, such as that produced by
analytical thought, is taken up. It would be wrong to think of these two
forms of intentionality as distinct modes of mindedness because we may
move between them as the attentiveness of our consciousness is redirected;
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 101

what we intend at one time becomes a repeated action at another and a

routine action at yet another time.
In making the case for his version of existentialism, Merleau-Ponty
borrows the term ‘intentional arc’ from F. Fischer to show how behind con-
scious act-intentionality there is always a continuity connecting many
aspects of life that are imbued with intentionality which is no longer con-
scious:

the life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or percep-

tual life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round
about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideo-
logical and moral situation, or rather which results in our being sit-
uated in these respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about
the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and mobility.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 136)

We can see in Sudnow’s learning to improvise jazz just such an intentional

arc in which the senses of sight and touch have been finely linked to the
movement of his hands and arms to realize a cultural idiom – jazz impro-
vised against standard chord sequences. The moral context is provided by
those occasions for playing when the pianist must fit in with the other
players, listening to their music to collectively create a performance for the
audience. These occasions of performance are dependent upon the prepa-
ration that Sudnow and the other musicians had put into acquiring the
embodied knowledge of how to play their instruments in this style. The
setting, the instruments, the players and the cultural idiom all have inten-
tionality embedded within them in such a way that intentionality of act
can produce this performance through the intentional arc that links its
various components.
What we find in the ordinary actions of humans that involve things, is
a continuity of intention which links objects, actions and human capaci-
ties. The familiarity of the actions in what we might call a ‘practice’ and the
readiness-to-hand of the objects make them all seem ‘natural’ and devoid
of intentionality. But as Merleau-Ponty has it, there are ‘intentional threads’
that link the material entities in a practice that is routine and familiar such
as the work of a tailor:

the subject, when put in front of his scissors, needle and familiar
tasks, does not need to look for his hands or his fingers, because
they are not objects to be discovered in objective space: bones,
muscles and nerves, but potentialities already mobilized by the
perception of scissors or needle, the central end of those ‘inten-
tional threads’ which link him to the objects given. It is never our
objective body that we move, but our phenomenal body … as the
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102 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

potentiality of this or that part of the world, surges towards objects

to be grasped and perceives them.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 106)

At some point ‘intentionality of act’ has invested each of the objects with
its particular design and its placing on the workbench, just as it has been
applied to acquiring the skills of using them. But intentionality has become
embedded in the objects and the person so that threading them together in
the flow of routine action requires little in the way of conscious act inten-
tionality.
Even though ‘operative intentionality’ begins to take on the flavour of
a mechanical action, (the sort of process that a machine could be assigned),
conscious intentionality is always ordering the action and the objects. The
hands that guide the sewing machine, the thought that goes into designing
the programme which guides an automatic machine, must draw on con-
scious intention to focus and direct the intentionality embedded in things
and bodies. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, conscious intentionality is what
gives ‘form to the stuff of experience’, providing an organizing theme for
future actions as it lies ‘beneath the flow of impressions’:

Now it is not possible to maintain that consciousness has this

power, it is this power itself. As soon as there is consciousness, and
in order that there may be consciousness, there must be something
to be conscious of, an intentional object, and consciousness can
move towards this object only to the extent that it ‘derealizes’ itself
and throws itself into it, only if it is wholly in this reference to …
something, only if it is a pure meaning-giving act. If a being is con-
sciousness, he must be nothing but a network of intentions.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 121 – ellipsis in original)

Conscious intention may initiate actions and provide an organizing ‘inten-

tional object’ such as the removal of a road wheel to get access to a brake
assembly. We can imagine that as the experienced garage technician per-
forms the routine task of removing the road wheel, the conscious intention
that gives his activity meaning, is ‘thrown into’ the actions so that his
lunch or a recent conversation with a colleague occupies his thoughts. But
once he moves to inspecting the brake assembly, what to do next will come
to the fore in his network of intentions and be a topic for conscious reflec-
tion before any subsequent sequence of actions.

Being and things

Merleau-Ponty’s account of being-in-the-world as being from the first,
embodied, brings him to a similar position to Heidegger’s on the presence
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 103

of objects for human beings. For Heidegger, things are taken up in actions
and as such they are primordially ready-to-hand; it is only in a second
moment of conscious reflection when we confront them as present-at-hand
that they appear as if they were complete beings in themselves. In the
course of everyday life a thing appears familiar and in keeping with the
setting and in that sense is ‘real’ in the fullness of its signification so
Merleau-Ponty calls it in-itself-for-us (1962: 322). But if we confront the
object, abstracting it from the flow of everyday life, it becomes something
else, something alien and other, and we realize that perceived significance
and existence, though they appear as one, are not always in fact. This is
what happens when the object is measured, rendering its size, weight, dis-
tance or colour in systematic terms. However, a ‘thing’ can never be prop-
erly a being in-itself because knowledge of its existence is always dependent
on our prior perception of it that, phenomenologically, appropriates the
object in relation to the body. For example, size is tied up with the distance
away that the object is perceived; a small object far away is insignificant and
unrecognizeable whereas close up, under a microscope, it may be of great
interest. Everything in the material world that I encounter is related to my
body and in order to see an object better I will move closer to it, pick it up
and move it about in my hands ‘because each spectacle is what it is for me
in a certain kinaesthetic situation’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 303). While at a
common-sense level we might simply claim that constancy is a property of
objects in the world, what Merleau-Ponty points out is that prior to objec-
tive knowledge of the constancy of the world, our bodies perceive this con-
stancy. Rather than distinguishing the different sensory information from
different sensory organs we take in the thing as a whole to make sense of it.
For example, colour is not seen in itself but is perceived in relation to other
characteristics, such as texture and shape. Whereas the green of grass takes
on many shades – according to the length of the grass, the strength of the
ambient light and the reflectivity of the surface of the blades – we nonethe-
less recognize it all as being the green of grass.
For Merleau-Ponty our engagement with the material world involves a
form of communication in which our senses ‘question’ things and ‘things
reply to them’ so the sensory information from things is ‘a language that
teaches itself’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 319). It is as ‘things’ respond by
demonstrating some constancy within themselves that we perceive them as
a thing; because all the parts of a car are linked together in a coherent and
constant way so that they move as one, we can regard the car as a single
‘thing’. As we engage with the world perceptually we enter into a form of
communication with the things we encounter that identifies their speci-
ficity within a setting.18 Of course, this perception of things as distinct enti-
ties in themselves is tied in with previous experience, of recognizing things
from earlier situations.
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104 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Culture
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between the artificial object, whose signifi-
cance precedes its existence, and the natural object that is already in the
world and whose existence antedates whatever significance it has. Whereas
the natural quality of objects such as plants and rocks is contained through-
out them in a way that is alien to humans, tools and other artificial objects
‘seem to be placed on the world’ and the intentionality within them is
apparent to human perception. This prior human quality in the artificial
object is what we recognize as its cultural origins and it is through inter-
preting it within the context of culture that it takes on a specific meaning.
As we perceive an artificial object we bring to it our cultural understanding
so that it is ‘not actually given in perception, it is internally taken up by us,
reconstituted and experienced by us in so far as it is bound up with a world,
the basic structures of which we carry with us’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 327).
If the possibility of subjective knowledge of the world moves from cer-
tainty of perception in the moment of experience to interpretation and
modification through reflection, this is not the individualized process that
it often sounds in Merleau-Ponty’s writing. He links our subjective experi-
ence of the world beyond our bodies to one shared with others through the
medium of material culture:

Not only have I a physical world, not only do I live in the midst of
earth, air and water, I have around me roads, plantations, villages,
streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe. Each of these
objects is moulded to the human action which it serves. Each one
spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity which may be deter-
minate in a low degree, in the case of a few footmarks in the sand,
or on the other hand highly determinate, if I go into every room
from top to bottom of a house recently evacuated … The civiliza-
tion in which I play my part exists for me in a self-evident way in
the implements with which it provides itself.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 347–8)

The significance of cultural objects is that I experience the presence of

others within the object, even if I do not know that person – I may not even
be familiar with their culture. If I unearth a spoon, it may not look quite
like any spoon I’ve every seen and yet I can perceive it as a spoon used by
another person, even though I may only guess at when it was so used, by
whom and with what food. For Merleau-Ponty this connection is through
a generalized ‘I’; I can imagine someone else using this spoon because I can
imagine using it myself. The generalization to many possible ‘I’s that all use
spoons is through the body which I take it that the ‘other’ has and uses as
I would my own. This, ‘the body of another’ which, he says, ‘like my own,
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 105

is not inhabited, but is an object standing before the consciousness which

thinks about or constitutes it’ is how we can solve ‘the paradox of a con-
sciousness seen from the outside, of a thought which has its abode in the
external world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 349). It is because we share the struc-
ture of our bodies and, most importantly, the relationship between con-
sciousness and the perceptual experience of our bodies, that we are able to
share the world. And our sharing of the material environment of the world
through the ways we adapt and modify it, is what brings about the possi-
bility of culture as we know it.
An object that we encounter can be recognized as a thing in-itself but a
living human body is recognized as more than that, as something existing
for-itself. I recognize the internal link between my phenomenal body and
that of the other and I recognize that it perceives the world and has an
intentional orientation to it, even if it is not mine. What is more, I recog-
nize that the other being has its own phenomenal field so I am compelled
to accept that the world is no longer merely mine: ‘Already the other body
has ceased to be a mere fragment of the world, and become the theatre of
a certain process of elaboration, and, as it were, a certain “view” of the
world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 353). Though I know that the other is for-itself
and as such distinct from my self and intentions, I can recognize a parallel
(‘a miraculous prolongation’) with my intentions and a familiar way of
dealing with the world. It is the materiality of our bodies as structures situ-
ated in the world, perceiving and acting in it, that provides the common
ground between myself and the other person. However, the other is consti-
tuted not simply in the materiality of its own body but also by its orienta-
tion to the world around it as it ‘annexes natural objects … makes tools for
itself, and projects itself ... in the shape of cultural objects’ (Merleau-Ponty
1962: 354). The most important of these is of course language which gives
complexity to our social world, enabling us to share in our dealings with
the material world in which our experience is grounded.

Conclusion

What we get from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenological

perspective that situates human being in the material world prior to the
world of thought, reflection and objectivity. In that material world the
human being confronts the stuff of the world through its own material
being and within the constraints of its form. This perspective counters the
tendency to think of the material world as a product of human thought as
is often the case with the critics of technology in society. There is a lived
relation with materiality that is prior to the complexity of modern tech-
nology that endures despite that complexity simply because the everyday,
lived world of human beings is first and foremost embodied. The phenom-
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106 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

enological philosophers do not provide a method for studying the rela-

tionship between lived human being and the material world but they do
provide a number of what, after Blumer, we might call ‘sensitizing concepts’
(1969a: 147). From Heidegger we get concepts that include ‘dealing with’,
‘concern’, ‘circumspection’, ‘readiness-to-hand’ and ‘enframing’, and from
Merleau-Ponty we get concepts such as ‘embodiment’, ‘field’, ‘habit’,
‘intentional arc’ and ‘operative intentionality’. What we get from Merleau-
Ponty that is a definite extension of Heidegger’s phenomenology is a
detailed account of the process of perception that locates it not only in the
body but also, and this is most important, within the culture. Merleau-
Ponty explains to us how the embodied responses of the human being do
not depend on the mechanical properties of the organs, such as the eyes,
but on the previous experience of that being. That previous experience may
be personal, direct embodied experience but it may also be generalized, cul-
tural experience that is acquired by the individual being through the body
by being taught or having ‘picked it up’ by observation and familiarity.
This phenomenological perspective challenges both the empiricism of
James Gibson’s notion of affordances and the social construction perspec-
tive that has come to be so influential in the sociology of technology.
Gibson’s psychology of perception moves towards phenomenology with its
disavowal of cognitivism and behaviourism and its acceptance of much
from the Gestalt psychologists. But Gibson ultimately wants to ground the
notion of affordance in the physical properties of objects prior to their
entry into the world of living beings. This produces a curious form of inter-
pretivism that eventually has to assert what objects afford; Costall’s ‘canon-
ical affordances’ at least resituate them within the social realm of linguistic
meaning. The moves by Costall and Hutchby to socialize the concept of
affordance bring it closer to the social constructionist perspective that was
in Chapter 4 exemplified by the ANT perspective. Social constructionism
takes the primordial form of sociality to be communication via language,
text and interpretation but this tends to omit the lived, embodied form of
material engagement with the world. What I hope to have shown is that
the phenomenological perspective brings together the material and com-
municative or cultural dimensions of social existence.
The phenomenological perspective shows us the nature of being with
materiality is not fixed or predetermined but is emergent and so shaped by
the temporal dimension as much as the spatial. The temporal dimension
allows for cumulative experience and cultural knowledge to impact on the
embodied and material experience of existence:

The thing and the world exist only in so far as they are experienced
by me or by subjects like me, since they are both the concatenation
of our perspectives, yet they transcend all perspectives because this
chain is temporal and incomplete. I have the impression that the
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BEING-WITH MATERIALITY 107

world itself lives outside me, just as absent landscapes live on

beyond my visual field, and as my past was formerly lived on the
earlier side of my present.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 333–4)

The dimension of temporality gives context and meaning to our experience

of the world and the beings in it. Rather than being distinct, each percep-
tion merges into the next and so our world is continuous and uninter-
rupted (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 328). This continuity extends to space so that
what lies beyond the field of sight or beyond the present, in the future or
the past is treated as continuous. There is an indeterminacy about what is
out of range of my senses that contrasts with the ‘uniquely compelling
reality which defines my present here and now’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 331).
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6 Material interaction

Introduction

Objects are for us, often without our recognizing it, the com-
panions of our actions, our emotions and our thoughts. They
not only accompany us from the cradle to the grave. They
precede us in the one and survive us in the other. Tomorrow
they will speak our language. But are they not already speak-
ing to us, and sometimes much better than with words?
(Tisseron 1999: 12)1

Tisseron suggests that our emotional relationship with objects is tanta-

mount to us talking to them as we would a confidant … or a psychoanalyst.
He is anticipating a world in which objects do literally ‘talk’, as my com-
puter does when it suddenly declares that my ‘battery is fully charged’ or as
a truck does when it announces to anyone within earshot ‘attention,
vehicle reversing’.2 But this is not so subtle a form of communication as the
way objects such as motor vehicles already ‘speak’ to us through our
embodied interaction when we drive them. We ‘read’ the road (even
through the rear-view mirror when reversing) and feel the progress of the
vehicle through our senses of sight and the kinaesthetic information from
our limbs and body. The resistance of the steering wheel and the feel of
brakes through our bodies allow us as drivers to interact with the object of
the vehicle (see Dant and Martin 2001; Dant 2004). Our interaction with
the artefacts of modern life, such as motor vehicles, depends on the way
that they have been intentionally designed for use and it is the meeting of
this object embedded intentionality with our own that produces interac-
tion with things.
As we saw in previous chapters, the idea of interaction between indi-
viduals and objects is not new; both Schiffer and Heath and his colleagues
(see Chapter 1) have developed different analytical strategies to tackle inter-
action with material objects and such interaction is implicit in the theories
of agency discussed in Chapter 4. There have been attempts to record the
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 109

embodied nature of action such as Birdwhistell’s (1973) system for studying

body-motion communication and Labanotation that can be used for
‘writing’ human actions (see Farnell 1994). The emphasis in these
approaches is on the communicational dimension of human action and the
interaction is primarily between humans sharing the same time and space
and of a symbolic nature.3 Indeed, the traditional approach to the study of
material culture has been to focus on objects as signs or symbols – Barthes
([1964] 1993) and Baudrillard ([1968] 1996) provide founding instances of
this approach.4 The shortcoming of the perspective that treats material
culture as symbolic representation is that it treats the specificity of the
object as largely irrelevant; my car may be a sign of my social status, but
then so may my watch or my suit. How these different objects fit into my
everyday life is clearly quite different as is the material interaction that I
have with them. They connect me to my social milieu in quite different
ways even though they may all confirm my social status. The argument of
this book is that material objects contribute to human cultural life in an
even more fundamental way than signification, through embodied interac-
tion with the object – a process that I have called ‘material interaction’.
This chapter will draw on the ‘Car Care’ project to illustrate various
modes of interacting with things.5 Cars are built on production lines where
the interaction between humans and objects is largely shaped by the
machine tools that are used. But in the setting of maintenance and repair
garages the technicians organize their work quite differently to ‘re-produce’
the car, to return it towards the state it was in when it left the factory. This
type of work lends itself to close observation because many of the objects
being worked on are large enough for an observer to see and record with a
video camera. The work is very much ‘embodied’ in the sense of requiring
the whole body of the technician to be involved; most of the time, hands,
eyes and mind are working together to interact with the range of material
objects that are the car, its parts and the tools used. However, all the objects
in a garage that the technicians interact with are artefacts designed or
intended for use in particular ways – even modern engine oil is synthetic
and produced to exact specifications. They are not natural objects that have
to be shaped for a purpose and the technicians are not required to ‘create’
new objects.6 The skill of the technicians lies in identifying how to work
with the available artefacts, some of which respond as expected, others of
which do not.

Interaction

An engineer who is constructing a bridge is talking to nature in the

same sense that we talk to an engineer. There are stresses and
strains there which he meets, and nature comes back with other
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110 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

responses that have to be met in another way. In his thinking he is

taking the attitude of physical things. He is talking to nature and
nature is replying to him.
(Mead 1962: 185)

As George Herbert Mead suggests, interaction, even with an inanimate object

implies a reciprocity between the human actor and the thing. There is an
asymmetry in the interaction in that, while humans have the capacities of
will and intentionality, objects, in themselves, do not. Usually this means
that it is the human who initiates and controls the pace of the interaction
although some objects, such as those with motor or electronic capacities, can
determine the pace and even the sequence. Artefacts – unlike Mead’s ‘nature’
– have embedded within them the intentional actions of those who designed
and manufactured them. This intentional quality in artefacts may be at some
distance in time or space from interactions with them and it may have been
modified by other intentional behaviour, for example, through a regime or
devised practice that modifies original intentions. The engineer talks to
nature when he builds the bridge but all those who drive over it interact with
the engineer’s intentions as modified by those who designed the regulation
of traffic that uses the bridge.
For Mead, what is distinctive about human action is its orientation to
meaning which is, he argues, generated within society so that ‘objects are
constituted in terms of meanings within the social process of experience’
(1962: 77). It is this orientation to meaning rather than to information that
makes the approach of Mead and the symbolic interactionists so different
from Schiffer’s concern with the communication of ‘information’ (see
Chapter 1, pp. 6–8 above). Information can be handled by a machine but
meaning requires the response of a human who has learnt from their society
what things mean. For Mead and for Herbert Blumer, objects may have mean-
ings but they are attributed by the social human being who perceives them.
Mead’s approach has much in common with the phenomenologists in that
he recognizes that the significance of objects is not as things in themselves
but as objects that are taken up in particular actions or activities. He talks of
the orientation towards objects in the distance and that as they become closer
they enter a ‘field’ of perception and eventually come into range within a
manipulatory area7 where they can be taken up for a purpose (‘We organize
the field with reference to what we are going to do’, Mead 1962: 278). Mead,
not unlike Merleau-Ponty, distinguishes a scientific account of the material
world from that of a social actor who attributes meaning to it using the capac-
ity of mind rather than systematic measurement. The importance of identi-
fying the meanings of physical objects is that they allow the human to
control them from the standpoint of her or his own responses (Mead 1962:
131–2). The attribution of meanings is a capacity of ‘mind’ but in Mead’s
account arises within social process and social interactions.
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 111

What I am calling ‘material interaction’ depends on the socially

acquired human skills for recognizing in the form of things what can be
done next with them. These skills are acquired through the culture but they
are also embedded in the objects with which we deal. This means that the
artefact itself embodies the intentional actions of prior human beings that
are released in the interaction with the present actor. So, the size and shape
of an object, say, a threaded bolt with a hexagonal head, constrain how it
shall be interacted with; it becomes fixed when tightened into a matching
thread on a nut or other component, is removed by overcoming static fric-
tion and turning it to the left, its head is designed to be gripped in the jaws
of a spanner and it achieves the linking of one object to another (usually
with other similar bolts) but has no other mechanical purpose in itself.
Interaction with the bolt may discover variations in meaning; that the
thread is left-handed or that the addition of a spring washer allows the
fixing to move under friction, and so on. The intentional, artefactual form
of the objects that go together to make a car means that they are all there
for a purpose which is entailed in that of the car (to move and stop in
certain ways with certain qualities of safety, comfort, speed, control, and so
forth). Both the purpose of the objects and the way they contribute to the
mechanical whole of the car are, more or less, embodied within the object;
the technician can assume that they were intended to ‘work’ mechanically
in specified ways.
Herbert Blumer provides a succinct account of what ‘symbolic inter-
action’ means: ‘human beings in interacting with one another have to take
account of what each other is doing or is about to do; they are forced to
direct their own conduct or handle their situations in terms of what they
take into account … One has to fit one’s own line of activity in some
manner to the actions of others’ (1969a: 8). For the symbolic interaction-
ists, physical things are important in the context of human interaction and
the meanings of objects become significant as the background or context
for interactions and may contribute to the process of interactions.8 But I
wish to go further than either Mead or Blumer, to suggest that human
beings interact with objects that have a social dimension beyond their
symbolic meaning. I am arguing that as the social human being interacts
with an object, she or he must take account of what the object is doing or
is about to do and must fit their line of activity to the intentions embedded
in the object. In this chapter I want to take Mead and Blumer’s version of
interaction but extend it to interaction between social beings and artefacts
using some of the ideas and concepts of the phenomenologists, Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty, that we encountered in Chapter 5. Let me begin with
undoing a nut.
In this example we find a technician – I’ll call him Ray – undoing
the nut on the front wheel bearing of a car. He has removed the split pin
that locks the nut and he knows from experience that it is going to require
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112 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

considerable effort to move the nut itself. What we see is that he has a
sequence of different types of ‘undoing’ responses to the nut’s resistance. To
begin with, he puts a socket together with an adjustable lever bar to form a
spanner, and on the end of the lever that is part of the standard tool, he
adds a length of pipe so that he can exert extra pressure.9 Having arranged
the extended lever for the movement that follows, he puts both hands on
the end farthest from the nut and bears down on it, with the weight of his
body pushing down through his straight arms, his knees bending as the
lever moves (see Figure 6.1). This movement moves the nut no more than
an eighth of a turn but he knew before he began that this embodied tech-
nique and arrangement of tools was likely to be needed to overcome the
initial static friction.

Figure 6. Ray’s persuader

Ray then removes the extension pipe and, kneeling down in front of
the nut, he realigns the socket and lever and makes a further quarter turn
using two hands to completely free the nut. He then disassembles the
spanner so that an extension bar can be fitted between the socket and its
lever. In its new form there is to begin with a long end and a short end
of the lever bar which gives him a little less purchase while another
quarter turn is made, this time with one hand on the long end of the lever
and one at the hub of the socket (see Figure 6.2). Feeling that the nut is
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 113

running sufficiently free, Ray then adjusts the lever bar so that each end is
roughly equi-distant from the turning point and one hand on each end to
turn it.

Figure 6.2 Two hands on lever bar

With the tool in this alignment the nut is worked looser, the hands
working fluidly together to drive the lever-bar. At first the left hand tends
towards working the lever while the right hand moves behind it to support
the socket to keep the spanner aligned on the nut. The left hand drives
down and round through about half a turn before it moves to pick up the
other end of the lever which it similarly drives through half a turn. But as
the nut becomes looser and offers less resistance, both hands work towards
the centre, turning the spanner more rapidly at the same time as support-
ing it, without using the purchase of the lever. Then, in a final phase, the
spanner is withdrawn completely and held loosely in Ray’s left hand, while
the right takes over turning the nut directly (see Figure 6.3). At first, there
is clearly still some resistance in the nut and the whole wrist is used to exert
the turning movement but as it loosens, just the fingers are able to spin the
nut before it is finally removed.
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114 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Figure 6.3 Finger loosening

In this example of material interaction, Ray takes up a series of bodily

techniques and arrangements of tools in response to the resistance of
the nut. As the resistance reduces, he changes to an action that involves
progressively less leverage but greater speed and continuity of turning
movement; he interacts with the nut through his whole body via the tools,
responding to its changing resistance. There is a reciprocity that is not
precise or pre-planned – this is not a mechanistic response that measures or
calculates resistance precisely. Ray uses techniques that he has acquired
over years of practice that are appropriate to his strength and bodyweight,
to the tools he has available and to the way that nuts of this size, with this
thread, used in this way on cars, tend to work. In a different garage we saw
different techniques to deal with nuts – different types of spanners, differ-
ent angles of work – but they all followed a similar sequence of response in
which the nature of an action was in response to the ‘feel’ of the nut
through the tools.
In the smoothness of the actions of turning the nut and of moving from
one technique and tool arrangement to another we can see Ray’s ‘habit body’
acting without great thought or deliberation. This is a process of ‘operative
intentionality’ in which conscious intention lies in the past as the series
of actions were learnt or acquired as practices appropriate to this sort of situ-
ation. The techniques Ray uses are securely embedded in his body, learnt and
practised over many years; his body knows how to respond to the responses
of the nut perceived through the tools. In Mead’s terms, this is a ‘conversa-
tion of gestures’ in that there is no symbolic interaction that requires con-
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 115

scious activity of the mind to interpret what is going on. Blumer prefers the
term ‘non-symbolic interaction’ for this type of process that is most apparent
in reflex responses when human beings ‘respond immediately and unreflec-
tively to each other’s bodily movements’ (1969a: 8). The continuity of inten-
tion survives through the sequence of actions that Ray follows and there is
no indication that he has to think or form a conscious intention before pro-
ceeding with the next action. It is the state of the friction in the nut that tells
him when to move from one undoing strategy, one configuration of tools
and use of the body, to the next.

Field

In the example above we can see that Ray is working in what Merleau-Ponty
would call a ‘phenomenal field’ in which he has located himself in such a
way that he can see the work and can touch all that he needs. When he
leaves the field, his place in it is visible as a point at the centre and bottom
of a rough semi-circle on the floor that would be made by the sweep of his
hands and in which his tools lie, and extends upwards in space at least to
the top of the wheel arch (see Figure 6.4). The phenomenal field is not a
defined or delimited space but is to do with perceptual range of the person’s
body so that as the body moves, so does the field. It is the space in which
the perceptual and motor apparatus of body can operate in relation to the
focus of the task. From his position facing the axle of the car Ray can see,
reach and touch the tools and parts he is working with and move his body
to fine tune the perceptual field.

Figure 6.4 Field

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116 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

In this case, and rather unusually, Ray is working from kneeling down
on an old cushion that emphasizes his place in the field of his work. The
kneeling position makes the field somewhat closer and more defined than
it is when a technician works standing up. Ray is replacing a worn ball-joint
and the damaged rubber gaiter from around the constant-velocity joint.10
From his kneeling position he can touch the parts and reach the tools,
leaning forward on his knees to get closer (see Figure 6.5), sitting back
on his heels to look at the work, reach for a tool or prepare a part. The field
of activity is a perceptual field as well as a manipulatory zone; within this
area he can see the objects well and judge their orientation. The tools are
literally ‘ready-to-hand’ as they are drawn up into use and on the video
recording, the metallic clang can be heard as spanners are dropped to the
floor within reach during the work. There is a wander-light attached to the
bodywork of the car that illuminates the field, particularly the parts of the
car that he is working on in the shadow of the wheel arch and as he leans
forward to focus the perceptual and manual capacity of his body on the
axle end, the phenomenal field narrows as in Figure 6.5 where he is begin-
ning to undo the nut on top of the ball-joint.

Figure 6.5 Close field

Ray’s hearing extends beyond the phenomenal field of sight and touch
so that he is able to hear when he is called to the telephone or when a cus-
tomer comes into the garage (both of which happen during this job). But
while he is working closely on the ball-joint, there are many other things
within the garage that are merely present-at-hand, where it is currently of
no importance whether they are within sight or not, within reach or not.
Within the field of his workspace the objects are under Ray’s ‘circumspection’
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 117

and available to be drawn up into action as the work demands. He knows

the direction in which to reach to pick up a tool and his hand and body
orient towards the tool before his eyes are directly focused on it. The gaze
rests on the object just before his hand so that his eyes are part of the touch-
ing that becomes a picking up (the flow of these sorts of actions can be seen
on video but is lost to still shots).11 Once an object is grasped, sight is
directed to where it is to be moved to rather than following the object while
it is in control of the hands. As Merleau-Ponty tells us, sight is not just
about the function of eyes but is always linked to the whole body. Some
objects Ray looks at closely, bringing them before his eyes with his hands,
as for example when cleaning a tool or part, but circumspection is part of
an almost continuous orientation to the touching, picking up and manip-
ulating of tools and parts within the phenomenal field. The car is stationed
over a ‘pit’ and from time to time Ray gets up and descends into the pit to
work from underneath and behind the wheel. In Figure 6.6 he gets into the
pit to use a compressed air driver to undo the three nuts securing the ball-
joint to the car. What he is doing is moving around within the workspace
in which the focus is the area at the end of the axle he is working on. As he
moves his head and hands closer to the work, the phenomenal field
becomes smaller and when he moves down into the pit, the phenomenal
field, oriented as it is to his body, is in a reversed orientation to the work-
space pictured in Figures 6.4 and 6.5. Circumspection of the workspace and
the tools and parts is broken while he negotiates the steps but continues
from the other side of the work, taking in the same array of tools and parts,
albeit from a different angle.

Figure 6.6 Field from the pit

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118 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

There are moments when Ray leaves the phenomenal field of this job
either to go to talk to someone in the office or to fetch a tool or part. When
he leaves the phenomenal field of this job, circumspection for the work in
hand is broken as his perceptual field moves with him – but when he
returns, his body slots into the phenomenal field again as he takes up his
position in relation to the objects he has been working with. Alfred Schutz
and Thomas Luckmann distinguish between ‘zones of actual reach’ and
‘zones of restorable reach’ which emphasizes the temporal capacity of the
human mind to retain features of a phenomenal field that can be recovered
or restored from the person’s stock of knowledge (1974: 36–8). They point
out that social actors can assume the constancy of the life-world including
the capacity to repeat an action in that situation – such as picking up a
spanner to work on a nut. Zones of restorable reach lie outside the present
moment of action, but they transcend the zone of actual reach because of
the body’s capacity to remember through typifications the meaningfulness
of a particular situation. Schutz and Luckmann point out that while this
capacity for retaining an orientation in space is to do with the human
memory, zones of actual reach are shared as memories of ‘a common sur-
rounding world’ so that the life-world has a social dimension (1974: 40).
As Ray fetches something for the job he is ‘de-severing’ the object, in
Heidegger’s jargon, withdrawing it from the present-at-hand, into the
ongoing activity that it would have had no part in until that moment. The
object – at one point he gets a small jack – is brought into the phenomenal
field where it remains ready-to-hand for its part in the job. The field of the
workspace develops as the work proceeds; not only are more tools drawn in
but as the road wheel comes off and the ball-joint is separated and removed,
that which is accessible to being seen and touched is reconstituted. Ray
manages the field, dropping tools casually in it – though they don’t bounce
or skid out of reach – and while they are not precisely arranged they are not
all on top of each other. There is a small box into which he puts the wheel
nuts and the bearing nut which are removed at the beginning of the job and
will be almost the last parts to be replaced on the vehicle; it is important that
they do not get dispersed or hidden underneath other things. This strategy
of arranging tools in use and parts that will be needed again was typical of
the repair work we saw in all the garages; technicians would create a field of
work with tools and parts oriented to the bit of the car they were working
on. But this field would not have systematic features or prescribed limits and
the arrangement of objects within it would be opportunistic or casual.
Instead of a systematic ordering of parts and tools in the workspace (e.g.
according to size or category or according to their physical relation within
the assembly), they were clustered within the phenomenal field. As parts
come off, they are left near to where they were removed and within loose
groupings but because they are available for circumspection the effort of
arranging them systematically is redundant. Nonetheless, their arrangement
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 119

does follow the pattern of the work; a technician said, ‘When I put things
down I put them in groups … things generally fall into place’ (Tape 75
[Link]). The end of the job was often signalled by the disassembly of
the workspace as tools were returned to the tool chest and replaced parts dis-
posed of, thereby reconstructing the field as available for a new task.
An extreme example in the corpus of data that involved dealing with
removed parts was where a whole engine had been taken out and was being
replaced. Many of the parts from the original assembly, including connect-
ing components like nuts and bolts, were kept for re-use. What appeared to
an outsider as chaos was not chaotic to the technicians involved. They did
not follow an instruction manual in undertaking the refit and the compo-
nents were not set out in space to prepare for the sequence of actions in
time. However, components were clustered in space within the phenome-
nal field. New parts were kept separate in a cardboard box, each component
still wrapped in plastic or smaller boxes. The larger removed parts were kept
in a plastic bin and there was a small plastic box for smaller parts (on the
right of Figure 6.7, under the technician’s hand). However, the smaller parts
were often spread out on the floor and mixed with sockets and other tools
that had been used (as in Figure 6.7) – other small parts were left in the
ledges around the top of the engine compartment.

Figure 6.7 Bits for the engine refit

The two technicians working on this refit had an idea of where differ-
ent sorts of things would be and knew where to look so, as a part was
needed, they searched through an array of objects using eyes and fingers to
identify components. Here the phenomenal field was rather larger than
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120 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

with Ray’s work on the ball-joint. The car was on a lift and the technicians
usually worked standing up – their workspace was focused around the front
of the engine compartment and extended a couple of paces to either side of
it. The work flowed as parts were brought to the engine and fitted – when
asked if he had a mental picture by which the work was organized, Mike,
the senior of the technicians said ‘Not really (.) it’s mainly ah (1) it’s the
same way as it came off really (.) got to do the easiest stuff first (.) there’s so
many bits and pieces which (.) which get lost otherwise’ (Tape 20
[Link]).12 The work was organized by the intentionality built into the
engine as holes that were intended to be filled and parts that were intended
to be connected were dealt with, starting with the most inaccessible. The
engine unit was first put in place and then the various linkages with the car
were joined up including the various parts that had to be bolted on. Bolts
for particular areas of the work were stored in different places and within
those places we can see the technicians periodically sorting through to find
just the size or shape of bolt or nut that was needed. As Mike picks out a
bolt, he does not measure it or even read the size on it as he sometimes does
when choosing a socket for his spanner. Instead he looks at it, picking it up
in his fingers so that he ‘inhabits’ the part, understanding its meaning in
relation to where it will fit in the task of reassembly.
In Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world, bringing a part or tool
from the present-at-hand to being ready-to-hand means that the part sought
‘withdraws’ from the environment as it is identified but, as Heidegger
explains, this is because of the work, the ‘towards which’, of the thing rather
than its visible properties. In Figure 6.7 Mike’s hands and eyes are looking
through a collection for the part which can be taken up into the use he has
in mind – the part literally withdraws from its environment of a disorgan-
ized group of parts on the floor as he picks it up. Heidegger says, ‘The fact
that observation is a kind of concern is just as primordial as the fact that
action has its own kind of sight’ (1962: 99). The concern in the looking is ori-
ented to the action of refitting the engine in the car rather than, for
example, sorting or categorizing the parts. Although it often appears casual
and imprecise, car mechanics notice where things are put as they remove
them – it is a kind of ‘concern’ – and the actions of their hands in disassem-
bly and re-assembly are part of that concern and so part of that sight. Their
concern is with bringing things into being ready-to-hand; this is not about
making categorial distinctions or about describing or noting the world about
them, and even less about scientifically measuring or understanding it.
The way in which tools and parts are distributed throughout the phe-
nomenal field and the way that they are brought into the actions of work
are recognizable as embodied action in the way that Merleau-Ponty under-
stands it. The phenomenal body of the technician works in concert with
the phenomenal field and all that is within it to bring about material inter-
action that is oriented towards the task in hand: replacing a ball-joint or
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 121

refitting an engine. The contiguity between body and the material field is
noticeable not only in the way that technicians draw tools and parts into
their actions but also in the way that their bodies do not get caught on the
material stuff they are dealing with. What is noticeable to a non-technician
is the ease with which the habit-body of the technician moves in and
around the car and the parts. They duck as they move under cars, their
hands move confidently in and out of confined spaces – sometimes where
they cannot see – and they do not trip or walk on parts or tools. Injuries do
of course occur but in their usual workplace they are able to move and use
their bodies without great care or thought because the complex material
environment is so familiar as a phenomenal field.
The way in which the whole body would on occasion be used in a
complex way to interact with the materiality of the field can be illustrated
from the task of refitting the engine. Here the car is off the ground on a
hydraulic lift and Mike has the weight of the engine supported by a mobile
crane (see Figure 6.8). He also has a jack underneath the engine unit to keep
it at the correct angle as he tries to line up the engine with the transmission
at the back. He is using his whole body to shove the engine unit through his
left hand while he peers over it to see whether it is in position, his right hand
feeling down to where the flywheel is. The perceptual apparatus of his whole
body is working with his hands, the crane and the jack to align the engine
with the car. The ‘form’, in Merleau-Ponty’s language, of the body working
here as a whole, means that it is difficult not only to distinguish those parts
of the body that are perceiving from those that are acting, but it is difficult

Figure 6.8 Moving the engine unit

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122 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

to distinguish the body from the tools that, although static, it is working
with. The weight of the body works against the suspended weight of the
engine, the body adjusts the alignment achieved by the jack, the action
involves pushing against the floor (sometimes Mike’s feet slip) and towards
the car raised on a lift that is itself mounted on the floor. The hands and
the eyes perceive but then so does the whole body and Mike’s cenethesis is
critical for the task in hand.

Intentionality

As I have described work on cars so far, I have treated it as largely a set of

habitual practices that realize material interaction. No doubt much of the
work involves thought, consideration and reflection but while the action
flows without interruption, there is little evidence of anything other than
habitual action. However, things do not always go according to plan and this
usually leads to a break in what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘intentional threads’
that link the current activity through the intention of the human actor, via
his or her tools to the objects being worked on. It is at these points that a shift
between what he calls ‘operative intentionality’ and ‘intentionality of act’
becomes apparent; this is where the intentionality in the object does not
match the intentionality that forms a routine sequence of actions. Once Ray
had removed the old ball-joint, he picked up the new joint still in its plastic
wrapper and realized that it would not fit as a replacement. There is a
moment when his hands turn over the new joint, still in its plastic bag, and
compares it with the one he has removed; the new one has a different con-
figuration of bolts and would not match those on the car or the backing plate.
In Figure 6.9 we can see the new part still in its plastic bag as it is dropped to

Figure 6.9 Wrong part

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MATERIAL INTERACTION 123

the floor not far from the old part with its triangular arrangement of holes
that fits the matching bolts on the mounting plate just beyond it.
As he turned the new part over in his hands there was a sense of him
inhabiting the part and realizing that it would not fit. Shortly after the new
ball-joint is dropped, the job is interrupted while he goes to get the cordless
telephone which he brings to the workspace to ring the parts supplier and
discuss what is needed and when a replacement can be delivered (see Figure
6.10). The mobility of the telephone instrument means that he can discuss
the parts, old and new, with them still within his perceptual field – the break
in the work and the talk about it confirm the break in the intentional thread.

Figure 6.10 On the phone

The telephone transforms Ray’s phenomenal field as it is suddenly

extended beyond his perceptual field in both space and time. He is able to
talk to someone miles away about his problem and plan actions in the
future, judging how the problem can be solved and minimally disrupt the
flow of his job. Characteristically of mobile phone users, he gets up from
the floor and moves about, looking into space as he waits for an answer
about the delivery; once he has described the mismatch of the objects, his
phenomenal field is down the telephone line and into the future. The part
arrived a little later in the day and he was able to continue the fitting of the
ball-joint without having to abandon the job and clear up the workspace.
While much of the work proceeds routinely and habitually as tech-
nicians take up tools and employ embodied techniques with very little
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124 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

apparent ‘intentionality of act’, there are many instances of technicians

stopping the flow of action and taking stock of the situation in ways that
make it apparent that they are thinking about what is going on. External
evidence of intentionality of act is not always certain; how can one human
being know precisely what another is thinking? But behaviourally speech
often indicates that there is a conscious act of the mind that adjusts inten-
tionality in relation to what to do next – Ray’s telephone call spells out
what he had been thinking. When the meaning of the objects in the phe-
nomenal field demands reflective interpretative work, this is usually indi-
cated by a pause in the flow of action that would take the job towards its
conclusion. Perceptual activity does not stop, however, and eyes, hands and
body often continue to move as sufficient meaning from the array of
objects is derived to enable the technician to carry on to the next task.
On the engine refit, as Mike was reassembling the soft pipe work of tubes
and the harness of electrical leads, he periodically touches them and moves
the leads and pipes. Although flexible, the pipes and wires are linked together
in groups with specific lengths and with most of the tubes pre-shaped with
fittings that indicate where they should go and how they should fit.
Although the parts contain material cues about how they fit together, it is not
always immediately clear to Mike just what the correct sequence of fitting is.
On at least one occasion a pipe will not go through the pipe clip he has fitted,
so he has to remove the clip, fit the pipe and then refit the clip around the
pipe. He also makes a number of gestural moves, such as picking up a group
of cables, as he does in Figure 6.11 and placing them onto the engine more
or less where they should go to prefigure what the final arrangement will be.
But before they are refitted they are moved out of the way again and left to
dangle to give him easier access for fitting something else first.

Figure 6.11 Moving cables

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MATERIAL INTERACTION 125

Given the complexity of the job, it is remarkable on how few occasions

that realignment of components is necessary. There is clearly a lot of
‘minded’ thought work that orients and links actions, stringing together
sequences of habitual action, although it is just about impossible for an
observer to know just how much conscious intentionality is being applied
at any one moment. To ask the actor would be to interrupt their work and
they would then have to recover what they can remember of what had been
in their consciousness … or not. It seems likely that material interaction
involves a constant shifting along a continuum from fully habitual action
to fully intentional action, with varying degrees of conscious intentionality
of act in any given action. In the nature of material interaction its charac-
teristic form is a continuous flow with meaning being taken up from the
objects in perception more or less without interruption – the intentional arc
of which Merleau-Ponty writes.
As when Ray spoke on the telephone, there are a few instances in our
corpus of data where technicians were moved to speak out loud as they
worked making apparent the shift from operative intentionality to an inter-
pretive mode to anyone in hearing range. In the following example Rob,
who was fitting a replacement exhaust pipe says, ‘that don’t line up straight
away’ (Tape 3 [Link]) – he is speaking partly to himself and partly to
the researcher and the wry comment refers not only to this pipe but how it
is fitting exhaust pipes in general.13 Then he stands away and looks at the
piece and its alignment from a different angle – he is reading the array of
objects that are not going together as it appeared they were designed to. At
this moment the section of exhaust pipe and its bracket are ‘unready to
hand’ and, in Heidegger’s phrase, the world underneath the car ‘announces
itself’ to Rob who is moved to utter a comment on that world. He shortly
returns to adjusting the nuts on the previous section to test the range of
movement of the two pieces of pipe to try to make sense of how it is meant
to fit onto the car. There are clearly a few moments of conscious reflection
on the meaning of the objects but it is closely followed by interpretation
that involves touching and moving the objects, trying out different orien-
tations between them.
The touchings, twistings, shakings and re-alignings of the loosely fitted
pipes happen too quickly to follow without the flow of action caught on
video but three moments from the action will show something of what is
involved (Figures 6.12–6.14). The problem is that the bracket on the pipe
needs to fit into the rubber mounting grommet on the underneath of the car
– but there is a gap too wide for any amount of ‘coaxing’ to bridge if the pipe
is to line up down the length of the car. Having twisted the pipe on in the
direction he expects it to go (Figure 6.12), he stands back to look from a dif-
ferent angle and sees that the support bracket sticking out at right angles to
the pipe (see Figure 6.13) is too short to fit into the rubber grommet mounted
on the car. He then begins to adjust both the section of pipe he has just fitted
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126 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

and the previous section of pipe to see if there is any way that the bracket and
grommet can be made to meet. There isn’t – and eventually he uses the
mounting bar that he took off the old exhaust pipe. The fitting of parts, espe-
cially parts such as exhaust pipes that are neither engineered finely nor fitted
firmly on the car (except at the manifold outlet), requires a considerable
amount of offering-up, lining-up, checking, adjusting, fiddling-with,
pushing, twisting and even bending. The manipulation of objects by hand is
a form of material interaction that is complex and fluid and often precedes
the interactions through the medium of a tool such as a spanner assembly.

Figure 6.12 Twisting the pipe

Figure 6.13 ‘That don’t line up straight away’

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MATERIAL INTERACTION 127

Figure 6.14 Moving the pipe

It is a frequent occurrence that as part of the continuing flow of the

work, the technician will stop, touch, peer at, shake or move objects to
check their state. This clearly involves an interpretative mode of interaction
in which nothing is being done to transform the objects, no physical force
is being applied. The interpretative mode is an interruption of the flow of
intentional interaction between the human and object – it is a type of inter-
action that involves consciously ‘reading’ the intentionality within the
object array through sight and touch to prepare for the next action that will
apply physical force to change the array of objects.
These two modes of material interaction – interpretative ‘reading’ of
the objects and ‘action on’ the objects that applies physical force to trans-
form them – may be simultaneous or they may be serial. Rob clearly paused
to look and think but then he appears to continue to look and think while
he touched and moved parts. The touching might have become action that
would realign the pipe as part of fitting so that it would be difficult to dis-
tinguish ‘reading’ from ‘action on’. It seems likely that these two modes of
material interaction, ‘reading’ and ‘action on’, are characteristic of interac-
tion with most material objects. The two modes of interaction are not
exactly contiguous with ‘operative intentionality’ and ‘act intentionality’
but the former is more likely to occur with ‘action on’ and the latter with
‘reading’. The mode of ‘reading’ involves not only the use of sight and
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128 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

touch but often the whole body that moves around objects, inhabits them
and alters their orientation temporarily. Sometimes tactile reading will
occur through other objects such as tools and protective gloves (as with
Merleau-Ponty’s feather or walking stick). In the case of Rob’s exhaust pipe,
the components were being supported by his body and he felt the orienta-
tion of one to another through the pipes and the socket spanner he is
holding in Figure 6.14.

Culture

As may already be apparent, the practices varied in different garages, even

when doing the same job or same sort of job. Ray worked as a single
owner/manager/technician in a garage that had equipment of a standard
common some twenty or so years in the past. Mike worked in the service
centre of a large dealership with up-to-the-minute equipment. These two
different environments constituted different material cultures although
they were both used effectively to achieve very similar material outcomes.
As we have seen, Ray used a pit to gain access to the underneath of his cars,
whereas in all the other garages in the study, hydraulic lifts were used to
raise cars off the ground to give access underneath. The task of changing a
ball-joint and a constant velocity boot were observed in other garages and
were undertaken with the car raised to just over waist height on a lift so that
the technician could stand rather than kneel while working. Ray’s use of the
‘persuader’ was also distinctive; it was not a regular tool but a length of pipe
that he had incorporated into his tool kit to extend the lever of his socket
set. In other garages we saw equally long levers being used but they were
manufactured for purpose and purchased to work with socket sets. There
were a number of other differences in the way that he worked – he used a
‘ball splitter’, a purpose-designed tool to break the ball-joint apart whereas
in another garage we saw a crowbar used for the same purpose. He also
used a special tool to stretch the gaiter over the constant-velocity joint
whereas elsewhere we saw the joint itself being separated before the gaiter
was put on. Perhaps most distinctively Ray used two spanners together in a
way that we did not see anywhere else; he inserted the jaws of one into the
jaws, another to lengthen the spanner and so exert extra leverage either to
finally tighten a nut (as in Figure 6.15) or to overcome static friction to get
a nut moving. This was not because he did not have other tools which
could have achieved the same leverage but it was a technique he had
acquired and utilized over years; it meant he could work with a small, light,
easy-to-use spanner and rather than change it for a different spanner could
simply extend it with another spanner within reach to start loosening or
finish tightening a nut.
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 129

Figure 6.15 Double spanner

The techniques of the body used in one garage varied from those in
another and appeared to be determined in part by the tools and equipment
available. But the techniques and experience of tool use and knowledge
acquired by the technician through their career also influenced how a task
was undertaken. In the dealership service centre where Mike worked, tech-
nicians were sent on courses that updated them with developments in the
design and manufacture of the brand of car they mainly worked on. Within
their workshop they had access to the manufacturer’s specialist tools, to
manuals on CDs and to a range of technicians with varying experience,
training and seniority. Mike consulted a more experienced technician at
one crucial point in refitting the engine and supervised a trainee technician
on the same job. Ray, however, has worked alone repairing cars for many
years which is a part of his being-in-the-world and an aspect of the way he
approaches material interaction. The economics of running his small busi-
ness do not extend to buying lots of new equipment to keep up with
changes elsewhere but that does not mean that he does not have appropri-
ate tools and techniques for the type of work he does and he is able to
borrow (and lend in return) special equipment from other local garages.
The major part of repair work involves direct material interaction in
which the technician uses their hands and body to work with the tools and
objects that are part of the car. The phenomenal field is largely constituted by
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130 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

these objects which are present to the perceiving body of the technician. One
of the reasons for studying closely how technicians work on cars is that it pre-
dominantly involves hand tools – spanners of a wide variety of sorts, screw-
drivers, levers, pliers, grips, and so on. This demonstrates the embodied
nature of the flowing, habitual practices used to respond to the intentional
nature of objects – a conversation of gestures as Mead has it. But
we have also seen how when things do not go smoothly, the habitual action
of the body is interrupted and the mind works consciously at interpreting the
meaning in the objects. I have referred to this conscious, reflective and inter-
pretive mode of perception as ‘reading’ the array of objects – very different
from Heidegger’s ‘circumspection’ as objects are taken up into action.
There is, however, reading of symbolic communication that supple-
ments the reading of the objects – textual meaning is used to enhance or
facilitate material interaction. It was noticeable that manuals were rarely
used to guide or organize the routine work in the repair garages but they
were consulted either for checking measurements (tolerances, torque set-
tings, volumes, and so on) or for helping out when things went wrong.
When balancing tyres onto wheels, for example, they are spun on a device
that calculates where and how much weight needs to be added to the rim
for the wheel to roll evenly; the information is presented as a figure in a
diagram on a screen that reacts precisely to sensors in the spinning mecha-
nism. Electronic devices were also used to ‘read’ the state of objects; they
produced symbolic information on a screen that would tell the technician
precisely what measured values were. In one instance where a modern car
would not start in a large dealership service centre, we observed the tech-
nician consulting a series of sources of textual information as he attempted
to diagnose the fault.
Initially the technician, Roger, consults a manual kept on a CD and
prints off a sheet that displays information about the electronic systems for
the car. He takes the sheet to his workbench and consults it before he starts
work; it contains a diagram and a list of explanations of codes. Then he
moves to the car and removes the cover from the fuse box under the dash-
board inside the car, where he finds a small card that is designed to tell him,
again through a diagrammatic representation of symbols, what the various
fuses are for and what their rating is. His eyes move backwards and forwards
between the card and the array of differently coloured fuse holders accord-
ing to their rating; he reads both the diagram and the array on the car (see
Figure 6.16).
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 131

Figure 6.16 Reading the fuse card

Having replaced the fuse card in its holder he removes another piece of
casing under the dash to reveal the electrical relays behind the fuses; to
make sense of them, he goes to his workbench where he again consults the
sheet printed out from the manual. Then he brings the sheet to the car
where he can again read it and read the array of relays on the car. On the
video tape we can see his head realign as his eyes move from the sheet to
the car and he uses the index finger of his left hand to ‘keep his place’ on
the relays he is reading, while his right hand holds the sheet from the
manual (see Figure 6.17).

Figure 6.17 Reading a sheet from the manual

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132 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

From this close reading of the car and the printout, Roger goes to an
office area where he consults the full workshop manual, scanning through
pages in the ring binder that include the one he has printed off from the
CD. However, his next move is to fetch an electronics diagnostic test rig
which is a computer with a touch-screen display on a trolley. The test rig
has a cable with a multi-point plug that can be inserted into a socket in the
car – the rig is mains-powered via another cable. To use the test rig, as when
moving between the manual sheet and the set of relays, eyes and finger
work together to find the screen he wants for this model that is headed
‘vehicle self-diagnosis’ with a menu for different groups of electronic func-
tions (see Figure 6.18).

Figure 6.18 Reading the electronic test rig

The test rig reads the vehicle for him … but it fails to identify a fault.
So Roger continues his own diagnostic reading of the car, going to the
engine compartment where he stands for a moment looking and thinking.
He then removes a cover from a group of plugs and relays; he touches these,
moving them from side to side slightly, checking that they are not loose,
removing one relay and one fuse, inspecting them and then replacing
them. None of these readings with eyes and fingers of manuals, screens or
arrays on the vehicle is successful in diagnosing the fault; it turned out to
be a displaced seal that was blocking the fuel line. It was a colleague who
spotted it, someone also used to diagnosing faults but not Roger who had
systematically followed the electrics through from switch-on point to the
engine.
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 133

Conclusion

By looking closely at how technicians interact with cars we can see some-
thing of the complexity that they take for granted in their everyday work.
Kusterer (1978) refers to the practical knowledge that is displayed in a
variety of types of work as ‘know-how’ to distinguish it from systematic or
scientific knowledge and we can see that these garage technicians demon-
strate that they have know-how.14 But we can say more than this because
their know-how takes a number of forms. First, at one level it is contained
within the body in the sense that bodily movements are smoothly co-ordi-
nated to achieve a particular task – such as undoing a nut – without there
having to be any conscious steering of the action. Although these sorts of
routine tasks involve a series of different types of action, often indicated by
the use of different types of tools, the technicians move smoothly from one
type of action to another within the task. These sets of actions I have
treated as habitual action in that the intentionality that underlies them
seems to be situated in the past, when the practice was learnt or the skill
acquired. In the present, intention is merely required to set the tasks going
and thereafter the process of interaction is guided by what Merleau-Ponty
calls ‘operative intentionality’ in which there is a flowing reciprocity
between the person and the objects they are interacting with – hands
turning spanner, spanner turning nut, nut becoming detached from thread.
But, second, even the operation of these habitual skills requires a certain
level of ‘intentionality of act’ to be present to interpret when to shift from
one type of action to another within the task – when to remove the ‘per-
suader’, when to alter the configuration of the spanner. The flow of the
material action follows a pattern of reciprocity between embodied tech-
nique and the intentionality embedded in objects that cues next actions.
Although the objects seem to ‘call out’ what is required next, the exchange
between objects and human appears more or less continuous unlike the
turn-taking of conversational human interaction.
However, third, we can say that ‘intentionality of act ’ comes to the fore-
front of material interaction when there is a problem that requires conscious
reflection. This is what happens when the wrong part has been delivered,
when the exhaust bracket does not line up or when the car won’t start. On
these occasions the technician moves into an interpretative or reflective
mode in which his reading of the objects is interrogative, seeking to identify
what has happened and what should happen. We might call this a diagnos-
tic mode except that this would conflict with the way ordinary action is
described by participants. Roger was ‘diagnosing a fault’ when searching
electrical circuits but Ray’s diagnosis that the wrong part had been sent was
almost instantaneous. Rob’s response to the misalignment of the exhaust
bracket and grommet was in between these two types of interpretation in
that despite quickly identifying a problem, he explored the nature of the
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134 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

problem for some time by moving, twisting and adjusting parts. Ray’s diag-
nosis was based on reading the object; he could see that the configuration of
bolt holes on the replacement part did not match that on the old part. Rob’s
reading of the exhaust pipe alignment involved sight and touch as he moved
the parts. Roger’s reading involved the sight and touch of objects (he moved
relays and circuits to check for a poor connection) but it also involved
reading symbolic and textual documents that in turn informed his reading
of the objects.
The car technicians’ work is distinctive in that it is precisely about
interacting with objects unlike those people whose worklives are primarily
about communicating through talk or writing. But unlike most people who
create objects in factories, the car technicians undertake work at a pace and
in a manner that they have control of and much of their work involves
hand tools and a wide range of embodied perceptual and motor skills. Their
work is not determined by a closely designed and planned production line
in which every work activity is prescribed and timed – although increas-
ingly their work is being penetrated by new technology that removes their
diagnostic skills and dictates what and when their actions should be. Even
so, the majority of their work requires a blend of judgement about the state
of an array of objects and embodied skills with which their actions can alter
the state of the objects.
Although much of the embodied capacity to interact with objects is
animal in origin, we have seen how the complexity of dealing with objects
requires a cultural context of acquired techniques in reading and respond-
ing to the intentions embedded in them. The skills demonstrated by car
repair technicians are learnt from parents and through play as well as from
formal training and watching other colleagues as they interact with objects.
Institutions such as training centres, government organizations and the
garage’s management guide the cultural acquisition and application of spe-
cific skills. The garages we studied all operated within general safety guide-
lines and industry standards and those that were part of larger organiza-
tions followed advice and guidance from their parent organizations. All the
garage technicians made use of manufacturers’ guidance, both in relation
to the cars they worked on and tools, equipment and spare parts. Both the
learnt skills and the proscriptions of institutions are oriented to responding
to the intentionality embedded in the physical form of the objects them-
selves. The meanings that technicians were able to attribute to the objects
that they worked with were derived from their culture – we would expect
them to be different in different situations as they were between garages
and technicians with different experiences (for an extreme contrast, see
Verrips and Meyer 2001).
The work of the car repair technicians is interesting because it is so
resistant to substitution by machines. The original manufacture of cars (and
of course spare parts) led the way, during the twentieth century, to the
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MATERIAL INTERACTION 135

devising of mechanical substitutes for human skill and effort in making

things. But the range of tasks involved, and particularly the wide range of
objects that must be interacted with, means that the repair of machines of
all sorts almost always continues to rely on human-object material interac-
tion (see also Orr 1996). The wide range of objects involved also means that
there is a high possibility of mismatch between them, as with the example
of the part that does not fit or does not work as intended with other com-
ponents. It is the need to cope with this wide range of possible material sit-
uations that requires the modifiable intentionality of the human to be a
guiding element in the interaction between all the material entities. The
embodied capacity of the human, able to adapt physically, in mode of
intentionality and with creative imagination to the material situation as it
unfolds, is characterized by this type of work. The technicians demonstrate
the human ability to take up a wide range of tools (including hand tools,
machine tools and electronic devices) in ordinary workaday uses. Although
much is well practised and repetitive, car repair work also shows the varia-
tions in cultural specificity and individual ingenuity that are brought to
material interactions of all sorts. This why car repair work, albeit in an inten-
sified and sustained form, exemplifies the nature of human interaction with
material objects and demonstrates the routine interface between human
beings and technology and between human beings and their material
culture.
This is very much how all of us deal with objects as in everyday life; we
look at, handle and use them, although the interactions will tend to be
briefer and involve less complex procedures. Whether putting paper in a
filing cabinet, loading a dishwasher, emptying a shopping bag, driving a car
or programming a video recorder, we are engaging bodily with the objects
that we live with. In pre-modern cultures, engagement with the material
environment would have involved much more interaction with the
natural, living forms of plants and animals, of the land and things derived
directly from the environment. But in late modern cultures, the material
environment is predominantly artificial and increasingly technical, requir-
ing that we interact with more complex objects in ways that follow patterns
that have been intentionally built into them. We grow up learning patterns
of material interaction appropriate to our culture, just as we learn to speak
the language that surrounds us. Reading objects, anticipating how they will
respond and acting with objects in an artificial material environment are
characteristic of how we engage with material culture in late modernity.
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7 Materiality and society

Introduction

To be human is to live in a material world in which our experience is always

grounded in the actions of our bodies in relation to other material entities
within our world. One of the features of human societies is that they create
material entities and engage with the material world in ways that are far
more sophisticated and complex than those of other animal species. As
material civilization has progressed, so has the material environment which
human beings have created for themselves. The human capacity to engage
with the world in ways that shape the material environment must have its
foundation in the embodied characteristics of the species; the particular
arrangement and orientation of senses, especially sight and touch, the
motor capacity of fingers, hands and limbs, and, perhaps most importantly,
the capacity of mind that imagines, anticipates and communicates. These
biological characteristics have enabled human interaction with the material
world but it is the social arrangements of human beings that have both
created the material world in which we live and have developed particular
ways of acting in that world.
The social sciences have by and large tended to regard the material
world as a matter for the physical sciences to be concerned with and have
focused their attention on the immaterial features of cultures and societies.
This has included studying the symbolic meanings of the material world
when it becomes a vehicle of signs that are recognizable independent of
their substantive, material form – these are the quasi-linguistic meanings of
objects that can be ‘decoded’ within a semiological system. But what has
tended to be overlooked are the more intimate and embodied relationships
with objects that communicate the culture through practices that are mean-
ingful to those who participate in them. What I have called ‘material inter-
action’ responds to the intentional form of artefacts in following a cultural
practice. In Chapter 6 I looked at some of the features of the interactive cul-
tural practices to be found in a repair garage. Here we can see learnt and
embodied techniques being used to work with a range of specific artefacts
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MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY 137

within a cultural idiom; the technicians are familiar with the way the
objects around them are designed and manufactured and their embodied
techniques are appropriate to them. This type of material interaction is not
only characteristic of work situations such as the garage, but is characteris-
tic of everyday interaction with material objects in the culture at large. The
activities of domestic living, of moving about the society, of communicating
and of interacting with other human beings also involve interaction with
material objects in very similar ways; they depend on culturally acquired
skills that are manifested in particular embodied practices to realize human
intentions through the use of objects. There is an idiomatic relationship
between series of objects and bodily practices so that the practices can
respond to and realize the intentions in the objects. For example, the types
of tools and the ways of using them vary somewhat from garage to garage
although the ease with which trained technicians move from one setting to
another suggests that this requires more of a shift in accent than of idiom.
However, the embodied techniques appropriate to sewing are within a dif-
ferent idiom from those appropriate to driving a car and different again
from those appropriate to replacing the ball-joints on a modern car. The
idioms of material interaction vary over time and from place to place but,
most importantly, they vary according to the types of objects involved.
We interact with material objects at work and at home, at rest and at
play; the knives and forks that in western culture are part of eating many
meals shape our interaction with the food we are bringing to our bodies and
so affect our behaviour. How the implements are used in conjunction com-
bined with the learnt practices of personal table manners, will provide a
material context for the social interaction between us and whoever else is
at the table. Using cutlery that is differently shaped or weighted from that
which is familiar will remind us that we are not at home and can add an
emotional quality to our interaction with the objects of the meal. The
teaching of table manners and the acquisition and maintenance of cutlery
are things undertaken usually within the household but both are connected
through our broader social contacts to sensibilities of distinction and strat-
ification. Experiences outside the home, at school, at the homes of others,
in public restaurants and cafés, will alter and amend our behaviour and atti-
tudes. It may only be in these contexts that we encounter sets of cutlery for
different courses, (fish knives and dessert forks, grapefruit spoons or steak
knives) and so have to acquire new techniques. Confronted with a pear
with its skin on, or the fish with bones, we will have to adapt our practised
techniques and find new ones to suit the occasion. And there will be occa-
sions when, although used to cutlery, we will have to negotiate dealing
with food directly with our hands – to eat the sandwich or the hamburger
– while avoiding contaminating our fingers and clothes with loose food. In
some cultures of course, eating with fingers or bread or chopsticks would be
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138 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

the standard culturally acquired bodily technique and would lead to a dif-
ferent idiom of material interaction for eating meals.
In Chapter 2, we saw that while the predominant interest of social
theory has been in the patterns of relationship between human beings that
constitute society, there is some recognition of the impact of the relation-
ship with the material world on how societies take on particular forms. In
exploring the idea of material civilization we saw that Marx’s analysis of the
changes from handicraft to industrial production were attentive to the
impact of changes in material culture on the social life of people. A similar
theme underlies Veblen’s analysis of the ‘instinct of workmanship’; in both
Marx and Veblen we find an account of the emergence of modern societies
with distinctive patterns of economic and social relationships that are
linked to the shift from the handicraft manufacture of goods to machine-
based production. The development of machine technology is itself a
product of society in which ideas about the nature of the material world
and the possible ways that it can be manipulated are shared between
members of the society who are otherwise unconnected. As an account of
material civilization, however, the tradition of social theory has been reti-
cent in exploring how changes in the material world affect human societies
beyond the process of production. There are suggestive remarks in Simmel’s
writing about modernity and in Veblen’s recognition of the significance of
materiality in marking social distinctions but it was to the historical per-
spective of Braudel that I turned for a recognition of the significance of
materiality in the everyday lives of people. The accounts of Braudel and
other historians of everyday life provide clues about the dramatic transfor-
mation in the practices and activities of ordinary existence that came about
during the nineteenth century as a result of the changes to the material
context in which people in industrialized countries live.
In Chapter 3 we followed some of the concerns about the nature of this
relationship between technology and society that have emerged since the
transformation of societies through industrialization and mechanization.
There is a fear that machines could take over; their importance in the life
of modern societies has become so great and their ramifications have now
extended beyond the comprehension of any single individual so that they
seem to be potentially overwhelming. And yet while machines take on
greater levels of autonomy and become increasingly complex, they have
nonetheless remained subordinate to the collective will of the members of
a society. In Chapter 4 the relationship between artefacts and people as
individuals within a social context was explored to see how it might best be
understood. As objects take on more significance in individual and social
lives, it is difficult not to think of them as having some form of independ-
ent agency. But unlike other animals or animist spirits, artefacts are only
invested with agency through humans who make, modify or draw them
into social actions. The meaning of objects is not simply in what they
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MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY 139

signify but in what they do or how they alter what humans do. Culture is
mediated not simply through messages in linguistic or quasi-linguistic
forms but is also distributed through the artefacts that shape the actions of
everyone in late modern societies.
To try to unravel at a rather deeper level the relationship between
human being and material entities in Chapter 5 I explored the work of the
phenomenological philosophers Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty who recog-
nize that the essence of being-in-the-world is first and foremost an embod-
ied and material being. The contents of our experience are not exclusively
physical but there is always a physical and material context for human exis-
tence. Our engagement with that material context is as a result embodied
and material in itself; we engage with the world through our bodies. The
perceptual apparatus that we utilize is not simply biological but is shaped
by our experience, including our cultural experience, and the material
world with which we interact is also shaped by the culture. Although we
interact with that material world on a routine, taken-for-granted basis, this
serves to obscure the impact that the culture at large has had in shaping just
what that world is and how it works with our bodies.
Some of these themes were exposed to empirical and concrete explor-
ation in Chapter 6 when I examined some of the processes involved in
material interaction – the engagement of human bodies with artefacts. Here
we saw how tools can enhance the motor and perceptual capacities of
humans as technicians used series of tools to undertake routine repairs. The
habits of their bodies were attuned to the tools and to the objects that they
were working on; for them, this material world was a familiar culture in
which the ways in which objects would respond was largely predictable.
There are occasions when the designed and made capacities of objects did
not fulfil expectations and the technicians had to resort to techniques of
reflective consciousness to work out how to proceed next. Even when most
demanding of mind, the relationship between human and object was phys-
ically interactive involving trial and error, adjustment and re-orientation of
objects. This showed how handcraft is still central within a machine-ori-
ented industrialized world. Power tools were used by the technicians to take
the burden of physical effort out of their actions but unlike the impact of
machine tools on the industrial workforce that Marx described, within the
modern repair garage the individual human continues to locate and guide
the tools. The interaction between humans and artefacts in the garages was
in a work context but the principles of habituated routine actions, shaped
by the way that the objects had been shaped, are characteristic of human
interaction with objects in everyday life within and beyond work.
But there were departures from the model of human–object interaction
suggested by thinking of them in terms of handcrafts, workmanship, skill
and so on. Within the work, textual devices substituted for the knowledge
and memory of the body and electronic devices intervened in communicating
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140 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

and information gathering. Electronic test equipment ‘reads’ the detailed

state of physical objects and, in some instances, obviates the complex
embodied skill of judging their state. The telephone, combined with com-
puter database equipment, enables the flow of work and objects such as
spare parts to and from the workshop. The light touch of the technician’s
finger on a screen, eerily reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’,
brings to life a different mode of material interaction. The phenomenological
engagement of the body with the material world is extended with these
devices beyond the time and place of the technician, the tools and the car
being worked on (see Chapter 6, Figures 6.10 and 6.18).

Design and intention

I have suggested that intentions are ‘designed’ into objects and this would
suggest that designers have a particularly important role in shaping mate-
rial culture. But while they may on occasion innovate and shape cultural
practices, design is in general far more likely to reflect the contemporary
culture, picking up aesthetic ideas, current styles and tendencies within
material culture. Harvey Molotch (2003) has recently cast a sociological
eye over the institutions and influences on the design process in modern
societies; the effect of his work is to undermine any idea that individuals
intentionally create material objects to have specific effects. Rather than
trace intentionality back to the designer, it would be more appropriate to
recognize the influence of corporate interests that produce design briefs,
the consumer studies that identify a ‘need’ as well as the aesthetic and style
influences from art, design history and contemporary trends. Designers are
themselves immersed within the culture from which they learn their skills
and develop their ideas and it is perhaps better to see them as the media-
tors of the culture in the way that Herbert Blumer suggested with his argu-
ment that the fashion elite express a ‘collective taste’ (1969b). He argued
that the network of designers, producers, commentators and buyers of
fashion were expressing a cultural tendency, catching an emerging sensibility
of aesthetics and desire, rather than forming it.
The institutional nature of fashion design that Blumer identified, in
contrast to the early commentators on fashion like Simmel (1971b) and
Veblen (1964a), suggests that feedback mechanisms have emerged within
this sphere of society that sense cultural change including the desire for
more change. During the twentieth century design, the intentional creation
of form in material objects, has, however, changed. More objects are likely
to be ‘designed’ rather than simply shaped in manufacture as their form
and structure are specified in a prior and separate process. The handcraft
tradition meant that design was a part of manufacture and often responsive
to the specific situation and end user (couture, tailoring, coach building,
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MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY 141

windows and wood panelling in buildings). During the twentieth century

design became progressively standardized and separated from its specific
application (for example, the ‘designer suit’, pre-formed double glazing – see
Forty 1990 on standardization). Partly through the introduction of machine-
based tools that have obviated handcraft skills, manufacture has been separ-
ated from use to follow the instrumental logic of standardization (see Forty
1990). But this has in turn led to attempts to reconnect design with use as
consumer research and machine tools that can adapt to specific and person-
alized specifications have been developed.
The feedback between design and use has extended beyond the indi-
vidual user to take in the wider effects of unintended consequences in
design. Nigel Whiteley (1993) for example, argues forcefully against the
dominant ‘consumer-led’ design agenda and for a green, responsible,
ethical and feminist agenda that looks beyond the isolated relationship
between an object and its user. One of the resources that Whiteley draws on
is the responsive consumer who challenges design on social and ethical
grounds to generate a critical perspective. A similarly critical perspective
inspires Elizabeth Shove’s (2003) overview of the co-evolution of cultural
habits, technical systems and the material objects all of which are involved
in air-conditioning systems, domestic laundry and modern bathrooms. But
what she finds is an inevitability of increasingly wasteful consumption as
technical possibilities are exploited in the name of personal convenience
and comfort. Rather than adopting the ideology of the green consumer,
Shove attempts to identify a reversing effect on the co-evolution spiral by
challenging the values behind it; ‘effort should focus on what it means to
be clean and comfortable’ (2003: 198 – emphasis added). She is arguing that
the solution to wasteful consumption does not lie in directives to designers
or invocations to consumers but in a wholesale questioning of cultural
values that unpacks the intentions embedded in the artefacts, systems and
practices of everyday life.
The state of material civilization has become a topic of popular culture
as we try to counterbalance the separation of intentionality in the manufac-
ture of objects and our use of them. Magazines and television encourage us
to rediscover domestic skills of cooking and cleaning, and handcraft skills
such as DIY, gardening and decoration. We are taught through these media
– or more precisely re-taught – how to re-shape our bodies, revise our choice
of clothing and re-cover lost fitness. The material world of our everyday
lives is, by and large, taken for granted as we move through it but our
culture is increasingly attentive to the significance that material interaction
has on our lives as well as on the material world we inhabit. It is, however,
professional areas of material interaction that are most likely to change the
material qualities of our lives. In the sphere of medicine, genetic engineering,
advances in keyhole surgery, biogenics and nanotechnology are opening up
previously unimaginable transformations in everyday material lives.
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142 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

Reducing illness and disability for the bodies of individuals is already the
most significant transformation in material civilization over the last
hundred years – the future holds even more possibilities. Material interac-
tion depends on bodily capacities so that any reduction of impairment is
an increase in the capacity for material interaction. The same principle
holds true for the second most significant transformation in material civi-
lization during the last hundred years which is the transformation of the
means of warfare and violence. The ways of bringing death and injury to
other people have been extended and been refined so that some countries
have ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that they fear so much that they try to
dissuade other countries from acquiring them. Giving up such weapons is
not seen as a powerful bargaining tool, so lesser ‘field’ weapons are
deployed to ensure compliance. These are largely useless against the politi-
cal activist who resorts to making their own bodies into a weapon to maim
and kill, often without discriminating between enemy, ally or bystander.
The intentionality behind the suicide bomb is palpable but the intentions
are often unclear and the unintended consequences overlooked in the
fervour of what we must understand as despair.

Material civilization in late modernity

All human societies are material societies in that the artefacts produced
within a culture shape and are shaped by the social actions within that
culture. But since the industrial revolution, material civilization has devel-
oped apace. The workshop model of human/object interaction remains; in
the garages we see human bodies working on objects to change them, often
using tools as intermediaries to facilitate that transformation. But while
this model persists both in our everyday lives and in some aspects of pro-
ductive work within late capitalism, it is undergoing radical changes. For
many people the complexity of the cultural intentions embedded within
the object is not revealed to the person interacting with it. This is what the
actor-network theorists would refer to as a ‘black-box’ scenario in which
the workings of objects or a network are unavailable to those who use
them. The object has the capacity to transcend the human user’s own
embodied materiality but in ways that can be quite mysterious. This is
often what is meant by the word ‘machine’ in which the object takes on
some human capacities without requiring its user to understand how. Such
objects are not new; the camera, the telegraph, the telephone, the train, the
motor car, the aeroplane, all transformed human perceptual and motor
capacities in the realm of ordinary life to extend the range of transforma-
tions of human action. But the communication and informational devices
of the electronic age – the telephone and the computer as interconnected
networked systems – have interposed in material life to produce a further
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MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY 143

transformatory impact. Even in the workshop of the modern garage such

devices extend the field of material interaction beyond the directly embodied
field as we saw with the telephone and the touch-screen computer.
There are then a series of transformations of the embodied state of
material interaction that have developed in late modern material civiliza-
tion that extend the sphere of material interaction and its social impact.

An increase in the number of objects with which we interact

In the western industrialized world we have more interactions with increas-
ingly different types of objects. The scenes of our domestic life – the
kitchen, the living room, the study – have more and varied types of objects
as we add new technologies to ancient ones. Alongside the traditional
implements of pens, writing paper and the sketching pad, we can add
cameras, computers and printers. Books, toys and newspapers do not dis-
appear as we add televisions, DVD players, video games and other enter-
tainment systems. The mixing bowl, the cooker and the chopping board are
not made redundant as they are joined in the kitchen by food processors,
micro-wave ovens and a myriad of other devices. Many of the items of
equipment are serially acquired; cars for each member of the household;
radios and telephones for each room.
Our culture is fascinated by the old as well as the new so we hoard
mementoes of the past lives of our families and acquire antique or merely
old objects to furnish and decorate our homes. What was once ‘rubbish’
(Thompson 1979) is recycled, not so much to avoid waste as to maintain
continuity with our cultural past. Museums and collections gather and
organize the history of our material civilization, enabling us to marvel
at how far we have come; the equipment of just a generation ago has
become outmoded and of interest because of its contrast with what we
use now.

The objects are more complex

Both individual items and systems become more ‘machinic’ and the likeli-
hood of the user knowing how they work reduces as functionality
increases.1 Electrical and electronic components increase motor and
memory capacity in individual objects and timers, regulators and feedback
loops control systems within objects and within our enclosed environ-
ments. In my kitchen there are digital clocks integrated into control
systems in the micro-wave, the regular oven and the radio. The central
heating or alarm system in an office will have timing and regulating sensors
which respond to environmental shifts. The interaction between individual
objects such as the telephone, the computer and the washing machine are
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144 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

interconnected with systems – electricity, communication, fresh and waste

water – beyond the home or workplace where they operate.2
Yet still the automatic and independent function of these systems does
not replace the traditional manipulation of material objects as we continue
to burn wood, send letters and collect rain water for the garden which we
distribute with a watering can. The types of material interaction with the
new complex objects is generally limited – the touch of a finger on a button
still requires hand and eye co-ordination but the reading of digital or
textual information has become of greater significance. Negotiating drop-
down menus or sequences of buttons that we must learn has increasingly
replaced the more manual interaction with traditional tools and devices.
Intention is embedded as functionality within the device and is less avail-
able to being adapted or variably interpreted by the user.

The range of materials has increased

The twentieth century saw the most dramatic developments in new types of
plastic materials that progressively brought a massive increase in the range
of durability, touch, tensile quality and colours to mouldings of all sorts. Not
only are the bristles of my toothbrush of different colours and frictional
effects, the handle incorporates different plastic materials for strength, flexi-
bility and graspability. Metal alloys (stainless steel, aluminium, titanium)
have been developed to compete with plastics for lightness, strength and
durability. A metal casing (for a computer, say, or a camera) continues to
signify the strength and durability that early plastic mouldings did not have
and other materials also retain their traditional qualities, both aesthetic and
physical. Wood in all its varieties is still a popular medium for artefacts,
including those with structural demands like the roofs of houses. Glass and
ceramics continue to be popular media in both traditional and new forms.

Objects as an interface between humans

Clothes and adornment have acted as an interface between humans probably
as long as human cultures have existed and writing as a material means of
communication for millennia. But by the end of the second millennium
the telephone and the Internet-connected computer had established new
modes of interface and interaction. The mobile video phone summarizes
the confusion of embodied presence through image and talk with physical
absence that characterizes much human interaction in contemporary
culture. The distanciation of time and space through electronic media is
changing the nature of material interaction with narrowly directed visual
contact and minimal tactility. The limitations of such devices, however,
remind us that at its fullest, human interaction is not simply about com-
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MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY 145

munication but is itself an embodied material interaction of touch and

co-action such as cooking and eating a meal together.

Objects as substitutes for humans

Latour’s concept of ‘delegation’ points to how tasks that we might delegate
to a human can be delegated instead to objects like the automatic door
closer (see Chapter 4). Such substitution of human action has become a
feature of material civilization in the industrialized world. Men with picks
and shovels are replaced by a mechanical digger, women and men with
dishcloths and tea-towels by the industrial dishwasher in a hospital. Some
objects substitute for the capacity or effort of the individual (spectacles, the
electrical wheelchair, the automatic door) – capacities that another human
might have substituted for.
During the twentieth century we became familiar with the ‘labour-
saving device’ that substitutes for human effort, strength and manual skill
but in the twenty-first century we are seeing increasing substitution of
humans and interaction by communication systems (e.g. the menu system
for information via telephones, Internet pages to find information and
buying goods and services). Behind such substitutes there lies human inten-
tion in the design of the machine or system or in the making of certain
decisions as it is operated, but the intentions become embedded within the
‘system’, making it more difficult to challenge. Even so, the substitution is
not yet so complete as to enable automatic agents to make decisions or
exercise final judgements in the way that was feared by some critics of tech-
nology and science fiction writers. Most substitutions have replaced human
roles that, while they had the status of employment, no one would regard
as appealing – who chooses to be a doorman?

More low-level maintenance of objects

Substitute objects are very good at replacing certain types of human actions
– such as making cars or calculating the payroll – but are not so good at
other types of actions such as repairing cars or gathering the data that
makes up the payroll. As Marx warned, employers will substitute for skilled
employees wherever they can to reduce the market value of the skill. But
some less skilled jobs are not so easy to replace because they rely on such a
complex range of intentional movements or perceptions that need to be
finely tuned to the situation. The most characteristic of these is cleaning
and the more objects there are, the more things there are that need to be
cleaned and, until nanotechnology changes the susceptibility of surfaces to
become contaminated, there will be many cleaning and maintenance tasks
associated with the materiality of society.
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146 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

More objects are both cultural and practical

The application of design has brought more and more objects to be cultural
artefacts that symbolize the current state of fashion and taste while at the
same time being practical objects that facilitate human actions. The car is
an example of such an object that during the twentieth century became
increasingly subject to design, both in its aesthetic and sensual appeal and
in its ability to realize the functional requirements of a mobility device
(Gartman 1994). The range of objects that can fulfil a role in our everyday
lives is now so extensive that we can choose on cultural grounds rather than
simply choosing the tool for the job. One of the reasons for studying mate-
rial interaction within car repair garages is that decisions about form are
determined by function (the alignment of holes must be right for the spare
part to fit). However, in many material interactions we can choose the
object for the purpose on aesthetic and cultural grounds: the kitchen spice
grinder may be electrically powered and of modern design, it may be a
hand-powered traditional design bought on holiday abroad, or it may be a
contemporary pestle and mortar echoing the standard, almost ubiquitous,
design from a couple of centuries ago.

Conclusion – material society

What Braudel noticed was that civilization is characterized as much by the

material relations that enable the flow of everyday life as by the political
relations that distribute resources and determine life chances. The resources
and the life chances are ultimately realized in material existence. And the
manifestation of material civilization is in the embodied relations between
human beings and the objects they live with. The relations are at once
tactile and visual, practical and symbolic – the impact of the ‘culture’
cannot be separated from the impact of functional use. Material civilization
is shaped by the objects we interact with. I have argued that sociology needs
to attend to the changes in material civilization that have shifted the
agenda from Marx’s concern with production, via the analysis of consump-
tion to the way that objects affect individual social lives and the life of our
society. While the changes that have characterized material civilization in
the twentieth century are not each in themselves of great significance, I
would suggest that together they amount to a change in society that is as
important as the transformation in the class structure or the progress of
individualization – but it has hardly been studied.
To engage with the material stuff that surrounds us is to unlock the
human agency that has been ‘congealed’ within it. To interact with objects
is to confront our society by releasing their hypostatized cultural content by
making them ours, or as Miller puts it: ‘Consumption as work may be
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MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY 147

defined as that which translates the object from an alienable to an inalien-

able condition’ (1987: 190). Theories of consumption have addressed the
social significance of the economic act of consumption as a way of symboli-
cally marking class and group boundaries. What they have told us little about
is how our everyday routine interactions with the material world shape what
it is to be a member of a late modern society. The habitus of the late modern
individual is more than ever constituted by material things that are appro-
priated through the senses and actions of the body. Whereas for previous
material civilizations, the material world would have been predominantly
‘natural’ and the social world was organized to ‘dominate’ and ‘exploit’ it, in
late modern society the culture of materiality shapes the social world, medi-
ating relations between individuals but most especially those between indi-
viduals and the broader society. The rapidity of change in material culture in
late modernity means that it transforms far more quickly than languages can
evolve, reversing the dominance of older age groups over younger, achieving
its impact as much through its practical uses as through its capacity as a
vehicle for signification. As children teach their parents how to use the func-
tionality of, say, a mobile phone, they are drawing on an acquired bodily
capacity to adapt to objects that have been made from a set of synthetic
materials designed for their purpose, that have multiple functionality and
aesthetic and ergonomic styling that varies between types. The mobile phone
provides an interface between humans but it can substitute for them when
they are not there, acting autonomously in accord with how it has been set
to answer, record or divert calls. The mobile phone undoubtedly has created
practical uses for itself within the everyday lives of many people in ways that
could not have been precisely planned or intended by the most prescient
engineer/entrepreneur. And yet as an object that has supremely symbolized
the changing nature of material civilization, it has also come to be a bearer
of signs of social status and worthiness for a wide variety of people.
What the changes in material culture have produced is a society that
we confront not so much directly through our interactions with its
members or leaders but through our interaction with the material world
that surrounds us. As we interact with the objects that we confront every-
day in our lives, few of us can any longer claim to be confronting nature –
we are confronting the society that has designed and placed those objects
around us. It is in these objects that the stable, consistent ‘Other’ of society
is routinely manifest to us, providing the social background against which
our warm human and sociable interactions take place. In the western indus-
trialized world we have fashioned the embodied world we live in and in
that sense we live in a material society.
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Notes

1 The sociality of things

1 The emphasis is in the original in this quotation and in all other quo-
tations throughout the book unless explicitly stated otherwise.
2 La technique du corps incorpore les objets matériels. Une raquette de
tennis, les roues de la bicyclette, la proue du bateau ou les spatules des
skis vont prolonger le corps et devenir des capteurs sensoriels … Les
objets matériels sont partie prenante de la pratique corporelle.
3 See e.g. Heath 1986; Heath and Luff 2000; Heath et al. 2000; Hindmarsh
and Heath 2000.
4 The project, ‘Car Care: The Professional Repair and Maintenance of the
Private Car’, was conducted at the University of East Anglia and funded
by ESRC Small Grant No: R00023370. The study involved fieldwork in
five local garages of different sizes and organizational structure over a
period of seven months in 2001/2. The principal form of data gathered
was the video of repair and maintenance work as it proceeded normally;
the research was designed not to interfere with the flow of ordinary
commercial work. For further information, see Dant and Bowles 2002b;
2003.

2 Material civilization

1 ‘Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and

so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflex of
the movement in opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature,
and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final
merging into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of
nature’ (Engels 1940: 206).
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NOTES 149

2 ‘By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing

their actual material life’ (Marx and Engels 1974: 42).
3 ‘In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of
the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages’ (Marx
1976: 548).
4 ‘Their growing wealth, and the relatively diminished number of workers
required to produce the means of subsistence, begets both new luxury
requirements and the means of satisfying them … In other words the
production of luxuries increases’ (Marx 1976: 573).
5 ‘The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the per-
ception of it. The object of art – like every other product – creates a
public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not
only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object’
(Marx 1973: 92).
6 In arguing that ‘Marx de-emphasized consumption’, Miller refers to this
as ‘a highly unsatisfactory section’ of the Grundrisse (1991: 48).
7 See, however, Miller (1991) who discusses these themes from an
Hegelian perspective in terms of ‘sublation’ and ‘alienation’ and Slater
(1997) who focuses on ‘alienated needs’ and my own discussion of use-
value in relation to ‘fetishism’ (Dant 1999).
8 For a fascinating account of the continuities and discontinuities between
Merleau-Ponty’s and Bourdieu’s theories of practice, see Crossley (2001).

3 Technology and modernity

1 One of the reasons that the study of material interaction discussed in

Chapter 6 was undertaken in car repair centres was that the technicians
work with the range from simple hand tools, to machine tools, to more
or less autonomous tools.
2 The idea that tools and machines are extensions of the bodily and social
capacities of human beings is often associated with McLuhan ([1964]
1994) but Mumford was thinking through the cultural consequences of
objects as extensions of humans, thirty years earlier.
3 See Ihde (1990: 59–64) for a discussion of the clock in Mumford that
connects it to Heidegger’s concept of time.
4 Manuals provide information on the amount of time a certain task on a
certain car should take, as well as the exact measurements and specifi-
cations of components – they are seldom used for ‘how-to’ knowledge.
Most routine tasks that the technicians undertake they are familiar with
and while they use a checklist, they do not follow written instructions.
5 In one service chain a sequence for undertaking servicing was estab-
lished not by the technician, not by the foreman or the manager but by
‘head office’ – a group of managers representing the company. The
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150 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

respondent telling us this reported that the sequence changed from

time to time; technicians were able to influence the specified sequence
of operations by commenting on their experience but were ultimately
expected to follow what the company specified. The logic of the
sequence attempted to follow scientific principles; by sequencing tasks
to fit with the flow of movement around the vehicle, the time and effort
to do the job could be reduced.
6 ‘Safety and order are, to a large extent, guaranteed by the fact that man
has learned to adjust his behaviour to the other fellow’s down to the
most minute detail. All men act equally rationally, that is to say, accord-
ing to the standards which insure the functioning of the apparatus and
thereby the maintenance of their own life’ (Marcuse 1998: 51).
7 He defines technique as the ‘totality of methods rationally arrived at and
having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field
of activity’ (Ellul 1965: xxxiii).
8 ‘Technical codes define the object in strictly technical terms in accordance with
the social meaning it has acquired’ (Feenberg 1999: 88). Drawing on
studies of the history and sociology of technology, Feenberg argues that
technical codes are fixed when a particular technology is chosen for
development because it meets certain social standards. There are now a
number of carefully researched accounts of the social exigencies that led
to particular technologies: the safety bicycle (Pinch and Bijker 1987),
the electric refrigerator (Schwartz-Cowan 1985), and the gasoline car
(Schiffer 2000) are a few.

4 Agency, affordance and actor-networks

1 On peut par example porter des sous-vêtements noirs et des vêtements

colorés, ou l’inverse. De même, les matières soyeuses peuvent être
tournées entre le corps et les matières rêches dirigées vers l’extérieur, ou
le contraire. Enfin, l’amplitude des étoffes du dessus peut recouvrir des
vêtements serrés comme un emmaillotage secret. La dynamique du vête-
ment du dessus – plus ‘sociable’ – et du vêtement du dessous – plus
‘intime’ – raconte l’histoire des états émotifs et affectifs de chacun à
chaque moment.
2 ‘La forme spécifique de symbolisation mise en jeu dans le vêtement est
d’abord sensori-affective-motrice.’
3 ‘Certains hommes semblent d’ailleurs passer plus de temps à s’occuper
de la carrosserie qui recouvre leur véhicle que de la peau a qui recouvre
leur corps.’
4 ‘Les objets ne sont pas seulement des prolongements de nos organes
moteurs ou sensoriels. Ils sont, plus fondamentalement, des prolonge-
ments du notre esprit.’
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NOTES 151

5 Gibson makes clear that he was, to some degree, influenced by the

gestalt psychologists including K. Koffka, who were also an influence on
Merleau-Ponty (see Chapter 5).
6 For a commentary see McCarthy (1984) and Dant (1999: 120–3).
7 Sharrock and Coulter made the same point in relation to bananas, e-coli
bacteria and mothers (1998: 155).
8 Interestingly this has a cultural dimension in that chimps in one area
will fashion and use twigs in one way to get at termites while chimps in
another area will use the twigs differently for the same purpose; they
learn the ‘local’ material civilization of their group. Whiten and his col-
leagues identified 39 different ‘cultural’ behaviours that varied between
local groups of chimpanzees (1999).
9 Latour does have some photographs of the Aramis transit system (1996)
and a few photographs that are integral to a description of humans
interacting with objects in scientific fieldwork (1999).
10 Latour’s position is of course precisely in contrast to Weber’s discussion
of the action of firing a gun where the issue is one of whether we can
understand the motive as rational or not – for Weber the status of the
gun is not worthy of discussion (1978: 9).

5 Being-with materiality

1 ‘Dasein’ translates literally as ‘Being there’ with the connotation of

referring to the existence of a person (Heidegger 1962: 27, fn1).
2 I am most grateful to Andrea Kenkmann who tried hard to make me see
the subtle complexity of Heidegger’s use of German – the failure in
understanding remains of course mine.
3 As it was for the technicians in the ‘Car Care’ project – see Chapter 1,
note 4.
4 Dreyfus translates Zuhandenheit as ‘availableness’ which is slightly less
clumsy and more directly meaningful in English than the usual transla-
tion of ‘ready-to-hand’ (1991: xi).
5 Dreyfus translates Vorhandenheit as ‘occurrentness’ instead of the usual
‘presence-at-hand’ (1991: xi).
6 Of course the sociologist as a sociologist first appropriates the environ-
ment as ready-to-hand by seeing it as a ‘setting’ in which ‘work’ proceeds
and ‘interactions’ take place … and so on.
7 See Chapter 6, Figure 6.8.
8 See Chapter 6, Figures 6.10 and 6.14.
9 Dreyfus translates Heidegger’s wordplay Ent-fernung as ‘dis-stance’ rather
than ‘de-severance’ which he regards as ‘unnecessarily strange’ (1991:
xi).
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152 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

10 Unlike Heidegger whose work is resolutely philosophical, Merleau-Ponty’s

writing engages with debates in clinical psychology and elsewhere in his
writing with matters of politics, culture – especially language – and
society. John O’Neill (1970, 1985) has for some time been pointing out
how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can contribute to sociological
understanding and more recently Nick Crossley (2001) has explored his
analysis of embodiment in relation to identity, desire and habit.
11 There are other limits to the ability of animals to achieve the connec-
tion between perception and action that is normal for humans.
Merleau-Ponty discusses Koehler’s studies with chimpanzees that iden-
tify their limitations in terms of linking perceptions to action and
things: for example, while good at balancing themselves they are not
good at balancing things (1983: 113–20).
12 Body awareness – Merleau-Ponty uses the term to distinguish his con-
ception from psychological versions of body image that see it as a
product of sensory information (1962: 99).
13 Writing in French, Merleau-Ponty plays on the double meaning of the
word sens which translates not only as ‘sense’ but also as ‘meaning’ – it
can also translate as ‘direction’ or ‘way’ and Merleau-Ponty also some-
times uses this third dimension of meaning in the word.
14 Sartre makes a similar point (1991: 9–10).
15 ‘I perceive a thing because I have a field of existence and because each
phenomenon, on its appearance, attracts towards that field the whole of
my body as a system of perceptual powers’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 318).
16 The term is borrowed from Husserl and refers to a field’s double dimen-
sion: ‘the here-there dimension and the past-present-future dimension’
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 265).
17 Don Ihde extends the idea of embodied feeling through the car with the
example of parallel parking (1990: 74).
18 ‘every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up
or completion by us of some extraneous intention or, on the other
hand, the complete expression outside ourselves of our perceptual
powers and a coition, so to speak, of our body with things’ (Merleau-
Ponty 1962: 320).

6 Material interaction

1 ‘Les objets sont pour nous, souvent sans que nous nous en rendions
compte, les compagnons de nos actions, de nos émotions et de nos
pensées. Ils ne nous accompagnent pas seulement du berceau à tombe.
Ils nous précèdeent dans l’un et nous survivent dans l’autre. Demain ils
parleront notre langue. Mais ne nous parlent-ils pas déjà, et parfois bien
mieux qu’avec des mots?’
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NOTES 153

2 It seems that the ease and frequency with which ordinary things ‘talk’
to those with special tools to understand them is likely to increase;
Dyson have invented a vacuum cleaner that can ‘speak’ to the engineer
down a telephone about its origins and its problems (Gibbs 2003).
3 There is too an emerging strand of cultural analysis which emphasizes
the emotional rather than symbolic aspect of embodiment and interac-
tion – see Csordas’s interesting collection (1994).
4 Barthes of course argues that all objects have a symbolic meaning
because they are produced and consumed. He suggests that even the
glass of water on his podium (an object that might aspire to the degree
zero of pure functionality) has the signifying function of identifying its
user as the lecturer (1993: 66).
5 See Chapter 1, especially note 4.
6 During the project we saw no making of parts from scratch and very
little complex engineering. Most of the work consisted of identifying
defective or worn-out components and replacing them.
7 Mead (1980: 119–39); see also McCarthy (1984), and Dant (1999:
121–3). See also Schutz and Luckmanns’ incorporation of the idea of a
‘manipulative zone’ from Mead into their ‘zone of operation’ in which
direct action takes place, (1974: 41–2).
8 ‘The meaning of a thing for a person grows out of the ways in which
other persons act toward the person with regard to the thing. Their
actions operate to define the thing for the person’ (Blumer 1969a: 4).
9 A visitor refers to the length of pipe as Ray’s ‘persuader’, punning on the
use of iron bars by violent people to persuade others to comply with
their wishes.
10 In other garages equipped with lifts rather than pits, we saw this task
being undertaken with the technician standing and working in a larger
field.
11 See Goodwin (1994) and Hindmarsh and Heath (2000) for an analytical
approach to gaze in relation to objects and interaction between people.
12 Within the brackets are pauses; ‘.’ indicates a minimal pause of less than
two tenths of a second, a figure indicates the length of pauses in seconds
– see Heath and Luff (2000: 27).
13 Replacement exhaust pipes, made of extruded and bent metal, come in
sections to make fitting easier but they are easily damaged in storage
and transit. The result is that they often need some ‘coaxing’ to fit.
14 Julian Orr’s (1996) ethnographic study of the work of repairing photo-
copier machines demonstrates that dealing with contingencies creates a
complex work environment that requires a range of skills but his focus
is on the interaction between relatively isolated workers and how they
solve their problems. Kusterer (1978) offers some case-study interview
evidence to suggest that production work is in fact not simply mechan-
BL2093 Chapter end notes 26/10/2004 8:14 PM Page 154

154 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

ical and its workers require specific ‘know-how’ if it is to keep going. His
argument goes little further than making a case for recognizing the skill
base of so-called ‘unskilled’ workers. Neither of these studies address the
embodied nature of material interaction.

7 Materiality and society

1 Baudrillard explored the increasing embeddedness of intended func-

tionality within objects in 1968 – the ‘gadget’ is marked by its multi-
functionality while the mechanizing of function, such as the starter
motor which replaces the starter handle, generates a monofunctionality
(Baudrillard 1996).
2 It is the emergent interconnection of objects, systems and techniques
that Shove (2003) calls ‘co-evolution’.
BL2093 bibliography 26/10/2004 8:12 PM Page 155

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Index

actor-networks, (ANT) 8, 60, body image 92, 152

76–81, 142 Bourdieu, Pierre 27, 31, 63, 149
affordance 70–76, 81–82, 98, 106 Bowles, David x, 148
agency 4, 8, 10, 12, 54, 59–82, 84, Braudel, Fernand 10, 27–32, 138,
108, 138, 147 146
agent(s) 15, 42, 54, 60–2, 64, Brewer, John 25
66–8, 74, 82, 145 Bruun, Henrik 8
Adams, John 9 building 3–4 , 43, 52, 54, 57, 63,
Akrich, Madeleine 8, 78, 80 69, 140
answering machine 60–61
animals 4, 11, 24, 38, 62, 70–3, Callon, Michel 8, 61, 78–9
75, 82, 90, 100, 134–5, 138 cars x, 3, 7, 9–10, 26, 29–30, 33,
anthropology 3–5, 8, 10–12, 25–6, 36, 39, 40–1, 43, 48, 50, 52–4,
30, 32, 40, 66–7, 69 56, 61, 65–72, 78, 80–1, 91,
art, art objects 8, 17, 62, 65, 66–8, 93–4, 98–9, 103, 109, 111,
autonomy 12, 18–19, 52–6, 60–1, 114–22, 125–6, 128–35, 137,
66–7, 78–80, 89, 138, 149 140, 142–3, 145–6
autonomous technology 52–5 Campbell, Colin 25
automatic machines 15, 34, 44, causation 42, 53, 62, 67–9, 77, 82,
46, 52, 102 94, 96,
cenethesis 92, 122
Barthes Roland 109, 153 Certeau, Michel de 2–3, 27
baths, bathing 29–30, 36, 141 civilization 10–11, 14, 16–17, 22,
Baudrillard, Jean 16–17, 27, 31, 34–5, 37–8, 74, 104, 146
36, 45, 109 clothes 3, 6, 20, 23, 62–3, 137,
being–in–the–world 83, 85, 87, 89, 144
94, 97–8, 102, 120, 129, 139 commodity, commodities 13–14,
Bijker, Wiebe 76–9, 81, 150 16–18, 32, 45, 47–8, 56
Birdwhistell, Ray L. 109 communication 6–8, 11, 19, 31,
Blumer, Herbert 106, 110–11, 115, 33, 47, 53, 56, 61, 65, 77, 103,
140, 153 106, 108–10, 130, 142, 144–5
black-box 67, 79, 142 concretization 57
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166 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

consciousness 6–7, 18, 23, 47, 84, 86–7, 89, 91–2, 96–7,
49–50, 63, 70, 86, 89, 94, 99–102, 105–6, 108–9, 111–12,
97–103, 105, 114–15, 124–5, 120, 123, 130, 133–40, 142–7
127, 130, 133, 139 exchange-value 16–8
consumption 4, 9–10, 17–18,
22–7, 32, 36, 45–8, 58, 65, 141, false consciousness 47
146–7 Farnell, Brenda M. 109
corporeal schema 92 feelings 48, 62–3, 65–6, 94, 112,
Corrigan, Peter 25 121
Costall, Alan 74–6, 106 Feenberg, Andrew 34, 56–8
critique 14, 34, 36–40, 42–4, 49, fetishism 16
51–2, 55, 58, 78, 84, 89 field, phenomenal 71–2, 93–4,
Crossley, Nick 149, 152 96–8, 105–7, 110, 115–21,
Csordas, Thomas 153 123–4, 129, 142–3
cutlery 26, 137 Fine, Gary Alan 8
food 2, 6–7, 12, 26, 28–9, 34, 47,
danger 41–3, 52, 54, 71, 77 104, 137, 143
design x, 1–3, 24, 33, 35, 38, 41,
43, 52, 57–8, 60, 67–8, 73–5, 77, Gartman, David 9, 146
87, 102, 108–11, 125, 128–30, Gell, Alfred 61, 66–70, 82
134, 137, 139–41, 145–7 gender 56, 77
distributed person 68–9 Giard, Luce 2–3
Douglas, Mary 4, 25 Gibson, James 61, 64, 70–5, 81,
Dreyfus, Hubert 85, 151 98, 106
Durkheim, Emile 13–14, 20–2, 32 Giddens, Anthony 68
Goodwin, Charles 153
eating 137, 145 Grint, Keith 74
electricity 1–3, 13, 19, 29, 32, 35, guns 5, 81–2
42–4, 50, 52–3, 56, 77–8, 124,
131–3, 143–6 habit, x, 3–4, 22–4, 27, 31, 47, 63,
Ellul, Jacques 34, 44, 49–52, 54–5, 98–100, 121–3, 125, 130, 133,
58, 78 139, 141
emotion 6–7, 11, 26, 36, 44, 46–7, habit-body 97–9, 121
51, 58, 61–5, 70, 82, 85, 108, habitus 4, 27, 32, 63, 147
137 hammer 64, 73–5, 86–7, 98
Engels, Frederick 13–14 harmonization 47–8, 56
enframing 40–6, 106 Heath, Christian x, 8, 108
environment ix, 3, 5–8, 21, 34, hegemony 56
36–8, 49–50, 52–3, 57, 61, Heidegger, Martin 7, 10, 34,
70–4, 76, 85–7, 89, 93, 100, 38–52, 54, 58–9, 78, 84–9,
105, 120–1, 128, 135–6, 143 102–3, 105–6, 111, 118, 120,
embodiment ix, 2–10, 25, 27, 125, 130, 139
35–8, 41, 46, 50, 59, 61, 69, 72, Hill, Stephen 34, 55–6
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144 INDEX 167

history ix, 10–13, 21, 25, 27–32, interaction, social 94, 110, 137
34–5, 37–8, 40, 42, 44, 55, interpretation 37, 59, 68, 74–5,
58–9, 63, 69, 74, 76–9, 84, 89, 77, 80–1, 90, 104, 106, 125,
93, 138, 140, 143 133
Hindmarsh, Jon x, 148, 153 interpretative action 98, 115, 124,
home ix, x, 28–30, 35, 42–3, 67, 127
137, 143–4
Horkheimer, Max 44–5, 61, 71 jazz 99, 101
house, housing 7, 17, 23, 26,
29–30, 45, 57, 70, 104, 144 kitchens x, 2–3, 23, 73, 143, 146
household 23, 137, 143 kettles 1–3, 9, 31
Howes, David 7 keyboard 99
Hughes, Thomas P. 76–81 Knorr-Cetina, Karin 8
Hutchby, Ian 80 knowledge 3, 12–13, 24, 38–9,
hydroelectricity 39, 42–3, 50–3 42–3, 47, 54–5, 76, 78, 86, 89,
97–8, 103–4, 106, 118, 129,
ideology 4, 50, 141 133, 139, 155
idolatory 68–9 knowledge, embodied 87, 97,
Ihde, Don 85, 149, 152 101
immateriality 20–2, 34, 36, 58, 76, knowledge, scientific 13, 39,
136 76, 78, 133
improvisation 90–1, 99, 101
index 61, 66–8, 131 Langlais, Richard 8
individualism 68 Latour, Bruno 8, 27, 61, 78–82,
industrialization 20–2, 27–31, 33, 145
35, 37, 41, 45, 49, 51, 55, 59, Laurier, Eric 71
78, 138–9, 142–3, 145–7 Law, John 78–9
inscription 80 Lefebvre, Henri 27
instrument x, 2–3, 5, 36, 41–3, 45, Luckmann, Thomas 118, 153
59, 90–1, 97–8, 101, 123
instrumentality 6, 38–9, 42, 44, MacKenzie, Donald 78
141 machines 15, 19, 21, 24–5, 29,
instrumental rationality 21 32–8, 40, 44–6, 49–53, 60–1,
instrumental reason 44–5 67, 102, 109–10, 134–5, 138–9,
instrumentalization 57–8 141–3, 145
intentionality x, 3, 46, 70, 82, machines, automatic 15, 34,
100–10, 114, 120, 122, 124–5, 44, 46, 52, 102
127, 133–5, 140–2 machinery 14–15, 24, 45, 52
interaction: magic 68–9
interaction, material x, 7, 9–10, Malinowski, Bronislaw 4
32–3, 59, 84, 108–135, 137, Marcuse, Herbert 34, 36, 44–52,
139–46 54–6, 58–9, 71, 78
interaction, symbolic 89, 110–1, material culture x, 2, 4–5, 10, 14,
114–15 16, 24–7, 30–2, 44, 70, 82, 84,
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168 MATERIALITY AND SOCIETY

104, 109, 128, 135, 138, 140, piano 99

147 Pinch, Trevor 76–9, 81, 150
materiality x, 3, 6–10, 19, 21–3, politics x, 11–14, 34, 41, 43–4,
32–4, 38, 42, 48–9, 52, 55, 49–50, 54–9, 76, 77–9, 84, 142,
58–9, 67–8, 72–3, 80, 82–4, 86, 146
89, 96, 105–6, 121, 136, 138, political economy 13, 17, 22,
142, 146–7 31
Marx, Karl 2, 10, 13–19, 20, 22, politics of technology 54–9
24, 25, 27, 31–3, 35, 44, 46, 49, Porter, Roy 25
52, 138–9, 145–6 power, social 14, 17, 24, 38, 40,
materialism 13–14, 32, 35, 36, 58 42, 47, 50, 52, 55–6, 58, 60–1,
Mauss, Marcel 4–5, 27 69, 79–80, 98, 102
McCracken, Grant 4, 25, 32, 65 prescription 80–1
McLuhan, Marshall 61–2 production 3, 9–10, 13–18, 22, 24,
Mead, George Herbert 73, 110–11, 27–8, 33, 35, 37–8, 44–7, 56,
130 59, 68, 81, 109, 134, 138, 146,
megamachine 38 148, 154
mentalism 96 progress, technical 37, 59, 77
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 7, 10, 27,
36, 72, 84, 89–107, 110–11, rationality:
115, 117, 120–2, 125, 128, 133, rationality, instrumental 21
139 rationality, technological 44–9,
Miller, Daniel 4, 9, 25, 107, 147 53, 55–7, 91
modernity 3, 10, 12–14, 17–22, ready–to–hand 87–8, 103, 116,
24, 27, 31–5, 44, 51, 53, 62, 68, 118, 120, 151
80, 135, 138, 142, 147 reflexes 97, 115
Molotch, Harvey 140 religion ix, 4, 11, 21, 24, 34, 38,
morality 19, 31, 67, 75, 78, 80–2, 49, 51, 68–9
101 reverse adaptation 54, 57
morality of things 80–2 reverse salient 77–9
Mumford, Lewis 34–8, 44, 46–7, Roche, Daniel 29–31
52, 78
safety 40, 77, 111, 134, 150
networks 5, 7–8, 79–81 Sahlins, Marshall 16–17, 25
Sartre, Jean–Paul 152
objectivity 18, 23, 45, 47, 73, 88, schemes of action 63
93, 94, 96–97, 100–1, 103, 105, Schiffer, Michael 6–8, 56, 108, 150
148 Schön, Donald A. 33, 51
Orr, Julian E. 153 Schutz, Alfred 118, 153
Schwartz-Cowan, Elizabeth 150
Parlebas, Pierre 5, 27 senses 5, 13, 50, 64, 70, 72–3,
perception 37, 61, 63, 70–2, 75–6, 89–90, 94, 96–7, 101, 103,
81, 84, 89, 94–8, 100–1, 103–4, 107–8, 133, 136, 147
106–7, 110, 125, 130, 145 sensation 7
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INDEX 169

Sharrock, Wes 151 technique 4–5, 18, 41, 45, 49–51,

Shove, Elizabeth 141, 154 53, 55, 65, 67, 112, 114, 123,
skill x, 15, 24, 34–5, 37, 41, 45, 128–9, 133–4, 136–7, 139
64, 91, 98–100, 103, 109, 111, telephones 52, 57–8, 60–1, 85,
133–4, 137, 139–41, 145, 153 153
sight x, 1, 31–2, 36, 42–3, 69, Thurk, Jessica 8
71–2, 88, 92, 94, 96, 101, touch x, 5, 27, 87–8, 91–2, 98,
107–8, 116–17, 120, 127, 134, 101, 115–18, 125, 127–8, 132,
136 134, 136, 140, 143–5
Simmel, Georg 13, 18–22, 24, 32, Tisseron, Serge 6–7, 27, 61–5, 70,
36, 138, 140 182, 108
Slater, Don 25 transport 4, 18, 29, 31, 33–4, 44,
social action 5, 21–22, 84, 138, 47, 54, 66, 80
142
socialism 56 unconscious 45, 70, 98
sociality 8, 31–2, 52, 59–60, 82, use-value 16–17, 149
106 Urry, John 9
sociology x, 8, 10–13, 18, 21–2,
27, 30, 32–4, 76, 78, 106, Veblen, Thorstein 4, 22–5, 28, 36,
146 46, 138, 140
social interaction 94, 110, 137
soul 34 Wajcman, Judy 78
spirituality 19 Warnier, Jean-Pierre 85–6, 27, 82
standing-reserve 40–3 water 1–2, 16, 28–31, 37, 43, 50,
stimuli 89, 94, 97 52, 72, 74, 104, 144, 153
subconscious 90 Weber, Max 13–14, 21–4, 31–2,
Sudnow, David 99, 101 38,151
Whiteley, Nigel 141
technological rationality 44–9, 53, Woolgar, Steve 74
55–7, 91 workmanship 23–4, 138–9
technical progress 37, 59, 77 workers 24, 27