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Title
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The Material Turn
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Author
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Mukerji, Chandra
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Research Area
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Culture
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Topic
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Culture and Society
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Abstract
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There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power. It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under‐examined forms of social life—particularly the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault's analysis of political embodiment, work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled with social practices.
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Identifier
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etrds0109
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extracted text
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The Material Turn
CHANDRA MUKERJI
Abstract
There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power.
It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how
and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under-examined forms of social life—particularly
the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple
sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault’s analysis of political embodiment,
work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing
interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled
with social practices.
INTRODUCTION
The analysis of materiality in the social sciences has developed in many
directions: looking, for example, at the material lives of suppressed groups;
considering the social power of consumer goods, fashion, and taste; tracing
the role of territorial control to the growth of states; and even addressing the
questions of how humans affect the Earth’s climate and how climate change
demonstrates nonhuman agency. The interest in materiality in the social
sciences has its most obvious roots in Marxism, and historical materialism.
For that precise reason, materiality became ripe for rethinking at the end of
the Cold War with the obvious failure of Marx’s theory of history. Historians
and social scientists needed to expand their understanding of material
power, and how it was configured and used. At the same time, research on
material practices became a more pressing concern with growing evidence
of climate change. The social sciences generally had poor knowledge of how
human communities physically engaged and reconfigured the natural world
they inhabited or about the limits of human control over nature. Foucault
seemed an unlikely source of new ideas about materiality, given his interest
in discourse, but he wrote about the embodiment of categories in bodies and
buildings, providing new ways to understand how material power worked.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Moreover, archeologists started to use their traditional tools and interest in
artifacts to think about broader issues about materiality, power, and culture.
At its most radical, the new materiality has become a way of doing
post-humanist analysis, taking as subject matter for social science not only
people but also the physical environments they create and the creatures with
whom they coinhabit social worlds. Social life is no longer imagined to be a
human drama taking place against the background of an independent and
static natural world, but is understood as activity within shared ecologies of
people and nonhumans: states armed with weapons, corporations located in
skyscrapers, furniture makers working with wood, laborers getting dressed
for a job, or families socializing with pets.
The new materiality is interdisciplinary and diverse, drawing on multiple
traditions of materialist analysis from history, geography, archeology, anthropology, sociology, and critical theory—just repurposing them. Archeologists
that previously dug up remains of civilizations for museums now seek out
material evidence of suppressed social groups; intellectual historians pose
questions about global flows of people, ideas, and artifacts instead the ideas
of great men; and sociologists and social historians study dams, forests, coins,
and mosquitoes as social actors in regimes of power (Harvey et al., 2013;
Hicks & Beaudry, 2010; Mitchell, 2002).
FOUNDATION I: MARXISM AND MATERIALITY
Materiality studies have multiple foundations, many addressing issues
raised by Marx about history and power. These include the Annales School
of historical research, and the British School of Cultural Studies, both of
which made important contributions to contemporary work on materiality.
THE ANNALES SCHOOL
Annales historians and social scientists explicitly tried to use elements of
Marxism, anthropology and geography to describe material practices in history. Founded by Lucien Febvre (1976) and Marc Bloch (1953, 1966), members
of this school were interested in issues at the heart of Marxism: economic
history, peasant life, material foundations of culture, and historical dynamics. They focused on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but were
troubled the lack of good evidence of peasant life in archival sources written
by literate elites. Therefore, they turned to geographical and anthropological
methods to write history from below.
Fernand Braudel (1973, 1975, 1977), who directed the school for many years,
argued that there were different temporalities in history in part because of
material constraints. Forms of material life were slower to change than the
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reins of kings and queens because they depended on local geography and
climate. This meant peasant lives were materially grounded and could only
be changed slowly. However, this did not make peasants passive or conservative. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1979) showed, even traditional festivals
such as carnival could evolve into moments of rebellion, making manifest
the agency and political desires of peasants.
Braudel’s social history provided intellectual inspiration for Immanuel
Wallerstein’s (1974) world system analysis with its emphasis on geographical
economic patterns and regional practices of peasant life. It provided a useful
structure for doing comparative, historical sociology of material regimes.
James Scott (1985, 1998) has also used economic history and anthropology
to study peasant life, similarly pointing to the agency of peasants and their
“weapons of the weak.” Similarly, Mark Leone (2005) has developed his own
form of history from below by combining geographical and archeological
methods in excavating Annapolis and shedding new light on slave culture.
CULTURAL STUDIES OF CONSUMPTION
The British school of cultural studies has provided another critical intellectual foundation for materiality studies. This school tried to explain the failure
of Marx’s theory of history, focusing on the world of goods and the cultural
seductions of capitalism. Raymond Williams (1961, 1980, 1982a) and his colleagues looked at commodificaton and mediation—not just representations
in culture. They studied theater, newspapers, television, music and other
popular cultural forms that were embodied and materialized as commodities. They focused on working class life styles and consumer acts of agency.
Dick Hebdige (1979) famously described the Punk reappropriation of safety
pins as piercing jewelry as a refusal of the hegemonic meanings of things.
Critical studies of consumer culture also focused on shopping, fashion and
urban pleasures as distractions, immersive fantasy, and drivers of manufacture and trade. Rosalind Williams (1982b) described displays in department
stores as dream worlds of consumption, using the allure of things to shape
consumer choices. Simon Schama (1987) looked at consumer culture within
the Dutch Golden Age. Daniel Miller (1998) wrote about the material constitution of social selves through shopping choices, looking not only at economic institutions but also the effects of fashion on taste. Sharon Zukin (1995,
2004) described cities as emporia where shopping was entertainment and a
measure of self. Sewell (2010) illustrated connections among fashion, textiles,
and labor, showing their interconnected importance to the rise of capitalism.
Finally, Bourdieu (1984) made clear the social implications of lifestyle choices,
linking tastes to the reproduction of social class. In all these works, goods
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
were treated as fundamental tools for constituting social worlds, selves and
social hierarchies.
Critical geographers, such as Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1989, 2001), considered the power of spaces to sustain political regimes. They described them
as simultaneously physical, political and cultural, legitimating as well as sustaining political orders. Critical cultural geography became a leading field in
materiality studies connecting places to power through neo-Marxist analysis.
FOUNDATION II: FOUCAULT AND THE MATERIAL TURN
A different direction in materiality studies developed from Foucault (1977),
particularly his description of the panopticon and his analysis of surveillance. The panopticon was a type of building designed for penitentiaries
and mental hospitals that made all the inmates visible from a central point
of surveillance. It stood for a form of policing designed to control conduct
and distinguish with its walls between legitimate and illegitimate social
actors. Foucault provided a different view of politics than neo-Marxists by
emphasizing the importance of linguistic distinctions that were imposed
on people and showing how this kind of power could be embodied and
materialized in things. Bodies, buildings and military uniforms were used to
shape social identities and privilege some bodily forms over others, creating
hierarchies that were not products of politicoeconomic forces, but rather
linguistic categories.
Discursive politics was diffuse and hard to control, since people could
oppose or ignore the categories imposed on them. However, once linguistic
differences were drawn with walls and bars, or were invested in bodies,
discursive power became more difficult to deny or displace.
This logic of analysis had immediate impact on feminist theorists such as
Judith Butler and race theorists such as Stuart Hall. Racialized and gendered
bodies made categories seem natural and real. They were not a matter of
argument, but evidence and experience. Therefore, body cultures pressured
groups to enact their prescribed social roles.
Researchers following Foucault added to the material turn by demonstrating social categories were not ideas dissociated from things. Quite the contrary, discourse had material forms. The question was when and how such
materiality mattered.
THE CUTTING EDGE: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
Many of the major ideas shaping the material turn today are being developed
in Science and Technology Studies (STS)—a field in which scholars have been
studying forms of power/knowledge. They have witnessed the constitution
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of “nature” through scientific research, and seen the entanglements of people,
instruments, classifications, artifacts, and natural forces that made this possible. Ironically, STS began by treating knowledge as a social phenomenon,
but not a tool of power/knowledge. Still, interest in epistemology made STS a
rich site for developing ideas about knowledge that could be used to address
issues of power/knowledge.
EPISTEMIC CULTURES AND BOUNDARY OBJECTS
Influenced by ethnomethodology, Kuhn and Wittgenstein, early researchers
interested in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) (Bloor, 1976, 1997)
focused on epistemic practices at the local level. Ethnographers in laboratories found themselves watching researchers working on instruments,
preparing samples or reading printouts from machines. To make sense of
this, ethnographers in SSK took a material turn (Barnes & Shapin, 1979;
Knorr, Krohn, & Whitley, 1981; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Lynch, 1985).
Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) has called the sociomaterial practices of knowledge seeking in laboratories epistemic cultures, and emphasized how differently scientific fields developed methods of research. There was no single
canonical scientific method, but many ways of using instruments and objects
of study to produce knowledge.
Researchers working in these different epistemic cultures sometimes
shared common instruments or standardized objects of study such as fruit
flies: boundary objects that linked fields. These common material tools were
meant to facilitate communication and mutual understanding across fields,
but as Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989) showed, objects and instruments did not have the same significance in different epistemic cultures.
The flies and instruments might have been the same, but their uses and
understandings of results varied widely. Therefore, these boundary objects
had more social than cognitive importance, not only roughly coordinating
work across fields but also helping bind research groups into communities
of related fields.
Work on epistemic cultures and boundary objects drew attention to instrumentation and the standardization of specimens, and showed that science
was a complex of material activities rather than a single, distinctive way of
knowing.
POSTHUMANISM AND OBJECT AGENCY
Posthumanist STS has had more radical effects on materiality studies. Much
of the work focuses on objects agency, developing this idea from Bruno
Latour (1987) and Michel Callon’s Actor Network Theory (ANT). Latour
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
pointed the power of nonhuman agents in science when he showed that
Pasteur’s experiment “worked” when microbes did what Pasteur predicted,
ratifying his theory. These invisible agents become his allies in promoting his
ideas. Michel Callon (1986) then made the radical argument that nonhumans
could have agency. He wrote that scallops in Biscayne Bay, in responding to
changes in their environment, were exhibiting agency or physically stating
what they thought. Callon and Latour (1992) combined these ideas in actor
networks, saying both people and things could “actants” testifying to the
validity of scientific ideas.
POWER/KNOWLEDGE
Steve Epstein (1996) showed that diseases were nonhuman agents in his
research on AIDS, but also argued they were caught up in systems of
power/knowledge. AIDS could kill the people it infected, and at first no
one could stop it. Medical researchers tried to identify it to understand its
agency. AIDS had power, and knowledge of its power empowered those
who could claim it. This is why AIDS activists from the gay community
were able to have some effects on AIDS research and treatments because
they saw the disease’s effects most directly. Epstein (2007) similarly showed
in his work on clinical trials how bodies politics worked in medicine. The
decision to include women and minorities in clinical trials reproduced social
classifications as embodied differences, and made them real in relation to
effects of medicines.
MATERIAL REGIMES
Some STS scholars began to realize that natural knowledge had political
uses by governments that STS could illuminate. Based on the distinction
between human and nonhuman agency, I was able to distinguish the logistical power used in territorial governance from the strategic power used in
political struggles, illustrating how infrastructural engineering was used
to get around noble opposition to the empowerment of the state in France
(Mukerji, 2009). Patrick Joyce (2003, 2013), Gabrielle Hecht (1998), Patrick
Carroll (2006), Sarah Pritchard (2011), and Karl Appuhn (2009) have also
done research on infrastructures, territoriality and states, looking at how
governments gain power by diverting rivers, digging canals, building dams,
erecting nuclear power plants, building post offices and draining plains.
Carroll showed how scientific measurement was used for gaining control of
land in colonial states. Moreover, Hecht and Pritchard showed how states
made themselves more powerful and addressed historical weaknesses by
using infrastructure. Joyce (2003, 2013) added that the buildings and spaces
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designed by governing elites affect how people understand themselves as
social actors, providing cultural scaffolding for forms of modern governmentality, for example, communicating to people who they are and what
they are expected to do.
Appropriately for a field concerned with the agency of nonhumans, climate
change has also played a part in the material turn within STS. Bruno Latour
has called climate change “the great experiment.” Extracting fossil fuel to
drive manufacture was supposed to demonstrate human rationality in the
use of natural resources, but was an experiment in the coproduction of a new
material reality. Nature and culture were entangled, and the great experiment
confirmed that any change one was a change in both.
Environmental historians have provided evidence of the modern compact
that governed the great experiment. Cronon’s (1991) work on Chicago
showed that modern industrial cities were products of material connections
and flows of things between city and country, nature and culture. The
housing for Chicago’s laborers was made from timber from Wisconsin.
The grains and beef at the heart of Chicago’s economy came from prairies
turned into farmland. Moreover, the feedlots in the city held cattle until
it could be slaughtered and shipped by refrigerated rail to eastern urban
restaurants. Its rural surrounds and Chicago became a single unit of material
transformation: a constellation of people and things that was meant to be
rationally controlled, but was really part of the great experiment.
NEW DIRECTIONS: ENTANGLEMENTS AND INARTICULACY
There are many new directions in materiality studies, but three that seem to
hold the most promise for changing the field: new directions in posthumanism and material regimes in addition to new work on inarticulacy.
Posthumanist feminists in STS are drawing on feminist theories of embodiment to rethink nature and culture, blurring distinctions between people and
things rather than articulating their distinct qualities. This version of posthumanism has roots in Andrew Pickering’s (1995) work on scientific practice
that blurs the subject-object distinction in laboratory practices, emphasizing the coproduction of scientists and research findings. It also has roots in
Donna Haraway’s (1991) work on cyborgs in which she celebrates cybernetic
mergings of people and new technologies. Posthumanist feminist STS scholars such as Annamarie Mol (2002) and Karen Barad (2007) follow a similar
path, foregrounding the entanglements of people and things in the practice
of research and medicine. Haraway took her understanding of human and
nonhuman relations in an ecological direction with her reflections on pets as
companion species. People and pets, she argues, live together because both
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
live longer if they do. Certain ecologies of people and nonhumans are biological beneficial, and social communities reflect this.
Annamarie Mol treats bodies as assemblages, biomes, arguing against
human exceptionalism and autonomy. She critiques the humanist vision of
human exceptionalism as a pernicious myth, obscuring our place in nature.
Karen Barad argues that scientific observation is not furthered by achieving
objective distance, but rather is a product of entanglements with things. The
universe is made up of entanglements, and so are we.
This work is particularly valuable for the social sciences it illustrates how
deeply human communities are entangled with things through their daily
practices, their bodies and their knowledge of who they are. It suggests that
social scientists need to consider human–nonhuman relations not as an interesting specialty, but rather as fundamental to understanding social dynamics.
MATERIAL REGIMES
The new studies of material regimes try to integrate an understanding of
object agency with political analysis, and to look at social dynamics from
below using the powers of things. Marian Feldman (2010), inspired by Alfred
Gell’s (1998) writings about object agency in the arts, studies how stele carrying legal precepts and decorative art not only exercise top-down administrative power, but shape social space around them by affecting circulation and
sight. Robert Scott (2003), looking at Gothic Cathedrals, considers how spiritual seeking animated labor processes that were long and arduous, making
these buildings not just tools of Church domination but also evidence of cultural desires animating the lives of artisans. Similarly, Severin Fowles (2013)
uses artifacts to reconstruct the arrival of some of people to the Taos Pueblo
to escape spiritual domination by the theocracy in Chaco Canyon.
These studies use artifacts as evidence of social processes that were entangled with people in complex ways, trying to tease out how material practices
enabled them to make social changes. This work helps to reveal some of the
political dynamism in political regimes, and illustrates how power is exercised, contested and elaborated through shifts in the material order.
INARTICULACY
Some of the most recent work on materiality, trying to understand how
objects work politically, focuses on inarticulacy. As Gilles Deleuze (1994)
suggests, objects are mute forms that can be sources of cultural change
because of their silence. Most of the time, new objects are made to resemble
older ones, and fit linguistic categories of things. However, Deleuze argues,
people often experiment with variants as they make things, and can find
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new opportunities for material action they did not anticipate and cannot
fully articulate. As Hebdige showed with safety pins, objects can be used
to challenge classification schemes and counter commonsense reasoning
because of their inarticulacy that links their meaning to their embodied uses.
A number of recent articles feature work on inarticulate politics and configurations of things, mainly focusing on spaces designed to shape identities.
Fred Turner (2012) writes on the “Family of Man” photography exhibit
that toured America after WWII that was designed to reshape American
identity by emphasizing individual choice and autonomy in the layout of
the show. I explain how Versailles worked as a pedagogical environment
for enrolling the French nobility in Louis XIV’s political agenda (Mukerji,
2012). Lyn Spiegel (2012) writes on the furnishings of post-WWII US houses
that helped organize media centered consumption. Erica Robles-Anderson
(2012) analyzes the Crystal Cathedral and the growth of drive-in religion as
an extension of televangelism and faith through consumption. Moreover,
Marisa Brandt (2014) shows how identity and interiority are being addressed
with machines by studying the design and development of Virtual Reality
Therapy for PTSD. In all these cases, people and things are entangled, issues
of power are at stake, and identities are tied to material arrangements. Yet
the inarticulacy of things makes their politics hard to pin down, makes their
use important to their meaning, but also makes their politics difficult to
articulate and confront.
All of the new work in materiality studies emphasizes the entanglements of
people and things, and the mutual production of social worlds and material
environments. They show, too, that societies, institutions, communities and
states all create material regimes to further ways of life, setting up ecologies
of people of things that affect human welfare and ought to be more systematically integrated into social research.
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CHANDRA MUKERJI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Chandra Mukerji is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Department
of Communication and the Science Studies Program, as well as Adjunct
Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She has
written extensively on materiality in relation to industrialization, state
formation, natural knowledge, and political culture. In her first book,
From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (Columbia, 1983), she
described the importance of materialism—tool development, materialist
philosophy, and consumerism—to the British textile industry, arguing for
a cultural interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. In A Fragile Power:
Science and the State (Princeton, 1989), which won the Robert K. Merton
Award in 1991, she focused on the material skills of scientists, and how
they were appropriated by the state, arguing that the state in funding
science was less interested in controlling scientific ideas than in developing
a skilled labor force of scientists that could be called upon to solve political
problems. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997),
which won the 1998 Culture book prize from the American Sociological
Association, looked at the royal gardens under Louis XIV as a microcosm
The Material Turn
13
of France that demonstrated the material capacity of the king to control
his land, and highlighted ways France was exercising territorial power.
Finally, in Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du
Midi (2009), which was cowinner in 2012 of the ASA’s highest book award,
the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, Mukerji looked at the material
production of state power. She focused on an infrastructural project that
was technically impossible according to formal knowledge of the period,
but was made possible with a form of “French intelligence”—a system
of distributed cognition in which women peasants and trained engineers
helped each other reconstruct and make available to the state elements of
Roman hydraulics. She used this case study to pose the question of how
states gained power through territorial control, and showed that exercising
logistical power (material rather than social power) was a struggle with
nature rather than patrimonial elites. Elites could not compete with or
successful stop such large projects that shifted patterns of local life away
from those that had served elites in the past. Currently, Mukerji is working
on a theory of inarticulacy to explain how material forms exercise cultural
and political powers. The first hints of these ideas appeared in a paper,
“Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles” Public Culture
24:3 515–540, that used figured world theory to explain how artifacts can
affect thought and shift patterns of political reasoning.
RELATED ESSAYS
History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun
Appadurai
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology (Archaeology), Kirsi O. Lorentz
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
The Use of Geophysical Survey in Archaeology (Methods), Timothy J.
Horsley
Media and the development of Identity (Psychology), Adriana M. Manago
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
History and Materiality (Anthropology), Rosemary A. Joyce
-
The Material Turn
CHANDRA MUKERJI
Abstract
There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power.
It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how
and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under-examined forms of social life—particularly
the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple
sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault’s analysis of political embodiment,
work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing
interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled
with social practices.
INTRODUCTION
The analysis of materiality in the social sciences has developed in many
directions: looking, for example, at the material lives of suppressed groups;
considering the social power of consumer goods, fashion, and taste; tracing
the role of territorial control to the growth of states; and even addressing the
questions of how humans affect the Earth’s climate and how climate change
demonstrates nonhuman agency. The interest in materiality in the social
sciences has its most obvious roots in Marxism, and historical materialism.
For that precise reason, materiality became ripe for rethinking at the end of
the Cold War with the obvious failure of Marx’s theory of history. Historians
and social scientists needed to expand their understanding of material
power, and how it was configured and used. At the same time, research on
material practices became a more pressing concern with growing evidence
of climate change. The social sciences generally had poor knowledge of how
human communities physically engaged and reconfigured the natural world
they inhabited or about the limits of human control over nature. Foucault
seemed an unlikely source of new ideas about materiality, given his interest
in discourse, but he wrote about the embodiment of categories in bodies and
buildings, providing new ways to understand how material power worked.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Moreover, archeologists started to use their traditional tools and interest in
artifacts to think about broader issues about materiality, power, and culture.
At its most radical, the new materiality has become a way of doing
post-humanist analysis, taking as subject matter for social science not only
people but also the physical environments they create and the creatures with
whom they coinhabit social worlds. Social life is no longer imagined to be a
human drama taking place against the background of an independent and
static natural world, but is understood as activity within shared ecologies of
people and nonhumans: states armed with weapons, corporations located in
skyscrapers, furniture makers working with wood, laborers getting dressed
for a job, or families socializing with pets.
The new materiality is interdisciplinary and diverse, drawing on multiple
traditions of materialist analysis from history, geography, archeology, anthropology, sociology, and critical theory—just repurposing them. Archeologists
that previously dug up remains of civilizations for museums now seek out
material evidence of suppressed social groups; intellectual historians pose
questions about global flows of people, ideas, and artifacts instead the ideas
of great men; and sociologists and social historians study dams, forests, coins,
and mosquitoes as social actors in regimes of power (Harvey et al., 2013;
Hicks & Beaudry, 2010; Mitchell, 2002).
FOUNDATION I: MARXISM AND MATERIALITY
Materiality studies have multiple foundations, many addressing issues
raised by Marx about history and power. These include the Annales School
of historical research, and the British School of Cultural Studies, both of
which made important contributions to contemporary work on materiality.
THE ANNALES SCHOOL
Annales historians and social scientists explicitly tried to use elements of
Marxism, anthropology and geography to describe material practices in history. Founded by Lucien Febvre (1976) and Marc Bloch (1953, 1966), members
of this school were interested in issues at the heart of Marxism: economic
history, peasant life, material foundations of culture, and historical dynamics. They focused on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but were
troubled the lack of good evidence of peasant life in archival sources written
by literate elites. Therefore, they turned to geographical and anthropological
methods to write history from below.
Fernand Braudel (1973, 1975, 1977), who directed the school for many years,
argued that there were different temporalities in history in part because of
material constraints. Forms of material life were slower to change than the
The Material Turn
3
reins of kings and queens because they depended on local geography and
climate. This meant peasant lives were materially grounded and could only
be changed slowly. However, this did not make peasants passive or conservative. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1979) showed, even traditional festivals
such as carnival could evolve into moments of rebellion, making manifest
the agency and political desires of peasants.
Braudel’s social history provided intellectual inspiration for Immanuel
Wallerstein’s (1974) world system analysis with its emphasis on geographical
economic patterns and regional practices of peasant life. It provided a useful
structure for doing comparative, historical sociology of material regimes.
James Scott (1985, 1998) has also used economic history and anthropology
to study peasant life, similarly pointing to the agency of peasants and their
“weapons of the weak.” Similarly, Mark Leone (2005) has developed his own
form of history from below by combining geographical and archeological
methods in excavating Annapolis and shedding new light on slave culture.
CULTURAL STUDIES OF CONSUMPTION
The British school of cultural studies has provided another critical intellectual foundation for materiality studies. This school tried to explain the failure
of Marx’s theory of history, focusing on the world of goods and the cultural
seductions of capitalism. Raymond Williams (1961, 1980, 1982a) and his colleagues looked at commodificaton and mediation—not just representations
in culture. They studied theater, newspapers, television, music and other
popular cultural forms that were embodied and materialized as commodities. They focused on working class life styles and consumer acts of agency.
Dick Hebdige (1979) famously described the Punk reappropriation of safety
pins as piercing jewelry as a refusal of the hegemonic meanings of things.
Critical studies of consumer culture also focused on shopping, fashion and
urban pleasures as distractions, immersive fantasy, and drivers of manufacture and trade. Rosalind Williams (1982b) described displays in department
stores as dream worlds of consumption, using the allure of things to shape
consumer choices. Simon Schama (1987) looked at consumer culture within
the Dutch Golden Age. Daniel Miller (1998) wrote about the material constitution of social selves through shopping choices, looking not only at economic institutions but also the effects of fashion on taste. Sharon Zukin (1995,
2004) described cities as emporia where shopping was entertainment and a
measure of self. Sewell (2010) illustrated connections among fashion, textiles,
and labor, showing their interconnected importance to the rise of capitalism.
Finally, Bourdieu (1984) made clear the social implications of lifestyle choices,
linking tastes to the reproduction of social class. In all these works, goods
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
were treated as fundamental tools for constituting social worlds, selves and
social hierarchies.
Critical geographers, such as Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1989, 2001), considered the power of spaces to sustain political regimes. They described them
as simultaneously physical, political and cultural, legitimating as well as sustaining political orders. Critical cultural geography became a leading field in
materiality studies connecting places to power through neo-Marxist analysis.
FOUNDATION II: FOUCAULT AND THE MATERIAL TURN
A different direction in materiality studies developed from Foucault (1977),
particularly his description of the panopticon and his analysis of surveillance. The panopticon was a type of building designed for penitentiaries
and mental hospitals that made all the inmates visible from a central point
of surveillance. It stood for a form of policing designed to control conduct
and distinguish with its walls between legitimate and illegitimate social
actors. Foucault provided a different view of politics than neo-Marxists by
emphasizing the importance of linguistic distinctions that were imposed
on people and showing how this kind of power could be embodied and
materialized in things. Bodies, buildings and military uniforms were used to
shape social identities and privilege some bodily forms over others, creating
hierarchies that were not products of politicoeconomic forces, but rather
linguistic categories.
Discursive politics was diffuse and hard to control, since people could
oppose or ignore the categories imposed on them. However, once linguistic
differences were drawn with walls and bars, or were invested in bodies,
discursive power became more difficult to deny or displace.
This logic of analysis had immediate impact on feminist theorists such as
Judith Butler and race theorists such as Stuart Hall. Racialized and gendered
bodies made categories seem natural and real. They were not a matter of
argument, but evidence and experience. Therefore, body cultures pressured
groups to enact their prescribed social roles.
Researchers following Foucault added to the material turn by demonstrating social categories were not ideas dissociated from things. Quite the contrary, discourse had material forms. The question was when and how such
materiality mattered.
THE CUTTING EDGE: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
Many of the major ideas shaping the material turn today are being developed
in Science and Technology Studies (STS)—a field in which scholars have been
studying forms of power/knowledge. They have witnessed the constitution
The Material Turn
5
of “nature” through scientific research, and seen the entanglements of people,
instruments, classifications, artifacts, and natural forces that made this possible. Ironically, STS began by treating knowledge as a social phenomenon,
but not a tool of power/knowledge. Still, interest in epistemology made STS a
rich site for developing ideas about knowledge that could be used to address
issues of power/knowledge.
EPISTEMIC CULTURES AND BOUNDARY OBJECTS
Influenced by ethnomethodology, Kuhn and Wittgenstein, early researchers
interested in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) (Bloor, 1976, 1997)
focused on epistemic practices at the local level. Ethnographers in laboratories found themselves watching researchers working on instruments,
preparing samples or reading printouts from machines. To make sense of
this, ethnographers in SSK took a material turn (Barnes & Shapin, 1979;
Knorr, Krohn, & Whitley, 1981; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Lynch, 1985).
Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) has called the sociomaterial practices of knowledge seeking in laboratories epistemic cultures, and emphasized how differently scientific fields developed methods of research. There was no single
canonical scientific method, but many ways of using instruments and objects
of study to produce knowledge.
Researchers working in these different epistemic cultures sometimes
shared common instruments or standardized objects of study such as fruit
flies: boundary objects that linked fields. These common material tools were
meant to facilitate communication and mutual understanding across fields,
but as Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989) showed, objects and instruments did not have the same significance in different epistemic cultures.
The flies and instruments might have been the same, but their uses and
understandings of results varied widely. Therefore, these boundary objects
had more social than cognitive importance, not only roughly coordinating
work across fields but also helping bind research groups into communities
of related fields.
Work on epistemic cultures and boundary objects drew attention to instrumentation and the standardization of specimens, and showed that science
was a complex of material activities rather than a single, distinctive way of
knowing.
POSTHUMANISM AND OBJECT AGENCY
Posthumanist STS has had more radical effects on materiality studies. Much
of the work focuses on objects agency, developing this idea from Bruno
Latour (1987) and Michel Callon’s Actor Network Theory (ANT). Latour
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
pointed the power of nonhuman agents in science when he showed that
Pasteur’s experiment “worked” when microbes did what Pasteur predicted,
ratifying his theory. These invisible agents become his allies in promoting his
ideas. Michel Callon (1986) then made the radical argument that nonhumans
could have agency. He wrote that scallops in Biscayne Bay, in responding to
changes in their environment, were exhibiting agency or physically stating
what they thought. Callon and Latour (1992) combined these ideas in actor
networks, saying both people and things could “actants” testifying to the
validity of scientific ideas.
POWER/KNOWLEDGE
Steve Epstein (1996) showed that diseases were nonhuman agents in his
research on AIDS, but also argued they were caught up in systems of
power/knowledge. AIDS could kill the people it infected, and at first no
one could stop it. Medical researchers tried to identify it to understand its
agency. AIDS had power, and knowledge of its power empowered those
who could claim it. This is why AIDS activists from the gay community
were able to have some effects on AIDS research and treatments because
they saw the disease’s effects most directly. Epstein (2007) similarly showed
in his work on clinical trials how bodies politics worked in medicine. The
decision to include women and minorities in clinical trials reproduced social
classifications as embodied differences, and made them real in relation to
effects of medicines.
MATERIAL REGIMES
Some STS scholars began to realize that natural knowledge had political
uses by governments that STS could illuminate. Based on the distinction
between human and nonhuman agency, I was able to distinguish the logistical power used in territorial governance from the strategic power used in
political struggles, illustrating how infrastructural engineering was used
to get around noble opposition to the empowerment of the state in France
(Mukerji, 2009). Patrick Joyce (2003, 2013), Gabrielle Hecht (1998), Patrick
Carroll (2006), Sarah Pritchard (2011), and Karl Appuhn (2009) have also
done research on infrastructures, territoriality and states, looking at how
governments gain power by diverting rivers, digging canals, building dams,
erecting nuclear power plants, building post offices and draining plains.
Carroll showed how scientific measurement was used for gaining control of
land in colonial states. Moreover, Hecht and Pritchard showed how states
made themselves more powerful and addressed historical weaknesses by
using infrastructure. Joyce (2003, 2013) added that the buildings and spaces
The Material Turn
7
designed by governing elites affect how people understand themselves as
social actors, providing cultural scaffolding for forms of modern governmentality, for example, communicating to people who they are and what
they are expected to do.
Appropriately for a field concerned with the agency of nonhumans, climate
change has also played a part in the material turn within STS. Bruno Latour
has called climate change “the great experiment.” Extracting fossil fuel to
drive manufacture was supposed to demonstrate human rationality in the
use of natural resources, but was an experiment in the coproduction of a new
material reality. Nature and culture were entangled, and the great experiment
confirmed that any change one was a change in both.
Environmental historians have provided evidence of the modern compact
that governed the great experiment. Cronon’s (1991) work on Chicago
showed that modern industrial cities were products of material connections
and flows of things between city and country, nature and culture. The
housing for Chicago’s laborers was made from timber from Wisconsin.
The grains and beef at the heart of Chicago’s economy came from prairies
turned into farmland. Moreover, the feedlots in the city held cattle until
it could be slaughtered and shipped by refrigerated rail to eastern urban
restaurants. Its rural surrounds and Chicago became a single unit of material
transformation: a constellation of people and things that was meant to be
rationally controlled, but was really part of the great experiment.
NEW DIRECTIONS: ENTANGLEMENTS AND INARTICULACY
There are many new directions in materiality studies, but three that seem to
hold the most promise for changing the field: new directions in posthumanism and material regimes in addition to new work on inarticulacy.
Posthumanist feminists in STS are drawing on feminist theories of embodiment to rethink nature and culture, blurring distinctions between people and
things rather than articulating their distinct qualities. This version of posthumanism has roots in Andrew Pickering’s (1995) work on scientific practice
that blurs the subject-object distinction in laboratory practices, emphasizing the coproduction of scientists and research findings. It also has roots in
Donna Haraway’s (1991) work on cyborgs in which she celebrates cybernetic
mergings of people and new technologies. Posthumanist feminist STS scholars such as Annamarie Mol (2002) and Karen Barad (2007) follow a similar
path, foregrounding the entanglements of people and things in the practice
of research and medicine. Haraway took her understanding of human and
nonhuman relations in an ecological direction with her reflections on pets as
companion species. People and pets, she argues, live together because both
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
live longer if they do. Certain ecologies of people and nonhumans are biological beneficial, and social communities reflect this.
Annamarie Mol treats bodies as assemblages, biomes, arguing against
human exceptionalism and autonomy. She critiques the humanist vision of
human exceptionalism as a pernicious myth, obscuring our place in nature.
Karen Barad argues that scientific observation is not furthered by achieving
objective distance, but rather is a product of entanglements with things. The
universe is made up of entanglements, and so are we.
This work is particularly valuable for the social sciences it illustrates how
deeply human communities are entangled with things through their daily
practices, their bodies and their knowledge of who they are. It suggests that
social scientists need to consider human–nonhuman relations not as an interesting specialty, but rather as fundamental to understanding social dynamics.
MATERIAL REGIMES
The new studies of material regimes try to integrate an understanding of
object agency with political analysis, and to look at social dynamics from
below using the powers of things. Marian Feldman (2010), inspired by Alfred
Gell’s (1998) writings about object agency in the arts, studies how stele carrying legal precepts and decorative art not only exercise top-down administrative power, but shape social space around them by affecting circulation and
sight. Robert Scott (2003), looking at Gothic Cathedrals, considers how spiritual seeking animated labor processes that were long and arduous, making
these buildings not just tools of Church domination but also evidence of cultural desires animating the lives of artisans. Similarly, Severin Fowles (2013)
uses artifacts to reconstruct the arrival of some of people to the Taos Pueblo
to escape spiritual domination by the theocracy in Chaco Canyon.
These studies use artifacts as evidence of social processes that were entangled with people in complex ways, trying to tease out how material practices
enabled them to make social changes. This work helps to reveal some of the
political dynamism in political regimes, and illustrates how power is exercised, contested and elaborated through shifts in the material order.
INARTICULACY
Some of the most recent work on materiality, trying to understand how
objects work politically, focuses on inarticulacy. As Gilles Deleuze (1994)
suggests, objects are mute forms that can be sources of cultural change
because of their silence. Most of the time, new objects are made to resemble
older ones, and fit linguistic categories of things. However, Deleuze argues,
people often experiment with variants as they make things, and can find
The Material Turn
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new opportunities for material action they did not anticipate and cannot
fully articulate. As Hebdige showed with safety pins, objects can be used
to challenge classification schemes and counter commonsense reasoning
because of their inarticulacy that links their meaning to their embodied uses.
A number of recent articles feature work on inarticulate politics and configurations of things, mainly focusing on spaces designed to shape identities.
Fred Turner (2012) writes on the “Family of Man” photography exhibit
that toured America after WWII that was designed to reshape American
identity by emphasizing individual choice and autonomy in the layout of
the show. I explain how Versailles worked as a pedagogical environment
for enrolling the French nobility in Louis XIV’s political agenda (Mukerji,
2012). Lyn Spiegel (2012) writes on the furnishings of post-WWII US houses
that helped organize media centered consumption. Erica Robles-Anderson
(2012) analyzes the Crystal Cathedral and the growth of drive-in religion as
an extension of televangelism and faith through consumption. Moreover,
Marisa Brandt (2014) shows how identity and interiority are being addressed
with machines by studying the design and development of Virtual Reality
Therapy for PTSD. In all these cases, people and things are entangled, issues
of power are at stake, and identities are tied to material arrangements. Yet
the inarticulacy of things makes their politics hard to pin down, makes their
use important to their meaning, but also makes their politics difficult to
articulate and confront.
All of the new work in materiality studies emphasizes the entanglements of
people and things, and the mutual production of social worlds and material
environments. They show, too, that societies, institutions, communities and
states all create material regimes to further ways of life, setting up ecologies
of people of things that affect human welfare and ought to be more systematically integrated into social research.
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Zukin, S. (2004). Point of purchase: How shopping changed American culture. New York,
NY: Routledge.
CHANDRA MUKERJI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Chandra Mukerji is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Department
of Communication and the Science Studies Program, as well as Adjunct
Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She has
written extensively on materiality in relation to industrialization, state
formation, natural knowledge, and political culture. In her first book,
From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (Columbia, 1983), she
described the importance of materialism—tool development, materialist
philosophy, and consumerism—to the British textile industry, arguing for
a cultural interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. In A Fragile Power:
Science and the State (Princeton, 1989), which won the Robert K. Merton
Award in 1991, she focused on the material skills of scientists, and how
they were appropriated by the state, arguing that the state in funding
science was less interested in controlling scientific ideas than in developing
a skilled labor force of scientists that could be called upon to solve political
problems. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997),
which won the 1998 Culture book prize from the American Sociological
Association, looked at the royal gardens under Louis XIV as a microcosm
The Material Turn
13
of France that demonstrated the material capacity of the king to control
his land, and highlighted ways France was exercising territorial power.
Finally, in Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du
Midi (2009), which was cowinner in 2012 of the ASA’s highest book award,
the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, Mukerji looked at the material
production of state power. She focused on an infrastructural project that
was technically impossible according to formal knowledge of the period,
but was made possible with a form of “French intelligence”—a system
of distributed cognition in which women peasants and trained engineers
helped each other reconstruct and make available to the state elements of
Roman hydraulics. She used this case study to pose the question of how
states gained power through territorial control, and showed that exercising
logistical power (material rather than social power) was a struggle with
nature rather than patrimonial elites. Elites could not compete with or
successful stop such large projects that shifted patterns of local life away
from those that had served elites in the past. Currently, Mukerji is working
on a theory of inarticulacy to explain how material forms exercise cultural
and political powers. The first hints of these ideas appeared in a paper,
“Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles” Public Culture
24:3 515–540, that used figured world theory to explain how artifacts can
affect thought and shift patterns of political reasoning.
RELATED ESSAYS
History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun
Appadurai
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology (Archaeology), Kirsi O. Lorentz
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
The Use of Geophysical Survey in Archaeology (Methods), Timothy J.
Horsley
Media and the development of Identity (Psychology), Adriana M. Manago
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
History and Materiality (Anthropology), Rosemary A. Joyce
The Material Turn
CHANDRA MUKERJI
Abstract
There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power.
It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how
and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under-examined forms of social life—particularly
the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple
sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault’s analysis of political embodiment,
work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing
interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled
with social practices.
INTRODUCTION
The analysis of materiality in the social sciences has developed in many
directions: looking, for example, at the material lives of suppressed groups;
considering the social power of consumer goods, fashion, and taste; tracing
the role of territorial control to the growth of states; and even addressing the
questions of how humans affect the Earth’s climate and how climate change
demonstrates nonhuman agency. The interest in materiality in the social
sciences has its most obvious roots in Marxism, and historical materialism.
For that precise reason, materiality became ripe for rethinking at the end of
the Cold War with the obvious failure of Marx’s theory of history. Historians
and social scientists needed to expand their understanding of material
power, and how it was configured and used. At the same time, research on
material practices became a more pressing concern with growing evidence
of climate change. The social sciences generally had poor knowledge of how
human communities physically engaged and reconfigured the natural world
they inhabited or about the limits of human control over nature. Foucault
seemed an unlikely source of new ideas about materiality, given his interest
in discourse, but he wrote about the embodiment of categories in bodies and
buildings, providing new ways to understand how material power worked.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Moreover, archeologists started to use their traditional tools and interest in
artifacts to think about broader issues about materiality, power, and culture.
At its most radical, the new materiality has become a way of doing
post-humanist analysis, taking as subject matter for social science not only
people but also the physical environments they create and the creatures with
whom they coinhabit social worlds. Social life is no longer imagined to be a
human drama taking place against the background of an independent and
static natural world, but is understood as activity within shared ecologies of
people and nonhumans: states armed with weapons, corporations located in
skyscrapers, furniture makers working with wood, laborers getting dressed
for a job, or families socializing with pets.
The new materiality is interdisciplinary and diverse, drawing on multiple
traditions of materialist analysis from history, geography, archeology, anthropology, sociology, and critical theory—just repurposing them. Archeologists
that previously dug up remains of civilizations for museums now seek out
material evidence of suppressed social groups; intellectual historians pose
questions about global flows of people, ideas, and artifacts instead the ideas
of great men; and sociologists and social historians study dams, forests, coins,
and mosquitoes as social actors in regimes of power (Harvey et al., 2013;
Hicks & Beaudry, 2010; Mitchell, 2002).
FOUNDATION I: MARXISM AND MATERIALITY
Materiality studies have multiple foundations, many addressing issues
raised by Marx about history and power. These include the Annales School
of historical research, and the British School of Cultural Studies, both of
which made important contributions to contemporary work on materiality.
THE ANNALES SCHOOL
Annales historians and social scientists explicitly tried to use elements of
Marxism, anthropology and geography to describe material practices in history. Founded by Lucien Febvre (1976) and Marc Bloch (1953, 1966), members
of this school were interested in issues at the heart of Marxism: economic
history, peasant life, material foundations of culture, and historical dynamics. They focused on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but were
troubled the lack of good evidence of peasant life in archival sources written
by literate elites. Therefore, they turned to geographical and anthropological
methods to write history from below.
Fernand Braudel (1973, 1975, 1977), who directed the school for many years,
argued that there were different temporalities in history in part because of
material constraints. Forms of material life were slower to change than the
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3
reins of kings and queens because they depended on local geography and
climate. This meant peasant lives were materially grounded and could only
be changed slowly. However, this did not make peasants passive or conservative. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1979) showed, even traditional festivals
such as carnival could evolve into moments of rebellion, making manifest
the agency and political desires of peasants.
Braudel’s social history provided intellectual inspiration for Immanuel
Wallerstein’s (1974) world system analysis with its emphasis on geographical
economic patterns and regional practices of peasant life. It provided a useful
structure for doing comparative, historical sociology of material regimes.
James Scott (1985, 1998) has also used economic history and anthropology
to study peasant life, similarly pointing to the agency of peasants and their
“weapons of the weak.” Similarly, Mark Leone (2005) has developed his own
form of history from below by combining geographical and archeological
methods in excavating Annapolis and shedding new light on slave culture.
CULTURAL STUDIES OF CONSUMPTION
The British school of cultural studies has provided another critical intellectual foundation for materiality studies. This school tried to explain the failure
of Marx’s theory of history, focusing on the world of goods and the cultural
seductions of capitalism. Raymond Williams (1961, 1980, 1982a) and his colleagues looked at commodificaton and mediation—not just representations
in culture. They studied theater, newspapers, television, music and other
popular cultural forms that were embodied and materialized as commodities. They focused on working class life styles and consumer acts of agency.
Dick Hebdige (1979) famously described the Punk reappropriation of safety
pins as piercing jewelry as a refusal of the hegemonic meanings of things.
Critical studies of consumer culture also focused on shopping, fashion and
urban pleasures as distractions, immersive fantasy, and drivers of manufacture and trade. Rosalind Williams (1982b) described displays in department
stores as dream worlds of consumption, using the allure of things to shape
consumer choices. Simon Schama (1987) looked at consumer culture within
the Dutch Golden Age. Daniel Miller (1998) wrote about the material constitution of social selves through shopping choices, looking not only at economic institutions but also the effects of fashion on taste. Sharon Zukin (1995,
2004) described cities as emporia where shopping was entertainment and a
measure of self. Sewell (2010) illustrated connections among fashion, textiles,
and labor, showing their interconnected importance to the rise of capitalism.
Finally, Bourdieu (1984) made clear the social implications of lifestyle choices,
linking tastes to the reproduction of social class. In all these works, goods
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
were treated as fundamental tools for constituting social worlds, selves and
social hierarchies.
Critical geographers, such as Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1989, 2001), considered the power of spaces to sustain political regimes. They described them
as simultaneously physical, political and cultural, legitimating as well as sustaining political orders. Critical cultural geography became a leading field in
materiality studies connecting places to power through neo-Marxist analysis.
FOUNDATION II: FOUCAULT AND THE MATERIAL TURN
A different direction in materiality studies developed from Foucault (1977),
particularly his description of the panopticon and his analysis of surveillance. The panopticon was a type of building designed for penitentiaries
and mental hospitals that made all the inmates visible from a central point
of surveillance. It stood for a form of policing designed to control conduct
and distinguish with its walls between legitimate and illegitimate social
actors. Foucault provided a different view of politics than neo-Marxists by
emphasizing the importance of linguistic distinctions that were imposed
on people and showing how this kind of power could be embodied and
materialized in things. Bodies, buildings and military uniforms were used to
shape social identities and privilege some bodily forms over others, creating
hierarchies that were not products of politicoeconomic forces, but rather
linguistic categories.
Discursive politics was diffuse and hard to control, since people could
oppose or ignore the categories imposed on them. However, once linguistic
differences were drawn with walls and bars, or were invested in bodies,
discursive power became more difficult to deny or displace.
This logic of analysis had immediate impact on feminist theorists such as
Judith Butler and race theorists such as Stuart Hall. Racialized and gendered
bodies made categories seem natural and real. They were not a matter of
argument, but evidence and experience. Therefore, body cultures pressured
groups to enact their prescribed social roles.
Researchers following Foucault added to the material turn by demonstrating social categories were not ideas dissociated from things. Quite the contrary, discourse had material forms. The question was when and how such
materiality mattered.
THE CUTTING EDGE: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
Many of the major ideas shaping the material turn today are being developed
in Science and Technology Studies (STS)—a field in which scholars have been
studying forms of power/knowledge. They have witnessed the constitution
The Material Turn
5
of “nature” through scientific research, and seen the entanglements of people,
instruments, classifications, artifacts, and natural forces that made this possible. Ironically, STS began by treating knowledge as a social phenomenon,
but not a tool of power/knowledge. Still, interest in epistemology made STS a
rich site for developing ideas about knowledge that could be used to address
issues of power/knowledge.
EPISTEMIC CULTURES AND BOUNDARY OBJECTS
Influenced by ethnomethodology, Kuhn and Wittgenstein, early researchers
interested in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) (Bloor, 1976, 1997)
focused on epistemic practices at the local level. Ethnographers in laboratories found themselves watching researchers working on instruments,
preparing samples or reading printouts from machines. To make sense of
this, ethnographers in SSK took a material turn (Barnes & Shapin, 1979;
Knorr, Krohn, & Whitley, 1981; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Lynch, 1985).
Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) has called the sociomaterial practices of knowledge seeking in laboratories epistemic cultures, and emphasized how differently scientific fields developed methods of research. There was no single
canonical scientific method, but many ways of using instruments and objects
of study to produce knowledge.
Researchers working in these different epistemic cultures sometimes
shared common instruments or standardized objects of study such as fruit
flies: boundary objects that linked fields. These common material tools were
meant to facilitate communication and mutual understanding across fields,
but as Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989) showed, objects and instruments did not have the same significance in different epistemic cultures.
The flies and instruments might have been the same, but their uses and
understandings of results varied widely. Therefore, these boundary objects
had more social than cognitive importance, not only roughly coordinating
work across fields but also helping bind research groups into communities
of related fields.
Work on epistemic cultures and boundary objects drew attention to instrumentation and the standardization of specimens, and showed that science
was a complex of material activities rather than a single, distinctive way of
knowing.
POSTHUMANISM AND OBJECT AGENCY
Posthumanist STS has had more radical effects on materiality studies. Much
of the work focuses on objects agency, developing this idea from Bruno
Latour (1987) and Michel Callon’s Actor Network Theory (ANT). Latour
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
pointed the power of nonhuman agents in science when he showed that
Pasteur’s experiment “worked” when microbes did what Pasteur predicted,
ratifying his theory. These invisible agents become his allies in promoting his
ideas. Michel Callon (1986) then made the radical argument that nonhumans
could have agency. He wrote that scallops in Biscayne Bay, in responding to
changes in their environment, were exhibiting agency or physically stating
what they thought. Callon and Latour (1992) combined these ideas in actor
networks, saying both people and things could “actants” testifying to the
validity of scientific ideas.
POWER/KNOWLEDGE
Steve Epstein (1996) showed that diseases were nonhuman agents in his
research on AIDS, but also argued they were caught up in systems of
power/knowledge. AIDS could kill the people it infected, and at first no
one could stop it. Medical researchers tried to identify it to understand its
agency. AIDS had power, and knowledge of its power empowered those
who could claim it. This is why AIDS activists from the gay community
were able to have some effects on AIDS research and treatments because
they saw the disease’s effects most directly. Epstein (2007) similarly showed
in his work on clinical trials how bodies politics worked in medicine. The
decision to include women and minorities in clinical trials reproduced social
classifications as embodied differences, and made them real in relation to
effects of medicines.
MATERIAL REGIMES
Some STS scholars began to realize that natural knowledge had political
uses by governments that STS could illuminate. Based on the distinction
between human and nonhuman agency, I was able to distinguish the logistical power used in territorial governance from the strategic power used in
political struggles, illustrating how infrastructural engineering was used
to get around noble opposition to the empowerment of the state in France
(Mukerji, 2009). Patrick Joyce (2003, 2013), Gabrielle Hecht (1998), Patrick
Carroll (2006), Sarah Pritchard (2011), and Karl Appuhn (2009) have also
done research on infrastructures, territoriality and states, looking at how
governments gain power by diverting rivers, digging canals, building dams,
erecting nuclear power plants, building post offices and draining plains.
Carroll showed how scientific measurement was used for gaining control of
land in colonial states. Moreover, Hecht and Pritchard showed how states
made themselves more powerful and addressed historical weaknesses by
using infrastructure. Joyce (2003, 2013) added that the buildings and spaces
The Material Turn
7
designed by governing elites affect how people understand themselves as
social actors, providing cultural scaffolding for forms of modern governmentality, for example, communicating to people who they are and what
they are expected to do.
Appropriately for a field concerned with the agency of nonhumans, climate
change has also played a part in the material turn within STS. Bruno Latour
has called climate change “the great experiment.” Extracting fossil fuel to
drive manufacture was supposed to demonstrate human rationality in the
use of natural resources, but was an experiment in the coproduction of a new
material reality. Nature and culture were entangled, and the great experiment
confirmed that any change one was a change in both.
Environmental historians have provided evidence of the modern compact
that governed the great experiment. Cronon’s (1991) work on Chicago
showed that modern industrial cities were products of material connections
and flows of things between city and country, nature and culture. The
housing for Chicago’s laborers was made from timber from Wisconsin.
The grains and beef at the heart of Chicago’s economy came from prairies
turned into farmland. Moreover, the feedlots in the city held cattle until
it could be slaughtered and shipped by refrigerated rail to eastern urban
restaurants. Its rural surrounds and Chicago became a single unit of material
transformation: a constellation of people and things that was meant to be
rationally controlled, but was really part of the great experiment.
NEW DIRECTIONS: ENTANGLEMENTS AND INARTICULACY
There are many new directions in materiality studies, but three that seem to
hold the most promise for changing the field: new directions in posthumanism and material regimes in addition to new work on inarticulacy.
Posthumanist feminists in STS are drawing on feminist theories of embodiment to rethink nature and culture, blurring distinctions between people and
things rather than articulating their distinct qualities. This version of posthumanism has roots in Andrew Pickering’s (1995) work on scientific practice
that blurs the subject-object distinction in laboratory practices, emphasizing the coproduction of scientists and research findings. It also has roots in
Donna Haraway’s (1991) work on cyborgs in which she celebrates cybernetic
mergings of people and new technologies. Posthumanist feminist STS scholars such as Annamarie Mol (2002) and Karen Barad (2007) follow a similar
path, foregrounding the entanglements of people and things in the practice
of research and medicine. Haraway took her understanding of human and
nonhuman relations in an ecological direction with her reflections on pets as
companion species. People and pets, she argues, live together because both
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
live longer if they do. Certain ecologies of people and nonhumans are biological beneficial, and social communities reflect this.
Annamarie Mol treats bodies as assemblages, biomes, arguing against
human exceptionalism and autonomy. She critiques the humanist vision of
human exceptionalism as a pernicious myth, obscuring our place in nature.
Karen Barad argues that scientific observation is not furthered by achieving
objective distance, but rather is a product of entanglements with things. The
universe is made up of entanglements, and so are we.
This work is particularly valuable for the social sciences it illustrates how
deeply human communities are entangled with things through their daily
practices, their bodies and their knowledge of who they are. It suggests that
social scientists need to consider human–nonhuman relations not as an interesting specialty, but rather as fundamental to understanding social dynamics.
MATERIAL REGIMES
The new studies of material regimes try to integrate an understanding of
object agency with political analysis, and to look at social dynamics from
below using the powers of things. Marian Feldman (2010), inspired by Alfred
Gell’s (1998) writings about object agency in the arts, studies how stele carrying legal precepts and decorative art not only exercise top-down administrative power, but shape social space around them by affecting circulation and
sight. Robert Scott (2003), looking at Gothic Cathedrals, considers how spiritual seeking animated labor processes that were long and arduous, making
these buildings not just tools of Church domination but also evidence of cultural desires animating the lives of artisans. Similarly, Severin Fowles (2013)
uses artifacts to reconstruct the arrival of some of people to the Taos Pueblo
to escape spiritual domination by the theocracy in Chaco Canyon.
These studies use artifacts as evidence of social processes that were entangled with people in complex ways, trying to tease out how material practices
enabled them to make social changes. This work helps to reveal some of the
political dynamism in political regimes, and illustrates how power is exercised, contested and elaborated through shifts in the material order.
INARTICULACY
Some of the most recent work on materiality, trying to understand how
objects work politically, focuses on inarticulacy. As Gilles Deleuze (1994)
suggests, objects are mute forms that can be sources of cultural change
because of their silence. Most of the time, new objects are made to resemble
older ones, and fit linguistic categories of things. However, Deleuze argues,
people often experiment with variants as they make things, and can find
The Material Turn
9
new opportunities for material action they did not anticipate and cannot
fully articulate. As Hebdige showed with safety pins, objects can be used
to challenge classification schemes and counter commonsense reasoning
because of their inarticulacy that links their meaning to their embodied uses.
A number of recent articles feature work on inarticulate politics and configurations of things, mainly focusing on spaces designed to shape identities.
Fred Turner (2012) writes on the “Family of Man” photography exhibit
that toured America after WWII that was designed to reshape American
identity by emphasizing individual choice and autonomy in the layout of
the show. I explain how Versailles worked as a pedagogical environment
for enrolling the French nobility in Louis XIV’s political agenda (Mukerji,
2012). Lyn Spiegel (2012) writes on the furnishings of post-WWII US houses
that helped organize media centered consumption. Erica Robles-Anderson
(2012) analyzes the Crystal Cathedral and the growth of drive-in religion as
an extension of televangelism and faith through consumption. Moreover,
Marisa Brandt (2014) shows how identity and interiority are being addressed
with machines by studying the design and development of Virtual Reality
Therapy for PTSD. In all these cases, people and things are entangled, issues
of power are at stake, and identities are tied to material arrangements. Yet
the inarticulacy of things makes their politics hard to pin down, makes their
use important to their meaning, but also makes their politics difficult to
articulate and confront.
All of the new work in materiality studies emphasizes the entanglements of
people and things, and the mutual production of social worlds and material
environments. They show, too, that societies, institutions, communities and
states all create material regimes to further ways of life, setting up ecologies
of people of things that affect human welfare and ought to be more systematically integrated into social research.
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CHANDRA MUKERJI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Chandra Mukerji is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Department
of Communication and the Science Studies Program, as well as Adjunct
Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She has
written extensively on materiality in relation to industrialization, state
formation, natural knowledge, and political culture. In her first book,
From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (Columbia, 1983), she
described the importance of materialism—tool development, materialist
philosophy, and consumerism—to the British textile industry, arguing for
a cultural interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. In A Fragile Power:
Science and the State (Princeton, 1989), which won the Robert K. Merton
Award in 1991, she focused on the material skills of scientists, and how
they were appropriated by the state, arguing that the state in funding
science was less interested in controlling scientific ideas than in developing
a skilled labor force of scientists that could be called upon to solve political
problems. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997),
which won the 1998 Culture book prize from the American Sociological
Association, looked at the royal gardens under Louis XIV as a microcosm
The Material Turn
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of France that demonstrated the material capacity of the king to control
his land, and highlighted ways France was exercising territorial power.
Finally, in Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du
Midi (2009), which was cowinner in 2012 of the ASA’s highest book award,
the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, Mukerji looked at the material
production of state power. She focused on an infrastructural project that
was technically impossible according to formal knowledge of the period,
but was made possible with a form of “French intelligence”—a system
of distributed cognition in which women peasants and trained engineers
helped each other reconstruct and make available to the state elements of
Roman hydraulics. She used this case study to pose the question of how
states gained power through territorial control, and showed that exercising
logistical power (material rather than social power) was a struggle with
nature rather than patrimonial elites. Elites could not compete with or
successful stop such large projects that shifted patterns of local life away
from those that had served elites in the past. Currently, Mukerji is working
on a theory of inarticulacy to explain how material forms exercise cultural
and political powers. The first hints of these ideas appeared in a paper,
“Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles” Public Culture
24:3 515–540, that used figured world theory to explain how artifacts can
affect thought and shift patterns of political reasoning.
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The Material Turn