secular materialism a critique of earthly theory

7/29/2019 secular materialism a critique of earthly theory

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/secular-materialism-a-critique-of-earthly-theory 1/23

Article

Secular materialism: a critiqueof earthly theory

Mitch RoseUniversity of Hull, UK

AbstractOver the last 20 years, studies of material culture have increasingly come to rely on the assumption

that cultural and material forms are co-constitutive. Indeed, it is thought that the co-constitutive

nature of culture and materiality guarantees the significance of materiality in the constitution

of social relations. This article illustrates the limitations of the co-constitutive relation by

characterizing it as overly secular. Specifically, it argues that the co-constitutive relation grounds

the significance of material culture in a set of earthly dynamics that rob materiality of its privileged

position. The article develops this position through two manoeuvres: (1) it describes a particular

conception of absence as it is developed in current debates in continental theory; and (2) it

demonstrates how a blindness to absence provides a limited understanding of the significance of

material objects within social relations. In conclusion, the author argues that the recognition of

absence re-orients the way we understand the significance of material objects by attuning us to

how materiality marks that which is necessarily beyond the social.

Keywordsabsence, Christopher Tilley, Daniel Miller, Material Culture Studies, mystery

A scholarly discipline that pretends to free itself from all that is esoteric is an illusion. (Walter

Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV: 199; quoted in De la Durantaye, 2009)

1. Introduction

For at least the last 20 years, the study of material culture has endeavoured to emphasizethe fundamental import of objects in the constitution of identity and social relations. If one noticed the increased interest in the study of everyday things, objects, sites and land-scapes1 and surveyed the range of output platforms where this work is circulated,

Journal of Material Culture

16(2) 107–129

© The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permission: sagepub.

co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1359183511401496

mcu.sagepub.com

Corresponding author:

Mitch Rose, Department of Geography, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK.

Email: [email protected]

J o u r n a l o f

MATERIAL

CULTURE



108 Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

including edited collections, textbooks, readers and handbooks, monograph series andthis dedicated quarterly journal, one would no doubt conclude that this endeavour has

been a success. Material Culture Studies (MCS) have indeed illustrated how materialculture is fundamental (rather than supplemental) to the constitution of social–cultural

relations. I use the term fundamental here quite consciously. In saying that material cul-ture is fundamental, I mean to emphasize that material culture is not a reflection of pre-existing structures or subjectivities. Rather, as many, if not most, authors in MCS haveendeavoured to illustrate, material culture is constitutive of these terms. As Tilley (2006:61) suggests, ‘material culture is … inseparable from culture and human society. It is nota sub-set of either, a part or a domain of something that is bigger, broader or more signifi-cant, but constitutive.’ Social relations, therefore, do not pre-exist material culture but,rather, materiality provides the means by which ideas about society, identity and belong-ing come to operate and exist: ‘ideas, values and social relations do not exist prior to

cultural forms, which then become merely passive reflections of them, but are them-selves actively created through the processes in which these forms themselves come into

being’ (p. 61).I begin by stating that I very much share in the general proposition of MCS that mate-

rial culture is constitutive of culture and identity. And yet, there is something about theway the fundamental import of materiality is framed that gives me pause. While I cer-tainly agree that material objects engender the sociality they are historically thought only

passively to reflect, I nonetheless find the arguments that are used to arrive at this posi-tion two-dimensional. This is not to suggest that they are simplistic or that they lack

complexity or richness. I mean they are literally two-dimensional – i.e. they are flat. Theaim of this article is to illustrate that, while some of the most interesting advances inanthropological theory are happening in the study of material culture (see Henare et al.,2007; Ingold, 2007), the theoretical trajectory that this work tends to take is one that

promotes a certain economism, that is, a certain attention to, and emphasis on, produc-tive relations. Indeed, when one examines the recent literature on material culture, it isquickly apparent that the conceptual ambition is to overcome what is often referred to asa subject–object dualism (Bender and Aitken, 1998; Ingold, 2000; Keane, 2005; Massey,2005; Miller, 1994; Tilley, 1994). Through the development of ontological schemas bor-

rowed from Bourdieu (1977), Hegel (1979), Heidegger (1996), Merleau-Ponty (1962)and Latour (1993), authors such as Miller (1994, 2008a), Tilley (1994, 1999, 2004) andIngold (2000) attempt conceptually to bridge the historical distinction between the sub-

jective ‘self’ and the objective ‘world’. They do this by positing an intense inter-relation-ship between subjects and objects where the relationships pre-exist the terms in whichthey are set. In this framing, subjects and objects come to be subjects and objects, that is,come to have the nounal qualities of subjects and objects, by being in-relation. The termused throughout MCS is that subjects and objects are ‘co-constitutive’, meaning that sub-

jects and objects are expressions of the relations in which they are entwined. The flatnessof the theory comes from the internality of this co-constitutive economy. As I will dis-cuss, the intensive and extensive network of co-constitutive relations that engender sub-

jects and objects, while no doubt complex, is also inescapably two-dimensional. There isno exit from the industry of ‘giving and taking’. As a system it is remorselessly produc-tive, predicated as it is on an unending litany of creative engagements. It is a system, it



Rose 109

seems, whose processes leave no room for quiet, where there is no space for pause or pas-sive slumber. There is no retreat or escape from the entanglement of subject–object rela-tions since these relations are the means by which such formations come to be – we are, itseems, the worldly relations we constantly weave.

The primary aim of this article is to illustrate how this productivist ontology – thisactive system of givings and takings – undermines, rather than reinforces, the MCSambition to elucidate the fundamental significance of material objects. As part of theco-constitutive relation, objects have no privileged role to play. While they are no doubtessential to the maintenance and functioning of social relations, their part is by nomeans profound – or at least no more profound than any other aspect of the productiveeconomy of which they are a part. As Miller (2005: 38) suggests, the relationship

between subjects and objects is one of equality: ‘a dialectical republic in which personsand things exist in mutual self-construction’. Similarly, Tilley (2006) states that subjects

and objects are intertwined in a ‘synaesthesia’, a ‘continual entwining’ between self andworld, subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘it’. My argument is that by conceptualizing objects as

part of this dialectical economy of equality, where subjects and objects continuallyentwine in systems of reciprocity and exchange, MCS misses out on those aspects of subject–object relations that are meta-economical, and thus, possibly some of the most

profound and fundamental ways that objects function in everyday human life. I amthinking here of the sombre power of a tomb, a concrete form whose function is notmerely to constitute social relations (although it no doubt has this role) but, more fun-damentally, to mark the absence of a loss – a life whose absence leaves a hole in the

world. While the nature of that life, its absence and the hole it leaves can no doubt berendered in diverse ways owing to various religious and/or cultural (for lack of moreencompassing terms) forms, to understand the tomb only as an object embedded in aco-constitutive economy of meaning and relations is to understand it purely in terms of what it gives and does. It is to see the tomb as a positive force that engenders a subject’s(mourner and mourned) embeddedness in a set of social and filial connections tethering

presence and absence, subject and object, individual and community in a productivefashion. The problem with this framing is that it does not take seriously the absence atthe heart of the tomb. The essence of tombs, I would suggest, lies in what they do not

give, indeed, in what they can never give. To engage with a tomb means reckoning withan absence; an event of absence where someone once present is now absent; an eventwe are called upon to recognize and reckon with. Regardless of how that reckoningtakes shape, the tomb marks the site of the reckoning itself; it marks the impact of anevent precipitated from outside life and outside the social; an event that presents itself to us from beyond the flux of productive co-constitutive relations; that aspect ‘of thedead that remained and that could not be sublated by the dialectical operation’ (Derrida,1988: 54). The point here is that conceptualizing objects only in terms of what they do(what they constitute, produce and engender) blinds our analysis to the a-productivedimension not only of objects but of social life in general; that aspect that withdrawsfrom assimilation and cannot be appropriated by any social force. The aim of this cri-tique is to illustrate how this lack of engagement with this absence hampers the study of material culture empirically in addition to undermining the claim that objects are funda-mental to the constitution of social life.




The discussion is divided into nine sections, including the introduction. Sections twoand three review the theoretical contributions of two of the sub-disciplines’ most influ-ential figures: Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley. The significance of Miller and Tilleyfor the field of MCS cannot be overstated. While MCS encompasses a vast range of

work, much of which draws upon an eclectic array of theoretical ideas, the perspectivesand concepts developed by these authors have been instrumental in reviving the sub-field. As both authors discuss, the study of material culture was historically viewed byanthropologists with suspicion and often elicited critiques of fetishism (see Miller, 1994).In very distinct ways, Miller and Tilley rebuke this trend by articulating a conception of material culture that endeavours to overcome the subject–object, surface–depth distinc-tions of their predecessors and presents material culture as a constitutive component inthe creation of everyday cultural life. The next section (section four) critiques Miller andTilley by characterizing their theoretical position as ‘earthly theory’. Specifically, I argue

that the co-constitutive relation described by Miller and Tilley traps the social–materialrelation within a set of banal everyday processes. Section five discusses how an attentionto absence potentially opens up MCS to other kinds of dynamics – forces that are tran-scendent to the earthly and everyday – which are equally, if not more, powerful to theconstitution of social relations and its various material forms. Sections six, seven andeight illustrate the consequences of this ‘earthly theory’. Taking various examples fromMiller’s and Tilley’s work, each section illustrates how their analyses privilege the

present and productive over the absent and silent. The aim here is simply to illustratewhat is missing from their analyses and what an engagement with transcendence could

potentially illuminate. Section nine concludes by discussing more fully how earthly the-ory paradoxically robs material objects of their fundamental significance. Objects, Iargue, are not actually fundamental in MCS, they are just necessary. This is not to sug-gest they do not serve a function – they no doubt do. But that function is truncated by theflat ontology they are trapped within.

Before developing the arguments further, it is important to introduce two qualifiers,the first concerning the article’s ambitions and the second its target. First, the logicaltrajectory of this article no doubt leads (and to some extent beckons) to a fully explicated‘theory’ of material culture predicated upon a philosophical conception of absence, par-

ticularly as the concept is rendered in the work of Levinas and Derrida. My aim, how-ever, is more circumscribed. While section five does develop (in a preliminary andabbreviated fashion) a conception of absence and suggests that this conception of absencecan provide a more fundamental ground for thinking about the significance of materialculture, it does this in order to better illustrate what earthly theory neglects. Thus, whilean alternative understanding of what material culture ‘is and does’ is suggested, the arti-cle does not develop these suggestions into a fully-fledged theory. Such an article wouldnot be an explicit engagement with the work of Miller and Tilley, but would focus on theconceptual heritage of absence in the existential tradition, its place in current debates incontinental philosophy and the implications of these debates not only for MCS but for anthropology as a whole. While this line of thought is one I hope to develop in the future,this article is an engagement with a specific body of literature, and thus provides only amodest contribution to what is bound to be a more elaborate and ambitious project. Thesecond qualifier concerns the article’s focus on the work of Daniel Miller and Christopher



Rose 111

Tilley. Using their work as a means to critique certain assumptions circulating withinMCS is a problematic and reductive exercise. MCS is a wide and varied sub-field thatincorporates a range of theoretical positions that are not always compatible or consistent.In this sense, the following critiques should not be thought of as a critique ‘of the sub-

field’, but rather of Miller and Tilley specifically. This said, it would be difficult to denyMiller’s and Tilley’s well-deserved theoretical influence. It is precisely because of thetheoretical rigour and creative application of their ideas that their work has been so influ-ential and the reason why they make a useful entry point for critique. In this sense, I seethe following discussion as an act of generosity, a means of extending their work into yetfurther regions of thought and debate. In doing so, I hope not only to reinforce the signifi-cance and value of Miller’s and Tilley’s work, but also the significance and value of material culture itself, that is, the significance and value of the question of material cul-ture and its profound (indeed, fundamental) relevance to social life.

2. Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller has perhaps been the most significant figure in the revival of MCS inanthropology. Writing at a time when structuralism in its various Marxist and linguisticguises was the dominant theoretical model for analysing and assessing cultural practices,Miller blazed a trail for thinking about cultural objects and artefacts as significant cul-tural phenomena in their own right. Rather than being merely an expression or reflectionof deeper sociological mechanisms (the systems and processes considered to be the

cause or engine of all cultural phenomena), Miller presents material objects as the means by which culture comes to be appropriated by subjects (see Miller, 1994, 1998). In thissense, his work develops a specific theoretical trajectory about the place of material cul-ture in everyday human life and a more generalized theory of social relations and thecentral place of objects in their constitution.

The essence of Miller’s argument is that subjects are constituted as ‘cultural’ subjectsthrough the appropriation and use of externalities. He begins with the uncontroversial

proposition that subjects find themselves in historical contexts where they are given anarray of beliefs, ideas, norms, values, practices, etc. The question Miller asks is: how do

these cultural elements become part of us? How do they come to be conceived as belong-ing to ‘us’, and how do we, through this process, come to identify with the culture wefind? For structuralists, the answer is that we are passively socialized into our culture.Thus, social relations reproduce themselves simply by being dominant, imprinting them-selves on those who are part of their system (e.g. Sahlins, 1976). For Miller, however,such relations only become our own through active consumption. We actively appropri-ate the culture we find and, through that process, incorporate and internalize its struc-tures. While Miller draws upon a range of social theorists to extend his point, the drivingforce behind his work is Hegel’s concept of sublation, ‘the movement by which societyre-appropriates its own external form – that is, assimilates its own culture’ (Miller, 1994:17). As Miller suggests, Hegel’s concept of subjectivity is founded on an ongoing move-ment between alienation and re-appropriation, where a subject initially sees the worldand its objects as foreign to it and then, at some point, recognizes those externalities as

part of its own being. The epiphany of recognition is followed by the subject




incorporating that which is other into itself, making it no longer foreign but an elementof its own being. It is this alienation–incorporation mechanism that describes how sub-

jects come to take ownership of the cultural world they historically receive.Given this perspective, it is clear why objects take on such significance. It is only by

seeing our culture at a distance, via the objects and materials it generates, that we cancome to take ownership of it and incorporate it into our self. For Miller, culture must beobjectified: it must be initially alienated in order for us to incorporate it. By introducingthe consumptive gesture into this formulation, Miller necessarily introduces perspective,a distance from society and its objects that the subject must then traverse in order for culture to be its own. In the process, Miller simultaneously creates and bridges a subject– object divide. On the one hand, he positions the object world at a distance from our beingand simultaneously argues that that distance is constitutive. It is only by moving back and forth between the subject’s self and the subject’s (historically received) world – by

regularly traversing the distance between the two – that the subject comes to understandits world as its own. Thus, while Miller does not completely collapse the subject–objectdivide as he claims, he does fundamentally reconfigure the terms. For Miller, there is nosubject without objects. The subject does not pre-exist the object world nor is the objectworld simply supplemental to cultural identity. Rather than collapse or transcend thesubject–object distinction, Miller creates a distance and then builds a bridge, thus situat-ing subjects and objects in a relation of fundamental interdependence.

At first glance, Miller’s framework seems to have much in common with that of Cultural Studies (e.g. Berger, 1972, 1980; Hall, 1997; Hall and Du Gay, 1996; Williams,

1977, 2005). Also influenced by Hegel (via the early Marx), Cultural Studies similarlyexplores how individual agents perpetuate culture through everyday objectifying prac-tices. Yet there is an important distinction. Cultural Studies, particularly in the early lit-erature of Berger and Williams, continues to ground the objectifying practices it explores(whether they be productive or consumptive) in relation to a dominant social order.Culture, in Cultural Studies, is a meaning system that reflects and reinforces hegemony.And while that hegemony can be resisted through the meanings it establishes, culture’sexistence (its presence) relies on the order underneath signifying itself in various forms.Miller’s position on the relation between power and culture is more subtle. While he is

certainly conscious of how power relations shape a subject’s ability to access and con-sume externalities, power relations and their objects are not conceptualized as processesthat structure thought. For Miller, there is always distance (an objectification) betweenthe cultural world and the subjects that incorporate that world. And incorporation doesnot equate with inscription because consumption is always strategic. In this sense, Miller turns Cultural Studies on its head. The practice of consuming objects does not reinforcea cultural system already produced (already reflecting and reinforcing the dominantorder), but is the very means by which a cultural order comes to be engendered. As Miller (2005) suggests, the clothes have no emperor. Rather than conceptualizing material cul-ture (clothes) as the expression of an already sedimented and internalized cultural system(emperor), Miller presents material culture as the means by which a sedimented cultureis constituted. Does this mean that agents are free to consume whatever and however?Obviously not, since power relations always operate as a constraint to the various waysculture can be expressed. But the question of power is a question of access and



Rose 113

consequences, not inscription or structuration. In this sense, Miller’s work bears astronger resemblance to Butler’s (1990, 1993) concept of performativity: a framework (also influenced by Hegel) that emphasizes action and experimentation as the means bywhich gender (or in Miller’s case, culture) is affected. Culture, in Miller (like gender in

Butler), is an empty centre. It is an idea affected through everyday experimental con-sumptive practices rather than a structure played out by semi-conscious agents. This isthe radical manoeuvre for Miller: conceptualizing culture as an ongoing performance

predicated on everyday consumptive practices. For Miller, it is the use of objects thatconstitutes culture and not vice versa.

3. Christopher Tilley

The second major theoretical trajectory I want to discuss is the phenomenological

approach discussed by Christopher Tilley. While there has been increasing interest in phenomenology throughout the cultural sciences,2 Tilley’s contribution has been to applythese insights specifically to the study of material culture. At the heart of his work is notsimply a series of phenomenologically inflected ideas about the relationship betweenmateriality and culture, but also the attempt to invent a set of archaeological methods thatcan operationalize this perspective in the field. This section focuses on the former con-cerns as their impact travels beyond their archaeological application.

As someone working within the phenomenological tradition, Tilley begins by endeav-ouring to reconfigure the subject–object divide. Unlike Miller, who establishes a space

between the subject and object only to bridge it, Tilley collapses subject and object intothe same conceptual scheme. He does this through two theoretical manoeuvres. First,Tilley (2004: 2) draws upon Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body–subject: ‘a mind phys-ically embodied, a body and a mind which always encounters the world from a particular

point of view … a physical subject in space–time’. The body–subject provides a concep-tion of subjectivity that is, first and foremost, of and in (rather than above or outside) the

physical world. As Tilley suggests, all subjects have bodies. We are ourselves material physical creatures who find ourselves embedded within an equally physical domain. The point for Tilley is that our body is a modality of this generalized physical world. While

the human body is no doubt different from a tree or stone, all three share in a more fun-damental corporeality, what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘flesh’. The second manoeuvre isTilley’s suggestion that subjectivity is founded on, and engendered by, the body’s capac-ity to sense. For Tilley, it is sense that primordially awakens the subject to his or her ownself-conscious presence. Thus, subjectivity is not the expression of a consciousnesswhose self-awareness precedes its sensing body, but consciousness (and thus subjectiv-ity) arises from the body’s capacity to sense. For Tilley, it is only through the process of sensing that we come to recognize, cognate and consider that which senses, that is, the‘I’, the ‘self’, the self-regarding ‘subject’. It is the sensing body that affords the subject’sawareness of itself as a self-conscious being.

The implications of these manoeuvres are twofold: first, the physical world and the body that senses are thought to share a pre-established unity, as Tilley (2004: 17) sug-gests, ‘even in the case of looking at something, I am “touched” by that which I look at… the act of perceiving the world binds the subject with the world of which he or she is




already a part.’ Thus, Tilley (1996: 162) can say that we create objects and objects createus: ‘while people create their landscapes these landscapes recursively act back so as tocreate the people who belong to them.’ It is only by being touched by the world, affected

by its material physical presence, that subjectivity can emerge. The second point is that

subjectivity arises from the sensory world. Thus, we are not self-conscious cognitivesubjects who find ourselves in a world, but are embodied subjects whose subjectivity isgifted by the world that gives itself to sense. As Tilley (2006: 61) puts it, the world‘affords’ us the capacity to perceive our selves: ‘through making, using, exchanging,consuming, interacting and living with things people make themselves in the process.’Thus, like Miller, Tilley et al. (2006) argue that understanding material culture, andindeed, culture itself involves exploring ‘the manner in which people think throughthemselves and their lives and identities through the medium of ... things’ (p. 4). Yet thereis an important distinction here between Tilley and Miller. While both authors discuss the

desire to bridge the distinction between subject and object, Tilley’s route to this end (ina classically phenomenological fashion) is via ontology rather than social practices. For Miller, subjects become themselves through their fundamental engagement with thingsvia consumption. While Miller would argue that such consumption is necessary for sub-

jectivity to transpire, it is nonetheless a matter of joining a subject–object divide. For Tilley, however, subjects and objects are a secondary effect of a prior unity. All beings,whether they are animate, conscious or mute as stones, are modalities of a primordialmateriality. They are part of the flesh of the world. The point for Tilley is that the distance

between subjects and objects is not something that needs to be theoretically bridged (as

for Miller) since the primordial one-ness is already presumed. What needs to be thoughtis how distinctive objects and subjects arise from an initial unified position.Tilley’s (2004) attempt to address this question both theoretically and empirically

takes him into the realm of landscapes, a mode of materiality that exemplifies thesubject–object unity that he is attempting to exhume. As a nexus of human environmentimbrications, landscape brings together those nature–culture descriptors most often setapart in social science: topography and emotion, scenery and memory, perspective and

power. Landscapes, for Tilley, are not just aesthetically, politically and meaningfullyimbued landforms. While they no doubt are such things, to see them only in these terms

misses their essence as a coalescence of embodied experience: earthly structures provok-ing emotive attachments begetting other emotive attachments and, inevitably, engender-ing further earthly structures. Tilley’s discussion of the experience of Neolithic templespaces in Malta (Tilley, 2004), West Penwith (Tilley and Bennett, 2001) and BodminMoor (Tilley et al., 2001; Bender et al., 2007) are illustrative. While many anthropolo-gists and archaeologists would seek to understand the significance of these temples viawhat they symbolize and what cosmologies they represent, Tilley attempts to engage thetemples experientially with an eye to the habitat and ecology in which they are set (andfrom which they emerge), as well as to the corporeal situations they engender via their architecture and appointment. Specifically, this means exploring the temples in terms of their situation in the surrounding environment; how they manipulate one’s body whenmoving through their chambers; how they play with light and dark, air and airlessness intheir passageways; how they open up vision at some points and obscure it at others.These experiential elements of the temple are not signifiers per se. Rather they are



Rose 115

devices designed to operationalize a series of corporeal modalities that, in the experiencing,engender a sense of a particular cultural world.

4. Earthly theoryThe aim of the previous sections was to illustrate the distinct trajectories of Miller’s andTilley’s respective frameworks. While Miller’s work responds to the longstanding struc-tural Marxist tradition of conceptualizing material culture (as well as culture itself) as areflection of relations of production, Tilley’s target is representational analysis which

privileges culture as a primarily cognitive system that can be read off its material expres-sions. In terms of theoretical heritage, Miller traces a line from Hegel (1979) throughSimmel (1978) and Bourdieu (1977) and, in his later work, Latour (1993, 1996). Tilley,on the other hand, is more grounded in the phenomenological tradition, and thus finds

inspiration in Merleau-Ponty (1962) and, to a lesser extent, Heidegger (1996). Yet,despite their differences in starting point and trajectory, both Miller and Tilley find them-selves working towards a similar theoretical horizon. In terms of critique, they bothreject the tendency in structuralism and representational analysis to conceptualize objectsas reflections of an already acculturated mind. Thus, rather than maintaining an exclu-sive focus on the subject as the core question for cultural analysis, and treating the objectsthey ‘throw off’ as peripheral, Miller and Tilley develop frameworks where neither sub-

jects nor objects take ontological priority. In addition, they do this through two similar theoretical manoeuvres. Firstly, they make subjects and objects beholden to each other.

As has been repeated by both authors numerous times, subjects and objects are co-constitutive. While such a statement may at first appear banal, its significance lies in thefact that both authors see subjects and objects as purely co-constitutive. In other words,there are only subjects, objects and the relations between them. While Miller and Tilleywill sometimes use the term ‘dialectic’ to describe the relationship between subjects andobjects, they do not use the term in the traditional sense of a larger anonymous force (e.g.capitalism) being differentially applied (see Ollman, 1993). For Miller and Tilley, thereare no driving meta-historical forces at work since, for both authors, subjects do not(indeed cannot) enter the social–cultural scene pre-conceived. There is simply no pre-

existing realm for creating cultural subjects before their engagement with the materialworld. The second manoeuvre is that the material processes they describe are conceptu-alized as everyday and worldly. For both authors, what matters for culture is not whathappens in a subject’s conscious, unconscious or indeed trans-conscious (as in struc-tured) mind, but rather, what happens in the immediacy of everyday relations and events.If subjectivity is not pre-determined, if it has no shape before it enters a sphere of mate-rial engagements, then it must be something that takes place. The operative word here is‘place’. It does not happen outside (in a distant metaphysical ether) or within (in the deeprecesses of the inscribed mind), but in the here and now of the world. It is constituted(and regularly re-constituted) in the meaningful engagements of everyday material life.

What is particularly interesting about these two theoretical manoeuvres is not simplyhow they reconfigure MCS, but more significantly, how they radically reconceptualizeculture itself. Despite their differences, Miller and Tilley converge in their mutualendeavour to contract and collapse the sphere within which cultural processes occur. I




say ‘contract’ because subjects and objects are positioned as thoroughly and purelyreliant on each other for their respective emergence. Again, for Miller and Tilley, subjec-tivity has no place outside the subject–object relation. Thus, culture only exists througha process of intensive co-becoming, a continual back and forth between subjects and

objects embedded and invested in each other’s existence. I use the term ‘collapse’ tosignal how Miller and Tilley abandon the traditional explanatory role of extra-empirical

phenomena (i.e. structures in both their transcendent and humanist guises) in order to provide a far more earth-bound account of cultural processes. In Miller and Tilley, eve-rything necessary for the constitution of subjects, objects and the complex coalitions theyengender is already in-the-world (or at least ‘in-the-social’). The key point for bothauthors is that social relations must be freed from the spectre of an acculturated subjectthat has to be accounted for via extra-phenomenal mechanisms. Once this position has

been disbanded, Miller and Tilley (1) narrow their focus to the immediacy of everyday

co-constitutive processes, and (2) collapse subjects–objects into an earthly domain whereall forces are equal. This is how subjects and objects become part of the same earthlymilieu. For Miller and Tilley, subjects and objects are equal, that is: they are in a ‘dialec-tical republic’ because they are different modalities of the same process. By emphasizingthe co-constitutive nature of subject–object relations, the everyday becomes the sourceof culture and cultural expressions. Thus, rather than being the stage upon which cultural

processes occur, the everyday becomes the means by which (and mode through which) people, plants, mountains, temples, smells, tastes, views, emotions, etc. come to be.

The precedents for this intense focus on the co-constitutive effects of everyday

grounded material practices are many in modern social theory, and MCS is an eclecticmirepoix of a number of them. In the idea that everything is always already there, readyand available to be consumed or corporeally engaged with, we see a connection withHeidegger’s (1996) conception of Dasein and its equipmental relations (as ‘picking up’and ‘pushing forward’ its world); in envisioning the world as a flat plane of connectionsfrom which subjects and objects contingently and chaotically emerge, we hear the echoesof Deleuze’s (1994) molecularized version of phenomenology and Latour’s (1993) ever-expanding network; in attending to how complex social relations, coalitions, institutions,cultural ideologies and power relations can be generated from everyday social practices,

we see the far-reaching effects of post-structuralism in general (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari,1987; Lyotard, 1993) and Foucault (1978, 1995) in particular; and, most significantly, inthe intense internality of practical inter-dependent engagements that work to constitute aself-sustaining cultural world, we find the powerful influence of Bourdieu (1977) and hisconcept of habitus. It is to the benefit of MCS that a relatively basic set of postulates(subjects and objects are co-constitutive and worldly) can find such a wide range of theo-retical predecessors, and it is possible that this has been a significant factor in making thetheoretical perspectives that Miller and Tilley have developed so popular. Throughoutthe MCS literature, the notion that subjects and objects co-constitute each other in aworldly earthly dimension (without the influence of extra-physical dynamics) is taken ascommon sense – reinforced by a wide range of empirical studies. Yet, it is precisely onthis issue, on the ontological faith in the co-constitutive relationship and the possibilitiesinherent in the everyday, that this critique begins.



Rose 117

5. Marking the immaterial

Under the guidance of Miller and Tilley, MCS have become enchanted with the materialand the myriad possibilities inherent in the everyday. In Miller and Tilley, the everyday

material world is a place overwhelmed by meanings, legacies, sensitivities, perceptions,emotions, etc., all of which have their own history and trajectory, and yet, at the sametime, are all available (to varying degrees) to be engaged with and/or consumed.Everything, in Miller and Tilley, is present in everyday life – subjects, objects and all the

processes and forces that they are an expression of. The consequence of this perspectiveis that it traps human processes in an inexorable baseness – a back-and-forth internalitythat is without transcendence or escape. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the frame-works proposed by Miller and Tilley are closed. On the contrary, there is a strong senseof contingency in their work and both authors are keen to illustrate how subject–object

formations emerge in numerous complex and hybrid forms. My point, rather, is that it is profoundly secular. Miller and Tilley introduce an animate vital world that is also veryflat. While it explodes with sensibilities and emotions, with visibilities and tactile reso-nance, there is nothing outside these movements and forces, no exteriority or alterity, towhich these events might also refer. In this sense, their perspectives stand for what I term

a secular materialism. It is not simply materialist – it is a materialism that does not refer or defer to anything beyond its own internal mechanisms and processes. It is secular

because, for Miller and Tilley, there is nothing above and beyond the everyday, nothingthat gives to the world except that which is already in the world. What is not present or

seen is conceptualized as either not yet visible – a visibility lying in wait – or non-exist-ent. While this holism, this expansive earthly network of moving open relations, prom-ises to bridge the subject–object divide, the flipside is it promotes a deep secularism, anearthly theory that founds all social relations on what is present and available.

In an effort to develop a trajectory of thought that can think material culture (or indeedculture itself) in terms other than what is present and available; in an attempt to elucidatea dimension that can add breadth and height to material culture, a dimension that can

provide escape from earthly theory and the flat ontology it situates; with a desire to sug-gest that there is more to material culture than materiality itself and the relations from

which it emerges, I want to ask a question about what, precisely, material culture marks?In presenting this question, I do not mean to suggest that MCS have misidentified their object or what it signifies, i.e. it is not that MCS have been imprecise in their understand-ing of the significance of objects or their theorization of what objects mean and do. Theemphasis is on the word ‘marks’. To mark is not to signify. While a marker can signify,this possibility is itself predicated on there being something there, a marker that can bemade to speak or express. In this sense, ‘precisely’ refers to the precise possibility for signification; the possibility of there being a site where signification can occur. To putthis another way, the question I am asking does not concern theorizing what materialculture is or even how material culture works, but why material culture, as a phenome-non, appears at all. What asks for material culture? What beckons it? From what pre-established scene are objects called forth to mark a place from which they can subsequently

be made to speak?




The question can perhaps be best described through an example. The parish churchmarks a scene of social and cultural relations. Through its evocative synthesis of mean-ings, corporeal practices, affective sensibilities and everyday histories, the church makes

present a specific modality of cultural and community life. It connects, via its material

formidability, stories and events in a manner that simultaneously concentrates and elabo-rates a certain imagination of being. And yet, what gives the church this capacity, thisability to establish relations, is precisely what the church, as a material site, does notshow. Like the name of God itself, the church reverberates and circulates around some-thing that cannot be captured. The church is not built to attest and announce the presenceof God – that would be impossible. Rather, what the church stands for is God’s absence.It is because God is absent that the church is present. This is not to say that God is dead

but that God resists presence, i.e. God resists appearing within the orbit of beings that can be comprehended, understood and/or rendered knowable. The church is a marker of God

because God resists presence; it is because God fails to appear, fails to be available tomortal vision, that the church is built.

While it would be easy to dismiss this line of argument as theological speculation, aCartesian deus ex machina on which to pin a tired and already well worn-out metaphys-ics, such a manoeuvre would not get around the philosophical problem that God presents.For philosophers like Levinas (1969, 1981, 1987), Derrida (1995a, 1995b), and others(Chrétien, 2004; Irigaray, 1991; Marion, 1991, 2008), God names what earthly theoryleaves out, indeed, what it must leave out – that which cannot be sublated, objectified,incorporated or appropriated; that which cannot be brought into a co-constitutive relation

or a ‘dialectical republic’. For Levinas, God signals a dimension of radical alterity, arealm that ‘infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge’ (Levinas, 1996: 12). God iswholly Other and essentially non-coincident to everyday existence. Similarly, Chrétien(2004: 25) describes God as an infinite choral call, a voice made up of a multitude of voices that exceed the human ear and which is inevitably and invariably misheard: ‘inwhat [the listener] hears lies always already what he has failed to hear, what he cannothear.’ Finally, Marion (2008) argues that God marks a threshold that reveals to human

beings the poverty of their fallen existence, an invisible mirror that reflects back to thelimitations of being and the circumscribed economy within which it operates. Taken

together, these theorists name an inscrutable dimension that, while being infinitely out-side being, nonetheless intrudes on being in a manner that is beyond all knowability,management, manoeuvrability and control.

The point here is not (necessarily) to argue for the inclusion of God into our theoriesof material culture, but to suggest that the demand to build, produce and create residesnot in social relations, but in a dimension outside such relations. The dimension I amdescribing is defined by its essential non-appearance, but it is precisely its absence thatengenders what we might term ‘a call’: a solicitation to build, produce and create inresponse to that which we cannot control, manage or comprehend.3 This response is nota strategic or tactical response since it does not address anything specific. It is a responseto something we do not understand, something we cannot see, a blind retort, a reply tothat which our ‘intentions have not encompassed’ (Lyotard, 1986: 123). It is a responseto what Levinas (1987) terms a ‘mystery’. A mystery that can be seen in our relationship



Rose 119

to the future; an opacity whose appearance on our horizon solicits plans, calculations and preparations that are routinely shattered. Even as the future utterly eludes us, it nonetheless beckons us into particular forms of action. It is because the future is beyond reproach thatit cannot be made to answer for what it delivers, that we predict and plan to meet its coming

secrets. This mystery can also be seen in our relationship with the body, a powerfulmodality for sensing, knowing and acting that, however, is inherently limited by its vul-nerability. As Harrison (2008) suggests, the body’s vulnerability to hunger, pain anddisease is a condition of existence. To be hungry or in need of rest is to be at the whim of something other than oneself. It stands as a demand that we have no purchase on. Onecannot challenge, engage with or face down one’s hunger or tiredness, it is a demand thatcannot be mollified or negotiated with but only satisfied. And yet, it is precisely the

body’s vulnerability that engenders our endeavour to take care of it – to seek its satisfac-tion and well-being despite the fact that such acts may have little effect on the body’s

inherent limitations. Finally, there is the mystery of other people; the other individualwhose measure and moods invariably have consequences on our own life. The appear-ance of other people always carries with them a demand to respond. Indeed, the veryconcept of governance, as it is rendered in Foucault (2007), is testament to this demand,that is, the need to engender security against the unpredictable forces that other peopleunleash. In all these examples, mystery marks a relationship that is fundamentally asym-metrical, i.e. a relationship where we have no claim over what we receive or what isdelivered. And it is precisely because we are at the whims of the future, of our bodies andother people that we build homes (to protect vulnerable bodies), create odds (to predict

unpredictable outcomes) and pray to gods (to face incomprehensible futures). It is pre-cisely the unaccountability of these mysteries that engenders our response. We build, prepare and produce in an effort to face that which escapes our powers to grasp.4 In thissense, the economy of material forms that MCS endeavour to trace, the ongoing produc-tion of objects, buildings and landscapes, can be thought of as an ongoing response to that

which requires continual redress – the absent/present Other whose endless withdrawalsummons us into new modes of marking an arcane, elusive and wholly unpredictable life.

As one can perhaps glean from the discussion thus far, the trajectory of this positionis that mystery is the fundamental origin of material culture. In this rendering, material

culture is built in response to a solicitation from that which withdraws: the call to builda physical place (a church, a tomb, a home) where we can hold onto that which alwaysand inevitably eludes us. The aim of this article, however, is not to build this position intoa fully-fledged theory of material culture. My point, rather, is to illuminate the limits of earthly theory’s secular horizon. The next section turns the discussion back to the work of Miller and Tilley in order to illustrate how the question of absence is neglected in their work and the implications of that neglect. Specifically, I discuss what I take to be three

broad consequences of Miller’s and Tilley’s secular materialist position: its economism,its presentism and its insularity. In each section, I endeavour to illustrate how their frame-works force objects into relations of consumption and exchange that the objects them-selves resist; how the practice of building, producing and consuming is not a matter of actualizing what is always already ours, but of marking that which is never ours and cannever be ours.




6. Economism

Miller’s and Tilley’s desire to collapse the subject–object divide, while laudable for allthe reasons they suggest, has the consequence of presenting the world as an endless

repository of commodities, meanings, corporealities (affects, sensations, emotions), etc.that give themselves over to the constitution of various subject–object relations. For Miller and Tilley, the world’s existence is predicated on its capacity to give; its nature isto support and promote the existence of other beings. As Tilley et al. (2006: 4) suggest:‘persons make and use things and … things make persons. Subjects and objects areindelibly lined. Through considering one, we find the other’ (see also Tilley, 1999: 76).My point here is not simply to draw attention to the indelible linearity of this reciprocalrelation, but its unrelenting productivity. It is not only that subjects and objects areentwined; it is that they are imbricated in an economy of giving and taking. Tilley’s

(2004: 18) discussion of a painter painting trees (an example drawn from Merleau-Ponty)is a useful illustration of this relationship: ‘the painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence.’ Thus, treeshave agency because they give themselves over to the painter to be painted. While Iagree that trees have agency, I wonder whether that agency can be conceptualized interms other than whom or what it serves. In Miller’s and Tilley’s co-constitutive econ-omy, all beings are perpetually at the beckoning of each other’s existence. Thus, subjectsand objects are perpetually caught in a dance of remorseless reciprocity, perpetuallyowing each other the means to their ongoing existence. Trees, for Tilley, are only trees(only become trees) as they affect and move the painter. Their appearance is reduced tothis economism, that is, to what they can endow, engender or produce.

Given that this economy is the engine of all being, it is hard to imagine what could possibly be outside. Even if we wanted to retain some residual component of being thatwas extra- or meta-economical (some aspect that was unavailable for appropriation or use), where, within the earthly horizon that Miller and Tilley establish, would that ele-ment be? What could remain beyond the sphere of earthly availability? As previouslysuggested, both authors have a conception of the not-yet-present or the not-yet-seen, butsuch concepts merely stake out what has not-yet-come-to-pass, similar to what Merleau-

Ponty calls ‘the invisible’ or what Heidegger calls ‘ready-to-hand’. The question is,where would we find that aspect of objects that is never available – that aspect that isnot lying-in-wait, but is, in its essence, unclaimable? Where, for instance, lies love? Wethink of love, friendship and intimate relations as something essential to human life andyet they have an ambivalent place within an economy of giving and receiving. Whilelove is often presented as something that can be objectified, commodified and/or con-sumed, love itself (if such a thing can be named) transcends such forms of appropria-tion. As Derrida (1997) suggests, we, as subjects, never properly have love nor can weever give it. We do not own our love but, on the contrary, are always at the whims of our

beloved, and are elated or destroyed by their coming and going. While we no doubtexchange tokens of love, such gifts bear the mark of an incapacity, that is, of an inabil-ity to possess love through reciprocal exchange. Indeed, such tokens are given precisely

because they stand in lieu of the love we cannot secure, predicated as it is on another



Rose 121

person whose presence cannot be guaranteed. Levinas terms such tokens ‘caress’. We perform our love through caress precisely because ‘the beloved cannot be grasped: bycaressing, the lover searches and forages without end’ (Peperzak, 1993: 194). Caressing,according to Levinas, is a means of holding onto love’s future. A future that, he states,

is ‘never future enough’, meaning never comfortably secured in our temporal imagina-tion. The caress is, thus, a failing gesture, it

consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes … in soliciting whatslips away as though it were not yet … It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: amovement unto the invisible. In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inabilityto tell it. (Levinas, 1969: 257–258)

It is only because love remains unavailable for having or giving, based as it is on the

mystery of others, that we mark our love with caress. A token that stands for a promisethat a subject cannot be held to, but is given nonetheless.Such a conception of love stands in contrast to the one described by Miller (1998) in

A Theory of Shopping . While Miller interestingly conceptualizes shopping as a gift of love, and similarly understands such gifts as an attempt to objectify (and thus secure)one’s sense of being responsible for, and being claimed by, another, he simultaneouslysecularizes the gift by making it part of a social economy of giving and receiving. Thus,while I find Miller’s conception of the relationship between love and shopping compel-ling, I find the analysis itself somewhat amputated. For Miller, the ultimate grounds for the gift of love are the worldly relations in which it is presented. While Miller acknowl-edges that gifts of love have a transcendent dimension, the grounds for the gift are thesocial relations it is thought to reflect and engender. While such gifts no doubt do engen-der and reflect loving relations, the circulation of such gifts cannot encompass that rela-tion or actualize the love they claim. Gifts of love mark an asymptotic ambition, animpossible gesture to secure love against the infinite. Following Derrida (1993, 1997)and Levinas (1969), I would see tokens of love as impossible gifts (see Argyrou, 2007);markers that hold out the possibility for a love that can never be secured. While gifts of love are no doubt commodities, their function exceeds the economy in which they circu-late and the social relations that that economy engenders. Thus, while gifts of love do

play the economic role Miller suggests, this role is not their foundation; and to under-stand it as such leaves us with both a limited understanding of love and a purely eco-nomic understanding of loving relations.

7. Presentism

A second consequence of earthly theory is its focus on that which is present – i.e. that

which is ‘there’ for appropriation and use by a co-constitutive economy. As in the previous

section, I am interested here in that which exceeds presence, those forms of existence that

resist a co-constitutive economy. By way of illustration, I want to revisit the earlier discus-sion of tombs. In Tilley, tombs are conceptualized as part of the worldly complex they

help constitute. Thus, they exist as another fractal of a phenomenological worldly whole,

reinforcing and reflecting the cultural environment in which they are situated. Tilley’s




(2004) analysis of tombs in Malta focuses particularly on their visibility within a wider

socio-material landscape as well as the forms of movements they impose on a living body

entering its structure. While my aim here is not to take away from Tilley’s analysis, I want

to suggest that such a reading of tombs provides a somewhat limited conception for what

tombs do. I do not doubt that tombs appear in the landscape in the way Tilley describesand that their appearance in such forms potentially reflects a set of endemic worldly rela-

tions, and yet his analysis tells us very little about tombs themselves as forms of material

culture. It says very little about what tombs are and what tombs do. They are approached

from the beginning as present forms within a co-constitutive economy of social relations

and meaning. Using the same kind of analysis that we used to discuss the parish church,

we might also think about tombs in terms of the absence they keep present; the irretriev-

able loss they make visible. While acknowledging that there are various material practices

for commemorating the dead, tombs mark a non-presence; they are a mode of making

present that which can never be present, a loss that can never be retrieved. In this sense,what gives the tomb its materiality, its presence as a stone in or on the earth, is the absence

it marks. Tombs do not emerge from a co-constitutive process but, rather, from a need to

name and mark absence, a life that is no longer ‘there’, and thus unavailable for appropria-

tion or sublation. While the tomb itself may serve social relations, its foundation lies in

that which resists the economy of presence. Tombs are bequeathed by death.

This myopic focus on that which is present can perhaps be explained by Tilley’s desireto situate the body as a phenomenological origin or foundation. As he states (Tilley,1999: 34): ‘the body is the ground or anchor by means of which we locate ourselves in

the world.’ The body is no doubt a highly plastic plane for sensing and its affectivecapacities and possibilities for knowing stretch along a thoroughly complex horizon. Yetthis is not to say that our body provides ‘the anchor’ by which the subject locates itself inthe world; nor is it to say that ‘we are always in and of our bodies and cannot leave them’(p. 4). Indeed, the issues I have been discussing throughout this article concern the sub-

ject’s capacity to escape the base physicality of its world. Thus, while the body is cer-tainly implicated in various forms of religious practice (fasting, yoga, etc.),5 in other traditions it is seen as something that must be transcended (in Buddhism, Sufism andcertain forms of Christianity), where the subject is thought to know precisely by aban-

doning the body, that is, by endeavouring to embrace that which is metaphysical. Thus,while MCS have provided many interesting accounts of the world of religious practice(Buggeln, 2003; Meskell, 2004; Miller, 2008b; Miller and Slater, 2000; Rowlands, 2002),the founding notion that ‘we are always in and of our bodies and cannot leave them’keeps such analyses at the level of what is available to corporeal engagement. In thissense, Tilley’s analysis is not only blind to the present absence of the divine (its presenceas absence), but it denies its existence. It denies that there is more to the world than the

body can touch, see and/or consume. Such a denial is not only theoretically and empiri-cally limiting, it is a profound deafness to a significant means of experience.

8. Insularity

The final consequence of earthly theory is its insularity. In Miller’s and Tilley’s co-constitutive framework, the world is presented as a networked unity. For both authors,



Rose 123

there exists at the heart of their mutual ontologies a primal connectedness, a set of rela-tions whose co-constitutive possibilities have no boundaries, bar those established byother co-constitutive relations. As Tilley (2004: 22) suggests: ‘an embodied mind is …

part of culture and part of the world … [it] establishes connections between things …

allow[ing] us to see similarity in difference, permitting us to connect the world together.’The problem with the theoretical ambition to see everything as connected is the loss of alterity. This is not to suggest that there is no place for difference in Miller and Tilley. Butthe difference that takes place in their work operates through the multivalent subject– object hybrids that emerge and recede through the co-constitutive relation. My problemwith this rendition of alterity is that it makes difference profoundly unthreatening. InMiller, the process of sublation involves a subject coming to consume what is alwaysalready theirs: ‘objectification helps people come closer to a realisation of who theyalready feel they “really” are’ (Miller, 1998: 178). Thus, sublation is a reunification

rather than a confrontation. Similarly, Tilley presents a sensuous material world whoseforms take shape in their specificity as they are incorporated into corporeal relationships

– e.g. of seer and seen. Thus, it is only by entering into a field of resonance and sensibil-ity, where things take on recognizable and familiar forms, that our relationship withourselves and the world is made clear. Difference, in Miller and Tilley, is something eas-ily tamed – readily consumed and/or sublated. While the processes of sublation andcorporeal engagement do not incorporate and renew the world as it stands (they bothinvolve interpretive syntheses), the process of coming to know and understand one’s self involves taking what is exterior, foreign and distant and making it something consuma-

ble. It means taking what is Other and making it identifiable and comfortable within theconfines of one’s own being.There are two related political implications of this framework. The first is the point

made earlier, that there is no real alterity here. The co-constitutive relation is a relationfounded on the annulment of difference. As Argyrou (2002) suggests, as well as Heidegger (1974) before him, relation by definition implies sameness. The co-constitutiverelation, as an agent of dialogic production, necessitates the incorporation (indeed, thesublation) of difference. Relation must subsume difference to its dialectical syntheticlogic. The second implication, following from the first, is that the co-constitutive relation

engenders an ontological equivalence between all beings. Indeed, if nothing resistsconsumption – if everything is equally commodifiable and incorporatable and if there isno enduring element of distinctiveness that operates beyond the constant circulation of the subject–object relation – then what keeps all individualism from being collapsed intoa singular elemental plane? While I am sympathetic to Tilley’s and Miller’s idea thatsubjectivity is an open-ended engagement with a restless world, I am uncomfortable withthe equality – the ‘dialectical republic of connectedness’ – that such a framework entails.In emphasizing the continuity between all (human and non-human) beings and celebratingthe multi-faceted connections that create us all, ‘the subject’, as a unique non-substitutable expression, is lost.6

Such a critique may seem like a conservative defence of humanism and Cartesian excep-

tionalism (and to some extent it is); however, my defence of subjectivity is not at the level

of ‘humanity’ but at the level of the single being. In a world where everything is connected

and we are all made of the same stuff, what makes each individual irreplaceable? What




makes each individual’s death tragic? What within the single individual human remains

utterly and essentially distinct – i.e. unconsumable, untradeable and outside all economy?

Miller’s and Tilley’s frameworks have no place for such a notion of singularity. While they

discuss the constitution of individual identities as multi-faceted complexities, such phe-

nomena are considered to be (on the ontic level) performative or (on the ontological level)a temporary synthesis. In each case, there is no transcendent element guaranteeing a being’s

specificity. There are only bodies, forces, sensibilities, perceptions and relations dialecti-

cally emanating from, and corporeally responding to, an open-ended multivalent world.

This is a consequence of their secular materialism; the conviction that everything that gives

beings their capacity to be exists in the earthly dimensions of the everyday. While there are

no doubt plenty of creative expressions emanating from this holism, the lack of something

outside or beyond its chaotic movement makes every identity within it fungible.

9. The necessary and the fundamental

Given the huge amount of interest in material culture, the explosion of thought aroundmaterial objects and the powerful statements about the agency and power of the materialworld, it is odd that I find Miller’s and Tilley’s conception of what material objects cando somewhat limiting. They have no doubt succeeded in illustrating the theoreticalimportance of objects in the constitution of social cultural life. They have also empiri-cally demonstrated the significant hold that material objects have on various subjects invarious settings. Yet, by restricting their conception of objects to a function within a

secular co-constitutive economy, they simultaneously limit their significance. Objects,for Tilley and Miller, are no doubt essential. They play a significant role in the function-ing of a co-constitutive process. But they are not fundamental. They do nothing to engen-der or support this economy. They are simply one of the means by which it functions.This is not to say that they are unimportant, but they have no priority. They do not presideover the economy they are a part of, they simply participate in its processes.

However, what if we think of material culture as a response to what is absent andelusive rather than what is present and immediate? What if we think of material objectsas an attempt to mark a love we can never have (a ring), an individual who will never

return (a tomb) or a divinity that shrouds its face in mystery (a temple, statue or altar)?What if we think of objects not as a means by which identities come to be possessed(Miller) or by which we become immersed in the do-ings and way-ings of everyday life(Tilley), but as things that mark our desires for such sufficiencies, that is, as things thatgive phenomenality (feebly, weakly and always insufficiently) to that which resists pos-session or coincidence? What if material objects stood not for what appears but for whatnever appears, giving presence to that which defies presence, e.g. the mysteries of love,the proximity of death, the yearning of hope, the calling of the divine? In this framingthings are fundamental . They are a necessary means of giving the inherent insecurity of life, the utter unknowability of the future (and the love, death and hope that awaits there)some semblance of presence; a concrete form we can hold onto in the face of an alteritymore radical than any identifiable or knowable difference. Here, objects are not simplyessential, they are fundamental: tombs as a means to address the forever absent, a ring tosecure a love we can never properly hold. Such objects do not secure the cultural world



Rose 125

they cultivate. They do not actually guarantee the forms of existence they mark. But they provide what Derrida (1982) might term a ‘dream of presence’. A material stake in theearth to mark a dream of a world we can never hope to hold or possess, but must dreamof possessing nonetheless (also see Caputo, 1987; Rose, 2006, 2010).

I recognize there is a frustration here in that I am not outlining a coherent theory of mate-rial culture predicated upon the transcendent, but that project, unfortunately, will have to

wait for another paper. This article is modest in aims and suggestive in proposition. Through

an engagement with some key theoretical works in MCS, it puts forth the idea that there is

more to life than life itself and there is more to existence than what the co-constitutive

economy gives, produces and engenders. The fact that such dynamics originate from a

register from outside the social does not mean that they are insignificant or epiphenomenal.

Indeed, what I have attempted to illustrate is how the social is inherently vulnerable to the

Other and the fundamental role material culture plays in attempting (always unsuccess-

fully) to address this vulnerability. In this sense, this critique is an attempt to step back fromwhat might be seen as a long-term endeavour in MCS to eradicate all metaphysics from its

theoretical index and reduce all cultural forces to the material relations in which they are

expressed. There remains a place in social–cultural theory for what remains outside of what

we can empirically encounter and it is only by engaging with this place, a dimension out-

side the social, that material culture can be approached as something fundamental.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Material Culture for their patient assistance with

seeing this paper through. I would also like to thank Mark Johnson and an anonymous reviewer for their engaged and insightful comments.

Notes

1. In anthropology (Appadurai, 1986; Henare et al., 2007; Macdonald, 2009; Miller, 1994; Tilley,2004; Van Binsbergen and Geschiere, 2005), geography (Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Gregsonand Lowe, 1995; Gregson et al., 2007; Jackson, 2000; Tolia-Kelly, 2006) and other disciplines(Attfield, 2000; Dant, 1999; Tiffany, 2000).

2. In anthropology (Gow, 1999; Ingold, 2000; Melhuish, 2005; Moutu, 2007) and geography(Cloke and Jones, 2001, 2004; Dubow, 2001; Harrison, 2000, 2007; Wylie, 2002, 2006).

3. Levinas’s later work is often characterized as emanating from an engagement with the critiquesand subsequent debates/conversations with Derrida on this issue, i.e. the capacity to write theOther. See Derrida (1978, 1991, 1999) and Caputo (1997), Critchley (1999), and Žižek (2006).

4. In the language of Levinas (1981: 185), the Other leaves its trace:After the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes, [one]… discovers the trace, theunpronounceable inscription … to which are suited not the nouns designating beings, or the verbs in whichtheir essence resounds, but that which … marks with its seal all that a noun can convey.

The key phrase here is ‘all that a noun can convey’. For Levinas, the trace is the origin of our noun-littered lives. We speak (as we write and build) because there is always more that can besaid in our response to the Other. What is said is never sufficient because it responds to thatwhich perpetually retires and retreats.

5. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this insight.




6. I recognize that such a statement betrays an adherence to a tradition that has a history of contemplating subjectivity as a problem of ‘the individual’ (Strathern, 1990). In this sense, Iaccept that there is nothing inherently wrong about a theory that does not guarantee the subjectas a singularity. The question of singularity is pertinent as it relates to ethics, but such a stance

would bring us into the fold of a Western tradition.

References

Anderson B and Wylie J (2009) On geography and materiality. Environment and Planning A 41(2):318–335.

Appadurai A (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Argyrou V (2002) Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique. London: PlutoPress.

Argyrou V (2007) The philosopher’s gift. Critique of Anthropology 27(3): 301–318.

Attfield J (2000) Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg.Bender B and Aitken P (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg.Bender B, Hamilton S and Tilley C (2007) Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape

Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.Berger J (1972) Ways of Seeing . Harmondsworth: Penguin.Berger J (1980) About Looking . New York: Vintage.Bourdieu P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Buggeln GT (2003) Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut’s Churches,

1790-1840. Hanover, CT: University Press of New England.Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Butler J (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ . New York: Routledge.Caputo JD (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic

Project . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Caputo JD (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Chrétien J-L (2004) The Call and the Response. New York: Fordham University Press.Cloke P and Jones O (2001) Dwelling, place, and landscape: an orchard in Somerset. Environment

and Planning A 33(4): 649–666.Cloke P and Jones O (2004) Turning in the graveyard: trees and the hybrid geographies of dwell-

ing, monitoring and resistance in a Bristol cemetery. Cultural Geographies 11(3): 313–341.

Critchley S (1999) The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press/Marston.

Dant T (1999) Material Culture in the Social World: Values, Activities, Lifestyles. Buckingham:Open University Press.

De la Durantaye L (2009) Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Palo Alto, CA: StanfordUniversity Press.

Deleuze G (1994) Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London:

Athlone Press.Derrida J (1978) Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida J (1982) Signature event context. In: Bass A (ed.) Margins of Philosophy. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 307–330.

Derrida J (1988) The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and

Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.



Rose 127

Derrida J (1991) At this very moment in this work here I am. In: Bernasconi R (ed.) Re-Reading

Levinas. London: Athlone Press, 11–48.Derrida J (1993) Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Derrida J (1995a) The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Derrida J (1995b) On the Name. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Derrida J (1997) Politics of Friendship. London: Verso.Derrida J (1999) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Dubow J (2001) Rites of passage: travel and the materiality of vision at the Cape of Good Hope.

In: Bender B, Winer M (eds) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford:Berg, 241–256.

Foucault M (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.Foucault M (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977 – 78.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gow P (1999) Piro designs: painting as meaningful action in an Amazonian lived world. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(2): 229–247.

Gregson N and Lowe M (1995) ‘Home’-making: on the spatiality of daily social reproduction inmiddle-class Britain. Transactions Institute of British Geographers 20(2): 224–335.

Gregson N, Metcalfe A and Crewe L (2007) Moving things along: the conduits and practicesof divestment in consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(2):187–200.

Hall S (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.Hall S and Du Gay P (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.Harrison P (2000) Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday. Environment

and Planning D: Society and Space 18(4): 497–517.Harrison P (2007) The space between us: opening remarks on the concept of dwelling. Environment

and Planning D: Society and Space 25(4): 625–647.Harrison P (2008) Corporeal remains: vulnerability, proximity, and living on after the end of the

world. Environment and Planning A 40: 423–445.Hegel GWF (1979) Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. JN Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Heidegger M (1974) Identity and Difference. New York: Harper & Row.Heidegger M (1996) Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit . Albany: State University of

New York Press.Henare AJM, Holbraad M and Wastell S (2007) Introduction: thinking through things. In: Henare

AJM et al. (eds) Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London:Routledge, 1–31.

Ingold T (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill .London: Routledge.

Ingold T (2007) Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.Irigaray L (1991) Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: on the divinity of love. In: Bernasconi R,

Critchley SB (eds) Re-Reading Levinas. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 109–118.Jackson P (2000) Rematerialising social and cultural geography. Social and Cultural Geography

1(1): 9–14.Keane W (2005) Signs are not the garb of meaning: on the social analysis of material things. In:

Miller D (ed.) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 182–205.Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Latour B (1996) Aramis, or, The Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Levinas E (1969) Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.




Levinas E (1981) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Duquesne Press.

Levinas E (1987) Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UniversityPress.

Levinas E (1996) Transcendence and height. In Peperzak AT et al. (eds) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 11–32.

Lyotard J-F (1986) Levinas’ logic. In: Cohen RA (ed.) Face to Face with Levinas. Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 117–158.

Lyotard J-F (1993) Libidinal Economy. London: Athlone Press.Macdonald S (2009) Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond .

London: Routledge.Marion J-L (1991) God without Being . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Marion J-L (2008) The Visible and the Revealed . New York: Fordham University Press.Massey D (2005) For Space. London: Sage.

Melhuish C (2005) Towards a phenomenology of the concrete megastructure. Journal of Material Culture 10(1): 5–29.

Merleau-Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Meskell L (2004) Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. Oxford:

Berg.Miller D (1994) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.Miller D (1998) A Theory of Shopping . Cambridge: Polity Press.Miller D (2005) Materiality: an introduction. In: Miller D (ed.) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1–50.Miller D (2008a) The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity.

Miller D (2008b) Migration, material culture and tragedy: four moments in Caribbean migration. Mobilities 3(3): 397–413.Miller D and Slater D (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.Moutu A (2007) Collection as a way of being. In: Henare AJM et al. (eds) Thinking through Things:

Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 93–111.Ollman B (1993) Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge.Peperzak AT (1993) To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West

Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.Rose M (2006) Gathering ‘dreams of presence’: a project for the cultural landscape. Environment

and Planning D: Society and Space 24(4): 537–554.

Rose M (2010) Back to back: a response to landscape, absence and the geographies of love.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(1): 141–144.Rowlands M (2002) The power of origins: questions of cultural rights. In: Buchli V (ed.) The

Material Culture Reader . Oxford: Berg, 115–135.Sahlins MD (1976) Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Simmel G (1978) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Strathern M (1990) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in

Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Tiffany DN (2000) Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Tilley C (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg.Tilley C (1996) The power of rocks: topography and monument construction on Bodmin Moor.World Archaelogy 28(2): 161–176.

Tilley C (1999) Metaphor and Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.



Rose 129

Tilley C (2004) The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford:Berg.

Tilley C (2006) Objectification. In: Tilley C et al. (eds) Handbook of Material Culture. London:Sage, 60–73.

Tilley C and Bennett W (2001) An archaeology of supernatural places: the case of West Penwith. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(2): 335–362.Tilley C et al. (2006) Introduction. In: Tilley C et al. (eds) Handbook of Material Culture. London:

Sage, 1–6.Tilley C, Hamilton S and Bender B (2001) Art and the re-presentation of the past. Journal of the

Royal Anthropological Institute 6(1): 35–62.Tolia-Kelly DP (2006) A journey through the material geographies of diaspora cultures: four

modes of environmental memory. In: Burrell K and Panayi P (eds) Histories and Memories:

Migrants and Their History in Britain. London: Tauris.Van Binsbergen WMJ and Geschiere P (2005) Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities

(The Social Life of Things Revisited). Münster: LIT Verlag.Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Williams R (2005) Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London: Verso.Wylie J (2002) The heart of the visible: an essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor. Geoforum 33(4):

441–454.Wylie J (2006) Depths and folds: on landscape and the gazing subject. Environment and Planning

D: Society and Space 24(4): 519–535.Žižek S (2006) A plea for a return to différance (with a minor pro domo sua). Critical Inquiry

32(2): 226–249.

Biographical noteMitch Rose is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Hull. His research interestscentre on questions of cultural theory and landscape. In addition to these conceptual interests, heis interested in the culture, history and politics of the Middle East, where most of his work onlandscape is based.

Documents

secular materialism a critique of earthly theory