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Theory, Culture & Society

DOI: 10.1177/0263276027618991102002; 19; 1Theory Culture Society

Dick Pels, Kevin Hetherington and Frdric VandenbergheThe Status of the Object: Performances, Mediations, and Techniques

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The Status ofthe ObjectPerformances, Mediations, and Techniques

DickPels,KevinHetheringtonandFrdric

Vandenberghe

TotheThingsThemselves?

OBJECTS ARE back in strength in contemporary social theory.Whether in the shape of commodities, machines, communicationtechnologies, foodstuffs, artworks, urban spaces, or risk phenomena

in a thoroughly socialized nature, a newworld ofmaterialities and objec-

tivities has emerged with an urgencywhich has turned them into new sitesof perplexity and controversy. After poststructuralism and constructivismhad melted everything that was solid into air, it was perhaps time that wenoticed once again the sensuous immediacyofthe objects we live, work andconverse with, in which we routinely place our trust, which we love andhate, which bind us as much as we bind them. High time perhaps also, afterthis panegyric of textuality and discursivity, to catch our theoretical sensi-bilities on the hard edges ofour social world again, tofeel the sheer forceof things which strike back at us with unexpected violence, in the formof

traffic jams, rail accidents, information overload, environmental pollution,or new technologies ofterrorism. Perhaps the most intriguingfeature ofthisnew constellation is our (re)discoveryof the multiple newways in whichsocial and material relations are entangled together, blurring conventionaldistinctions between the software and hardware ofour social lives. Talkingto intelligentmachines, reconstructingour bodies with the help ofprostheticand genomic technologies, beingglued tomobile phones, roving around incyberspace, indulging in humanoid robotic phantasies, is tomingle ourhumanitywith not-so-mute, active, performative objects in a waywhich we

find equallyfascinating as disconcerting. The prime objective ofthis special

Theory, Culture&Society2002 (SAGE,London, Thousand Oaks and NewDelhi),Vol. 19(5/6): 121[0263-2764(200210)19:5/6;121;028403]

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issue is tofurther explore some of the modes, spaces, contradictions, medi-ations and ethical dilemmas of this co-performance ofsociality/materiality.

One key theoretical challenge which has arisen in the past decades ishowwe can rethink traditional conceptions about the performance ofsocialorder in the face of this newly appreciated impact ofmaterial environmentsand the socializing effect ofthings. In viewof the weakeningof traditionalviews ofsocial reality as an entirely social realm, a familiar issue has resur-faced:what holds society in place? If(post)modern individualizing societiesare able to survive on much less structure, cohesion, or foundation thansocial theorists have generally assumed, how much cement, how muchexistence does the social actually need? And what is the stuff that it ismade of? Various new approaches in the anthropology and geography ofmaterial culture, in science and technology studies, and in the new soci-

ologies of consumption and risk culture, have pointed towards an under-standingofthe performative and integrative capacityofthings to helpmakewhat we call society. By emphasizing howmuch the social is ordered, held,and fixed by the material, these new approaches have posed critical chal-lenges tomainstream social theory, which until recently has only beenmarginally interested in relationships between humans and non-humans,culture and nature, or society and technology.

But the issue is not just one oforder. Ifwe still need to ask this oldsociological question about order being held in place we need to add a

further one:what makes societymove?

The current concern with mobili-ties, fluidities and flows (Lash and Urry, 1994;Urry, 2000) needs to be readalongside that ofstability; and materiality is equally implicated in this issueoffluidity. Perhaps Simmel had it (partially) right all along. It is a questionofbridges and doors and the constitution ofa will to connection(Simmel,1994: 6; cf. Hetherington, 1997). But whereas for Simmel it was humanmeaninggenerating social action that was the start for all desires to connectup the world, for manyof the contributors in this volume it is not somuchwhat materials (like the bridge or door) symbolize within social action thatmatters but their constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networksofsociality/materiality. That is either the basic starting point or the point ofcritique that is addressed by the articles within this issue. One assumptionmade in a number of the articles presented here is that materials are notthings given meaning by a volitional will but are taken as actants; theiragency is understood as constituted as a relational and non-volitional will-as-force(cf. Brown and Capdevila, 1999).

The present issue (which is based on the proceedings ofa conferenceheld at Brunel University in earlySeptember 1999) reflects some interest-ing cross-fertilizations between these various newmaterialisms, and forges

critical links withmore classical tropes and themes in the historyofthinkingabout institutionalization, reification, fetishism, mediation and the realiza-tionof the social. Byfocusingmore intently upon the social life of thingsand the expressive, retroactive, or interpellating effects which they haveon human activity, its purpose is to reinvigorate and possibly alter the terms

2 Theory, Culture&Society19(5/6)

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of classical debates about idealism vs materialism, realism vs construc-tivism, agencyvs structure, or essentialismvs fluidity and difference.

The need to address issues about nature, technology, the body, food-stuffs, mobility, the (un)planning of space, and newmedia of communi-

cation, has hastened the emergence of new social studies which make asuccess ofcross-disciplinarywork and increasingly appear as successors tothe 19th-century disciplines. In Benjamins familiar concept of constella-tion, these studies put the object in place ofthe sun and map out in a non-Euclidean way the multiplicity of contributory disciplines (such asphilosophy, sociology, law, geography, psychoanalysis, history) andapproaches within and across these disciplines (actor-network theory,material cultural studies, postmodern and post-colonial theory, criticaltheory), that analyse different objects (substances, fetishes, trains, choco-

late, computers, marbles and soon). The articles in this issue exemplifysome ofthese neworientations towards the object, objectification and objec-tivity, providing a cutting-edge overviewofexciting new bridges and doorsinto social and cultural studies.

Let us get rid of the impossible question right away:what are things?What counts as an object? The impossibility of this question is alreadyreflected in an etymological lineage which suggests indetermination andessential contestability. The hope and fate of the notion of the res, whichhas furnished the etymological root for both our conceptualization ofthing-

ness

and that of

reality

, is to be chronically in deliberation, in process,up for grabs. In Roman and Germanic languages, thing (causa, Sache,Ding, Thang) originally stood for trial, lawsuit, judiciary assembly,deliberation, or accusation. Linguistic expressions such as thing orcause are hence themselves a product of a reified process (Elster, 1985:80; cf. Serres, 1982; Pitkin, 1987). Ob-jects are material things which arethrown out(Serres, 1991) intoour path; but toobject is raising a verbalaccusation or difference which stands against our own point of view (cf.Daston, 2000: 2). The world of things which we routinely inhabit has ofcourse always extended far beyond raw tangible matter and really existingrealities into the vast realmofthe abstract, the invisible, the imaginary, andthe virtual (McLuhan, 1987;Strathern, 1991). In a culture which favoursbricolage, simulation, performativity and acting-as-if, we have increasinglylearned to calculate and playwith this radical indeterminacy between thereal, the not-so-real and the imaginary. Increasingly, we have also come toappreciate the fluidity and instabilityof the (multiple)ontological bound-aries which separate thinglike from nonthinglike entities (persons, animals,relations, concepts), in a growing discomfort about the traditional hierar-chies which separated subjects from objects, cultures from natures, and

humans from nonhumans.

ReificationandFetishismIn view of these indeterminacies, it might be illuminating to revisit twoclassical sites ofcontroversywhich have offered frameworks for theorizing

Pels, Hetherington&Vandenberghe The Status ofthe Object 3


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this three-sided interplay between materiality, immateriality, and sociality:reificationand fetishism. Originally, both discourses were centred upon acritical trope which targeted the illegitimate confusion between things andnonthings. Reification, ofcourse, refers to the unwarranted transposition of

human relations, processes, actions and concepts into impersonal,nonhuman objects, and hence implies a double denunciation of the alien-ating autonomization ofboth intellectual concepts and social structures (cf.Vandenberghe, 19971998, 2001). Fetishism has conventionally indicatedthe reverse process of the personification and agent-ificationofmaterialobjects, which are thought to be possessed by spiritual, even supernaturalforces, and command a unique reverence as a result of this magical attri-bution (cf. Pietz, 1985, 1987, 1988). In both cases, critical theory strives tounmask these seemingly inherent powers ofagency as alienated and phan-

tasmagoric representations of human definitions and performances,reducing what appear to be natural properties which emanate from theobject itselfas delegated actions and properties ofhumans. Because of thissymmetrical ontological confusion, which juxtaposes the thing-ification ofhuman actions and definitions to the personification and spiritualization ofthings, the critical vocabularies of reification and fetishism emerge ascrucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary betweensubjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as theepistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. The idioms

of reification and fetishism therefore offer themselves as intriguingtemplates for rethinking the relationship between sociality and materialityin conditions ofontological uncertainty in which the demarcation betweenthe world of things and the world of persons is losing its former obvious-ness and solidity.

A thumbnail sketch of the shared historyof the two terms reveals aconceptual rift which increasingly relegated the discourse of reification tothe idealist and meta-physical side ofthe grand modernist binary betweenidealism and materialism(pace Feuerbach, Lukcs and Debord), while thetrope offetishism tended to linger at the opposite materialist side (Marx).In the primordial sceneof the debates among the Young Hegelians duringthe 1830s and 1840s, the critical theoryofreification emerged in the middleofa philosophical battle in the course ofwhich Marx turned Hegelian spir-itualism back upon its feet, in order to ground the critique of religiousalienation in the muddy realityof alienated practices ofmaterial produc-tion. His famous analysis of commodity fetishism immediately connectedthe reification of social institutions, e.g. of the social division of labour, tothe alienatingmaterialityof commodity exchange in the capitalist market.The commodity fetish was a sensuous supersensuous thingwhich had a

semblance ofsingularity and autonomy; but it simultaneously enacted socialrelations and definitions which were quasi-naturalistically inscribed in thematerial properties of the commodified object itself. This naturalisticconcealment ofsociality in materialitywas analogous to the reversal whichwas operated by religious consciousness, which made the productions of



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the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with lifewhichentered into relations both with one another and with their human produc-ers (Marx, 1977 [1867]: 77). Both the personification ofthings and the reifi-cation of persons were analytically anchored in the realm of material

production, while the reification ofcultural and political forms was seen asa secondary result of this primordial alienation.

The subsequent historyofthe concept ofreification, as it can be tracedfromLukcs and the Frankfurt School toGabel, Debord, Baudrillard andbeyond, showed a progressive generalization towards a comprehensivetheoryofsymbolic structures which progressively extinguished the Marxianbase-superstructure problematic, moving away from the material ground-ings in which the theoryoffetishism remained constitutionally rooted. Thispartial parting of the ways between the two vocabularies reflected the

broader culturalization of social theorywhich spans the course of the 20thcentury. Effectively reasserting the dualism between idealism and material-ism, it increasingly incorporated the world of things as a backdrop (screen)to and object ofpractices ofsymbolic signification and meaningful classifi-cation. In the classical sociological tradition, the thingness or materialdensityof social structures was preferably seen as resultingfrom the forceofcollective representations (cf. Durkheims methodological rule to considersocial facts as things); and where the critical figure of reification wasretained, the emphasis was upon the way in which institutional facts mysti-

fied the true nature ofhuman activity, which itself tended to be conceivedon the model and as a modalityof consciousness rather than as materiallabour or practice (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966). The cultural turnwhich was somassively exemplified by 20th-century intellectual currentssuch as structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, phenomenology, sym-bolic interactionism, and hermeneutics, genericallyfavoured the view thatmaterial entities primarily existed as envelopes ofmeaning, acquiring theirsocial presence as a result ofprocesses of linguistic coding and discursiveinterpretation.

The general outcome was that sociological theories of institutionalorder adopted an idealist character fromwhich the dimension ofmaterialculture gradually disappeared. Reification was predominantly understoodin terms ofthe constraining, supra-human facticityof institutional relationsand processes as it was instantiated and confirmed by the misplacedconcretenessof naturalizing definitions and representations. The analysisof fetishism, even though it retained a Marxian (or Freudian) focus onconcrete material objects, was also increasingly drawn into this culturalistforce field. In a recent reopeningof the debate on the politics ofmaterial-ism, Pietz for example sawfit to criticize the predominantly semiological

reading of the Marxist account of fetishism by canonic poststructuralistssuch as Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Laclau and iek, for their tendencyto reject any firm distinction between materiality and meaning and tocollapse the problemoffetishismwith that of ideology. In his view, the gistof the poststructuralist position was effectively to restate the Hegelian



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idealist view of material reality as the necessary mediating othernessthrough which subjective concepts asserted themselves in their process ofreflexive historical self-recognition (Pietz, 1993: 11922, 127). In thissense, it might be argued that much post-Marxist understandingoffetishism

has tended tofall back into a kind ofpre-Marxist, Feuerbachian critique ofthe signifier (cf. Debray, 1995).

Pietzs attempt to revive the Marxian focus on the materialityof thefetish fits a broader countermovement to reigning constructivist orthodox-ies, which has been gatheringforce and pace in the past decades to add uptowhat can now safely be described as a materialist turn in social andcultural theory. It is hardly accidental that much of the theoretical inspira-tion and many analytical tools for these new approaches tomaterial cultureoriginated with social anthropology, which could rely on an unbroken

tradition in the empirical consideration ofthe socialityofthe material world(Douglas, 1984;Douglas and Isherwood, 1996;Thompson, 1979; Miller,1987; Thomas, 1991;Carrier, 1995). In particular, Appadurais agenda-setting essayon the politics ofcommodity exchange and Kopytoffs analysisof the cultural biography of objects, both fromTheSocialLife ofThings(Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986), were important attempts to refocusanalytical attention upon the material embodiment and concrete historicityof social objects themselves and indeed to reassert that commodities, likepersons, had social lives. While conceding that material things did not

acquire meanings

apart from those that human transactions, attributions,and motivations endow themwith, it was rather more imperative now tofollow the things themselves in order to ascertain how such meanings wereactually inscribed in their forms, uses, and trajectories. Countering thetendency to excessively sociologize material transactions, no social analysisof things could therefore avoid a minimum level of methodologicalfetishism(Appadurai, 1986: 5).

In this respect, the anthropological trope of fetishism generallyoffered a more accessible channel for rehabilitating the idea of the materialembeddedness of culture than that of reification, which to a larger extentremained imprisoned in the subjectivist and representational programme ofcritical social theory (cf. Lukcss 1967 self-critique, 1971). Accordingly,anthropological and psychoanalytical studies of primitive belief systemsand of the fetishization ofdesire provided important templates for the rein-ventionof the material in the new cultural studies ofconsumer and mediaculture, ofvisual imagery and the aesthetics of design, ofgeographies ofspace, and of science and technologywhich began to invade the intellec-tual and disciplinary landscape from the early 1970s (cf. Hall et al., 1980;Miller, 1987;Thrift, 1996). Borrowing the empirical flair ofethnography and

its habits of thick description, these new studies ofmaterial and techno-logical culture indeed began tofollow the things themselves; and by doingso, gradually reopened the question of the material constitution and tech-nical equipment of different forms of social order. While beginning toretrace and redress the balance between idealism and materialism in this



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fashion, these studies simultaneously guzzled a sufficient dose of ethno-graphic descriptivism and ontological relativism in order to shift from anormative approach to fetishism and reification towards a non-judgmentalor a-critical position which increasingly dismissed the Marxian problemoffalse consciousness as an irrelevant concern. In this sense the materialistturn was simultaneously an agnostic turnwhich hit on a new social ontologyprecisely as a result of its empirical resolve to turn to the things them-selves.

Appadurais decision to follow the social and political life of thingswas matched in the emerging social studies oftechnology by similar injunc-tions, most visibly articulated byWinner (1986), to counter overly socio-logical and contextual theories of technological determination and paycloser attention to the ways in which political qualities and purposes

becamefixed

in the material design and physical dimensions of technicalartefacts themselves. RepeatingAppadurais flirtation with methodological

fetishism, Winner defended the apparent ontological transgression involvedin identifying technologies as political phenomena in their own right andin talking about an inherent politics of things, even though conventionalintuitions might see this as a way ofmystifying human artifice and ofavoiding the true human sources ofjustice and injustice (Winner, 1986: 26).Ifmaterial designs represented crystallized choices between various possi-bilities of realization, particular forms of politics could be scripted into

artefacts (cf. Akrich, 1992) and act back independently upon their users.Against this background, it is perhaps less remarkable that more radicalapproaches to the material constitution of social life simultaneouslydeepened this emergingontological confusion between human activity andthe performativity of things, and further delegitimized the normativehumanist impulse so as to seemingly sever all critical relations betweenreification, fetishism and alienation.

Working in the idealist tradition ofsociological institutional analysis,Thomason has, for example, suggested that instead ofcurable distortions,reifications should perhaps be regarded as necessary and inevitableprerequisites for any social order (1982: 7). Newmaterialist approaches tofetishism in anthropological, feminist, psychological, and cultural studieshave similarly distanced themselves from the derogatory reflexoftraditionalideologycritical accounts (cf. Strathern, 1995; Spyer, 1998; Pels, 1998;Mercer, 1994;McClintock, 1993, 1995). Within the emerging tradition ofscience and technology studies, this agnostic and non-denunciatoryapproach has been most clearly articulated byActor-Network Theory(ANT)(Callon, 1986;Latour, 1993a, 1993b;Law, 1991, 1999). Theorems such asthat ofthe ontological symmetry between human and nonhuman actants, the

hybrid character ofsocio-technical collectives (as also in Foucaults readingof the technologies of discipline and surveillance, 1977), assemblies ofheterogenous engineering, and the interobjectivity of social order,deliberately set out to confuse the modernist categorizations which princi-pally separated culture from nature and societyfrom technology, revaluing



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things as active mediators, fixers and stabilizers of social, cultural andpolitical networks. In the ANTview, the ethnographic injunction to closelyfollow the actants revealed a practice of intimate hybridization betweenhumans and artefacts, which suggested that social networks are unable to

cohere without the delegated intentionality and agencyof things (see alsoHaraway, 1991). Merely social structures and symbolic representations arenot solid enough to frame durable interactions and hold social reality inplace;wherever interactions have a temporal and spatial extension, it iscaused by sharing human socialitywith nonhumans (Latour, 1996a: 239;1994: 51, 54). Rather than considering things as idols, which function asprojection screens for inverted human beliefs, intentions, and desires, theacknowledgement of this moral and political agencyof things leads one toabandon the critical, anti-fetishist reflex and to accept that material reifi-

cation or fetishization is preciselywhat holds the social order in place andallows it tomove at the same time (Latour, 1993a, 1996b, 1999).

SymbolicandMaterialOrdersThis brieftrackingofthe discourses ofreification and fetishismyields usefulparameters for an introductory framingof the contributions to this issue.The first axis of controversy is generated by conceptual residues of thetraditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism, which has by nomeans been dissolved or laid to rest, but continues to infiltrate recent

redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern is of coursehowmuch autonomy and agency can be granted tomaterial objects in viewof their social inscription and symbolic construction, and howfar concep-tual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans andnonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted togo. The second mainaxis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-politicalsensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinctionbetween what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, andbetween what may count as a person and what as a thing.

The first section starts out with two contributions which usefully recallthe two contrasting but alsooverlapping sides ofthe argument: the symbolicframingofmaterial objects (Harr)vs the material framingofsocial relations(Pietz). The twofollowing contributions rise to the radical challenge whichis posed by the levelling and a-critical ontologyofANT, in arguingfor astronger essentialist (Vandenberghe) or a weaker performativist (Pels)priorityof the realmofsymbolic practice and socialityover that ofmaterialobjectivity. The next section switches more clearly towards the performa-tivity of objects and the politics of things themselves, emphasizing theirtopological multiplicity and the precarious nature oftheir ontological stabi-

lization. It lays out alternative and multiple spatial ontologies which stepbeyond the Euclidean modernist grid in order to explore the fluidity andvirtualityofobjects (Law, van Loon), the performative construction ofspaceby dwelling and movement (Turnbull), and the co-production ofmaterialspace and national community(Verstraete). The third section extends these



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routes, which are already leading beyond the idealism/materialism binary,into new conceptual territories at the centre ofwhich is a reconsiderationof the issue ofmediation:from a concern with the mediation of the screenin the making of the subjectiviy of the market trader (Knorr Cetina andBrgger); the mediation ofthe hand within what we understand as the scopicof the museum (Hetherington); the mediation of food within the ethics ofcare (Harbers, Mol and Stollmeyer); the mediation of the commodity in theregime of the (pornographic)gift (Slater); and the mediation of technologyin the makingofwhat it is to be human (Latour). One emphasis which ismarked throughout this collection of articles is a switch in conceptions ofperformativity and performance from a predominantly discursive towards amore practice-oriented viewwhich focuses upon bodily encounters with andattachments to objects and spaces (cf. Schieffelin, 1998). Another major

theme which is addressed throughout this issue is the imagination of newforms ofontological politics and of a new ethics of alterityon the basis ofthis new intimacy between sociality and materiality.

As indicated, the first set of articles follow a tacking movementaround the issue of the relative weight of symbolic vs material structuresand that of the relative agencyofpeople and things. In the opening article,Rom Harr strongly argues the priorityof symbolic, especially discursive,action over the material order in the genesis of social things. What turns apiece ofstuff into a social object is its embedment in a narrative construc-

tion. The attribution of an active or a passive role to things in relation topersons is thus essentially story-relative: nothing happens or exists in thesocial world unless it is framed by human performative activity. DrawingonGibsons notion of affordance, Harr affirms that material things may bedisposed towards many different usages, and may acquire multiple identi-ties according to different narrative constructions, even though the range oftheir possible existences is constrained by certainmaterial features. In thissense, the materialityofan object is perhaps nothing but the totalityof itsaffordances. Objects acquire their full significance only if one takesaccount of their double role in both the practicalorder, which includessocial arrangements for maintaining life, and the expressiveorder, whichcreates hierarchies ofhonour and status, and which enjoys priorityover theformer. Reasoning from a microsociological constructionist perspective,Harr restates his view that there is nothing else to social life but symbolicexchanges and joint management ofmeaning, including the meaning ofthings; the illusion that some thing is real is merely an effect of certaininterpretational grammars which remain stable across the generations oreven the centuries.

If Harr emphasizes that things become social objects only within

particular storylines, William Pietzmakes the reverse point about the essen-tial materialityof social relationships, especially contractual ones, e.g. asexpressed in the legal historyofthe material consideration. Departingfroma similar conception of the performative micro-reproduction ofsocial orderand the communicative objectification of social facts, he nevertheless



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attempts to balance what is described as the immaterialist Enlightenmentviewof social contract by focusing upon the role of forensic legal objectswithin the capitalist economy. Amaterial consideration refers to an obscurebut important social object that embodies the power to transform subjective

promises intoobjective obligations and thereby establishes the social factof legal liability. The legal doctrine of consideration implies that verbalpromises or moral considerations do not suffice to establish a contractualrelationship between individuals, but require the simultaneous transfer ofa tangible object in order to institute a legally binding social fact. By thusproviding objective physical evidence for the obligation, materiality isclearly a condition for sociality. This idea ofsocial materiality cannot easilybe articulated in modern social theory as long as it sustains a strict separ-ation between society and nature or between human subjectivity and

physical causality, and therefore tends to explain social objects such ascontracts as expressions of subjective intention, without noticing thematerial component which lends them their binding force. If social fact-making is purely seen in symbolic terms rather than as real enactments ofsocial power, the social causality of things like material considerationseffectively becomes a mystery.

The following article by Frdric Vandenberghe tacks back towardsthe idealist side ofthe argument, in a spirited defence ofcritical humanismagainst the radical symmetryofANT. Compared to Harr and Pietz, he also

takes a much stronger stance on sociological realism, arguing that thecritique ofreification and the ethics ofemancipation require us togo beyondthe flat ontology of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnicalnetworks towards a more stratified viewof social realitywhich is able toaccount for the determining effect ofbroader generative but invisible struc-tures of domination. Drawingon Husserlian phenomenology, he reassertsthe categorical distinction between the ontological regions inhabited byhumans and nonhumans, and develops a critical opposition between the gifteconomy, which emphasizes qualitative relations of reciprocity betweenhumans and which tends towards the personalization of things, and thecommodity economy, which objectifies things as property, promotes thereification ofpersons, and turns them into strategicallyoperatinghumants.By restoring the primacy of the relationship among humans over thatbetween nonhumans, gifts symbolize and perform the social bond; whilecommodityfetishism severs that bond and inverts this essential relation-ship. This Marxian model is critically applied toANT by suggesting that itsfetishist attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results froma failure to account for the emergent properties ofthe broader relational andcultural systems in which they are embedded, and which over-determine

the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described. Breaking thisfetishist illusion calls for a utopian and communicative reconfiguration ofsemiotics which turns back the materialist turn and restores the emancipa-tory interest ofgivingvoice to human voices which are repressed by theworld of things.



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In the following article, Dick Pels reverses tack again by supportingHarrs nominalist view about the reflexive performance ofsocial reality andmateriality against the sociological realismwhich is defended byVanden-berghe. The challenge posed byANTs principle ofradical symmetry is here

taken up in a different way, by developing a counterargument to theLatourian (ethnomethodological) presumption that social and symbolicconstructions are in themselves too fragile and weak to effectively knittogether the social order which needs ballasting by a myriad of techno-logical objects. Refocusing the Durkheimian problemofthe resilient thing-ness or stickinessof the social, it is argued that social orders are alsomaintained by self-fulfilling prophecies which are stabilized by the realityeffect ofwhat is called everyday essentialism. Social facts are routinelyenacted by circular bootstrappingoperations which are often misrecognized

as such in order to produce an illusion ofontological transcendence:whatPels calls the Mnchhausen effect. It is this practical everyday reificationof social facts which also creates fixities, nodes, and sites for the symbolicpackagingofmaterial objects. Over against ANTs agnostic appreciationof this reifying practice as somethingwe all do, Pels, like Vandenberghe,therefore retains an interest in a critical theoryof reification. Social factsare implicated in incessant processes ofrealization and de-realization whichenhance or diminish their relative existence; they become thinglikeentities because (and insofar as) actors fail to calculate their own perfor-

mative contribution to them and continue to treat them as things. Thisperformative circle is onlyvicious as long as it is not recognized for whatit is and cheerfully practised as such. Reflexive circularity emphasizes thenormative significance ofacting-as-ifover against all forms ofontologicalessentialism: ifsocial situations are more clearly defined as if they are real,we are less likely to be caught out by the stark realityoftheir consequences.

Performativity,Fluidity,AlterityObjects need symbolic framings, storylines and human spokespersons inorder to acquire social lives; social relationships and practices in turn needto be materiallygrounded in order togain temporal and spatial endurance.Ifthe previous section has variously re-emphasized the symbolic side ofthesociality/materiality equation, the contributions in the next one return to amore attentive exploration of the object side. On one level, it continues thebroad de-reifying programme which was pursued bymost of the previousauthors, in emphasizing that material objects are not natural facts but areperformed in heterogenous ways, as are the networks and spaces which theyinhabit and construct. John Laws article begins by restating the classicalANT position that objects do not exist in themselves but are the effect of

a performative stabilization of relational networks. Material objects areenactments ofstrategies, and actively participate in the making and holdingtogether of social relations. In addition, these material enactmentsinevitably have a spatial dimension; they simultaneously establish spatialconditions for objectual identity, continuity, and difference. Space must not



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be reified as a natural, pre-existing container ofthe social and the material,but is itselfa performance. Moreover, there are multiple forms ofspatialitybeyond the Euclidean space of regions (e.g. networks and fluids), andobjects may exist and achieve homeomorphism within several different

spatial systems. Like the Portuguese ship, they are able to displace them-selves precisely because of their topological complexity, i.e. because theysimultaneously exist within regional, network, and more fluid forms ofspace. Technologies such as the Zimbabwe Bush Pump present a fluidobject which is able to exist and cohere without the presence offixed bound-aries or the permanence of a particular functional definition. The networklogic, however, which gravitates towards stability and functionality, tends toexclude and silence this spatial Other, even though network realities areconstitutively dependent upon fluid work. Law suggests an alternative

political ontology is needed which goes beyond the reification of networkspace in order to give voice to the fluid objects which escape its unidi-mensional functionality.

In the next article, Joost van Loon takes as his subject a particularlyfluid category of objects: viruses. His emphasis is once again upon theperformative constitution or objectification of an object whose itnessremains virtual and ambiguous. Far from being a simple matter offact, vanLoon argues in classical STSmanner (Latour, 1988), viruses only came intobeing as an accomplishment ofa varied set ofactors, being rendered intel-

ligible as a result of their successful performative

enpresenting

by theemergingassemblageofvirology. Virological technoscience objectified thevirus, which gradually emerged as a nodal point in a new alliance betweenmicrobiology, molecular physics and electron microscopy engineering, andon the strength ofnew techniques ofvisualization and newforms ofdiscur-sive signification and cultural valorization. Mainly a gradual process, itsemergence during the early 1950s was radical and sudden because onlythen could the various substrands of virological technoscience establishpartial connections with each other and establish the more or less universalintelligibilityof the virus as a virtual object. The singularityof the virus asa distinct object disclosed byvirology, is therefore a performative closureofmultiple possibilities by an ensemble of discursive and practical tech-nologies.

David Turnbulls article mingles perspectives fromSTS and landscapearcheology in order to illuminate the closely related performativityofknow-ledge and space in readings of ancient monuments such as the Maltesemegaliths. Counteringmodernist linguistic and architectural approachesto the performance of space, he examines how such monuments may beapproached as theatres ofknowledgewhich materially embody spatialized

narratives of particular human actions. Amid the welter of explanationswhich have been given of the shape, function, position, and social contextof the megaliths, Turnbull prefers a more fluid performative view overtraditional representational accounts which privilege the modernist spatial-ityof the architectural plan and emphasize howmaterial culture reflects



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particular forms of society. Conventionally seen as temples, such a viewallows for very different interpretations of these structures which recognizemultiple and changingfunctions over time, with accompanying transitionsin spatiality and social organization. Neolithic monuments suggest a spatial

practice which is different fromour own, in which space is created throughthe movement of bodies through the landscape rather than through carto-graphic inscription/imposition. People perform objects, but especiallybuildings, by moving through and around them; but these objects alsoperform people by constraining their movements and by suggesting particu-lar encounters between them and others. Ingolds conception ofway-findingas feelingyour way through a world which is itselfcontinually constructedby the interaction ofhuman and nonhuman agencies, brings out the differ-ence of this neolithic experience of space, which was intimately related to

the ways in which people travelled through and marked the landscape(Ingold, 2000).

If, for Law and Turnbull, otherness is enacted in more fluid and mobileforms of spatiality, Ginette Verstraetes paper considers a major technologyofmobility in order to trace how its co-production of national space andnational community simultaneously generated the exclusion of specificcategories of racialized and gendered others. The construction ofAmericasfirst transcontinental railroad displays an intriguing intersection of tech-nologies of transportation, representation and dissemination. Narrowly

cultural approaches to nationhood still overlook that territorial nation-building is inseparably both a technical project of spatial design and aproject of community building which includes the production of racial,gendered and class-related divisions. Verstraete traces how a classic storyofheroic white male ingenuitywas forged and disseminated with the aid ofvarious rhetorical and visual practices, especially photography. Thesepromotional technologies ofnation-wide marketing attempted to contain thecontradictions involved in this simultaneous attempt tomaterially invent anewAmerican subject and to purify it from contact with excluded others(such as Chinese railway labourers, Californio ranchers, and indigenousIndians). A new concept of equal and homogenous citizenship emerged tosuggest the image ofthe nation as a Great American Familywhich was forgedtogether by iron tracks. Railroad photography reproduced a spectacular land-scape which, purged from the presence of workers, pictured the heroicimmensityof railroad structures within a sublime natural scenery as an all-American white male achievement, reaffirming divisions between workingimmigrants and travelling citizens, female nature and male technology, andthe culture ofleisure and that ofwork. In this fashion, mobility and location,difference and identity, particularity and universalitywere intricately inter-

twined in the technological production ofAmericas mobile nation.

LivingWithThingsAs we have seen above, one fundamental intuition of the theory ofcommodityfetishismwas that what was reified in material commodities was



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basically human practical activity. This categoryofpractice or work (whatthe young Marx described as practical sensuous activity) may offer apossible starting point for developing a more material conception ofperfor-mativity which tendentially distances itself from rationalist discursivemodels to shift closer to emotional, corporeal modes of experience whichemphasize a more immediate libidinal apprehension ofboth persons andthings. Some ofthis direction is indicated by Pietzs viewoffetishism as theintense experience of an individuals living self through its impassionedresponse to the fetish object (1985: 1213). Such a practical turn (cf.Schatzki et al., 2001), which encloses material things not somuch withindefinitions or textual narratives but within practical, bodily handlings andperformances, mayoffer a promisingwayout ofsome ofthe dilemmas whichstill incapacitate debates around the interaction between sociality and

materiality. As a reinvigorated tradition in the sociology of the body hasvariously pointed out, the sensuous materiality of the human bodymayidentify the missing link and act as the most proximate ontologicalmediator between discursive idealism and the nakedmaterialismof thethings themselves(Shilling, 1993;Burkitt, 1999;Crossley, 2001), suggest-ing an interactive complex in which bodilyintuitionsofthe situation simul-taneously centre particular sensationsofthe social (cf. Shilling, 1997) andparticular attachments tomaterial things. In this manner, a more practicalontologyof livingwith thingsmay be able to rework the mediating link

between the performances ofpersons and the performativityofobjects whichhas emerged as the core issue of the present collection ofarticles.Bits and pieces of this view have already intermittently popped up in

some ofthe contributions summarized above. Van Loon for example referredto the assemblage ofvirological technoscience as simultaneously includinga regime of signs and a practice of handlingobjects. Verstraete suggestedhow the sensuous spectacle ofrailway bridges, tunnels, and viaducts withinthe setting of amazing natural landscapes, as represented throughpromotional photography, was meant togenerate feelings of proud attach-ment to the spectacular unityof the American family-nation. Turnbull mostexplicitly advocated a move from a linguistic-discursive viewofperforma-tivity towards notions about thinking through the body and feelingyourway, tracing how spaces were structured and cognitively mapped bypeoples practical dwellings and movements. In this way the articles in thethird and final section are particularly concerned with the materiality ofmediation that is constitutive of embodied subject-objects. It becomesclear that this materiality also implies an ethics of relations, ofcare and oftechnological folding.

In this light, Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Brgger consider the

construction ofwants and the embodyingofthe market in the work routinesofworkers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. They are concerned, inparticular, with the role of the computer screen within the establishment ofpost-social relations around a sense ofembodied lack. The screen does notprovide access to the market but isthe market as an exteriorized assemblage



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ofpractices brought together in one place. The screen is the (ontologicallyliquid)market rather than its representation into which traders immersethemselves. Traders engage with this market in their dailywork practicesthrough a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionatelywithin the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure ofwanting. While Knorr Cetina and Brgger drawon a Lacanian understand-ingof the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation ofdirect humansocial relations around this issue, they look instead at the materialityoflackand its position within the post-social relations constituted through tradingon-line in the foreign exchange market. Desire is constituted and realizedhere through the object ofthe computer screen rather than with other peopledirectly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objectsthat constitute persons virtually.

Kevin Hetheringtons article looks at a quite different formofmedia-tion, a tactile book on the Parthenon Frieze for the visually impaired that

has recently been produced by the British Museum. As a material expres-sion of the current concern with equal opportunities and access within themuseum sector, this book attempts to provide a formof access through anartefact to another set ofartefacts (the sculptures themselves)for a group ofpeople on the margins of the museums visual space. Conscious of theconservational problems ofallowingobjects to be touched directly, the bookprovides an optical prosthesis that allows the hand to extend into an other-

wise visual space. But as a formofmediation the book reproduces the repre-sentational codes of Enlightenment scopics, in which the viewpoint isreduced to the optics of the subject. In contrast, Hetherington argues thatthe bodyof the visually impaired person, notably the hand, offers anotherand quite different formofmediation in which the body, through its hapticcapacities, comes to challenge (stop) this correspondence between the opticand the scopic. Associating instead the haptic with the scopic opens up thepossibilitywith a new formof connection with the signs materiality andperformativity.

If Hetheringtons concern is with the view from the fingertips, thepaper by Hans Harbers, Annemarie Mol and Alice Stollmeyer addresses thetasteof ethics. Through a studyof the eating practices of patients withdementia in institutional settings, the authors open up for consideration theissue ofthematerialityofcare in the aporial space that exists between estab-lished ethical discourses ofwill and medical discourses of natural death.One of the symptoms of dementia diseases like Alzheimers is a loss ofappetite amongst sufferers. The question of whether patients should beforce-fed to stop them dying and whether not doing somight be construedas an act ofunlawful killing has led to public debates in Holland that centreon these two discourses. Dementia challenges the categoryofwill as voli-tional act. In the ethical discourse it has tended to be dealt with by broad-ening the categoryofwill from conscious acts to include physical embodiedexpressions in order to address the issue of food refusal. In the seconddiscourse, the refusal offood is seen instead as a part of the nature of the



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disease itself, and of the disease actingwithin the body. In both discoursesthe issue of care is left out. In the context of feeding both discourses arepremised solelyon the issue ofthe need for food rather than care that it canexpress. Care is relational and material. As the article shows, food can

become the mediumofcare: that ofnurses for their patients or relatives fortheir dying loved ones. Food is analysed here as an example of the materi-ality of care that is not captured by either of the established discoursessurrounding the treatment of dementia patients. Foods texture, smell andits taste provide a source ofpleasure as much as nourishment. The authorsuse the trope ofthe taste ofchocolate as exemplaryofthe pleasure that foodcan bring. That taste is seen as a mediation ofcare the care of the son forhis mother and of the nurses who provide the chocolate when he cannot bethere. Attention to the materiality of care refocuses the subordination of

eating to acts ofwill or the progress ofa disease and readdresses attentiononto the mediation of relations of care and the practices of living withdisease and to broader ethical concerns with living and dying.

Don Slaters article, concerned with the trading relations surroundingsexually explicit material over Internet RelayChat (IRC), connects back tothe papers byVandenberghe, Knorr Cetina and Brgger and van Loon aswell as further addressing this issue ofthe materialityofthe ethics ofmedi-ation. The trading relation in this field is one expressed through notions ofexchange where nomoney changes hands. In this virtual market, people

interact with one another around the idea ofswapping(sexual) images witheach other that they have on their own computers. Networks ofcontacts areconstituted, forms of deviant sexuality policed, and a sense of reciprocityestablished around this trade. When such trading relations develop they canoften lead on to other forms of interaction, from email and letter writingoutside the channels of the IRC tomeetings and sexual encounters outsideofthe virtual world altogether. There are similarities here with Knorr Cetinaand Brggers arguments about the constitution ofpost-social relations andthe subject as lack through the screen (it appears that the people in thisvirtual arena can never have enough porn). Likewise Slater also addressesthe question of the objectification of the immaterial (virtual object/image)that concerns van Loon too. In addition to the materialityof the computersystems and the embodied viewers there is the less certain material statusof the image itself that can be seen as an image on a screen, downloadedas bytes to a disk or printed onto paper. But the key issue for Slater is theway in which such unstable materialities are inserted into ethical practicesofestablishing a normative order ofexchange. In contrast to the distinctionbetween gift and commodity exchange (as defended, for example, byVandenberghe)Slater shows howgifts of images where nomoney changes

hands are established through the rules ofcommodity exchange. In order tosustain an ethical sense of reciprocity and trade an economic model isdeployed within a gift arena. Stable social relations of exchange are madethrough the mediation of an unstable form ofmateriality and through ablurringof the boundaries between the gift and the commodity.



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Bruno Latours article is also concerned with the question of themateriality and ethics ofmediation but in a much broader way. Taking usinto his garden shed and watching him hammer something at his bench heasks us to consider the moral dimension ofobjects such as the hammer. The

central question in this article is not simplyhow can an object be moral?but to redirect that question in order to ask what is it to be human?Latoursanswer is that we should overcome the dualism between the human and theobject through a novel understandingof technical action. In contrast to theidea that technologies are concerned with means (mastery) and moralitieswith ends, Latour entangles the distinction between means and ends in thenotion of technology. Technology is contained in the use ofan object that isitself inserted into a fold in time that connects the use of an object todaywith its makingyears ago, with a design that stretches back for centuries

and to a hominid tool principle that is twomillion years prior to thehuman

.Rather than a form ofmastery (and therefore a problem, see Heidegger,

1977), technology is considered instead as a relation with alterity that isfolded within garlands of time through which we relate to the Other. Tech-nologyfor Latour is a formofmediation that allows us to express a beingthrough a relation with the other. Humans do not just use technologies butare themselves mediated by them. Through this idea ofmediation as amaterial relation an ontological dignity is given back to the human. Ratherthan the humanist wayof treating the human as the measure of all things,

the human becomes here something constituted of and for other things.Through this sense of technology, Latour offers a wayfor ANT to reconnectwith critical questions of otherness, objectification and alienation whichhave up until now been missingfrom this theoretical approach.

The issue closes with an afterword, in which Steve Woolgar criticallyinterrogates the argumentative dynamics which are organized around theduality between the social and the material. Reinforcing the point thatmaterial objects need (social) interpretations, stories, and spokespersons,Woolgar claims that the very idea ofa duality is a conceptual bubble thatneeds and deserves bursting. The complex crossover effects between thevirtual and the real in electronic technologies (the more virtual the morereal) are cited in order to suggest that the entanglement between the socialand the material might likewise be viewed as a mutually stimulatingonerather than as a zero sumgame which invites analyses in terms ofpendulumswingsor co-construction:the more material the more social.

In this way, the present issue highlights newmediations and entan-glements ofsociality and materialitywhich also suggest newforms ofonto-logical politics and a new ethics of alterity. If, as Latour insists, technicalmediation is the mode of the detour, of the unexpected sideways move,

rather than that ofmere instrumentality; and if ethical mediation too is awayof slowing down, preventing ends from turning too readily intomeans,both morality and technology are explorations of alteritywhich are out toproliferate mediations rather than to close them down. Ifsociality is inces-santly folded into the materiality of things, a politics of things will be



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interested in doggedlymaintaining the reversibilityof these technologicalreifications. Human bodies and the artefacts they are attached to form anintricate tangle ofperformances,mediations and techniques which no longersupport traditional critical distinctions between the social and the materialworld. But this does not reduce the critical (political) task ofkeepingfluidthe manyfixtures and reifications which these performances, mediations,and techniques necessarily engender.

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DickPels is Professor ofSociology in the Department ofHuman Sciencesat Brunel University and a Senior Research Affiliate of the AmsterdamSchool for Social Science Research. He is the author ofPropertyandPower.A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (Routledge, 1998); The Intellectual asStranger. Studies in Spokespersonship (Routledge, 2000); UnhasteningScience. Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge(UniversityofLiverpool Press, forthcoming 2003) and co-editor (with John



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Corner)ofMediaand theRestylingofPolitics(Sage, forthcoming 2003). Heis an associate editor ofTheory, Culture&Society.

KevinHetherington is Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University. Heis author of Badlands of Modernity (Routledge, 1997); Expressions ofIdentity (TCS, Sage, 1998);NewAgeTravellers (Cassell, 2000);Capitalismand theEye(Routledge, forthcoming);FiftyKeyThinkerson theCity(Rout-ledge, forthcoming) and co-editor ofConsumptionMatters(Blackwell, 1996);Ideas of Difference (Blackwell, 1997); Spatial Hauntings (Space andCulture, 2001) and After Networks, a special issue of the journal SocietyandSpace (2000).

Frdric Vandenberghe is researcher at the University for HumanistStudies in Utrecht. He is the author ofUnehistoirecritiquede lasociologieallemande. Alination et rification (ditions la Dcouverte, Paris,19971998, 2 volumes);LasociologiedeGeorgSimmel(ditions la Dcou-verte, Paris, 2001); and co-editor ofChasser le naturel. . ., a special issueofLaRevue duMAUSS (2001). In English, he has published articles onsocial theory in SociologicalTheory, European Journal ofSocialTheory,PhilosophyandSocialCriticism, Thesis11 and RadicalPhilosophy.


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