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Personality objects

Paolo Volonté

In search of the missing masses

For some decades the social sciences have raised, albeit obliquely, a new problem.

They have begun to inquire as to the role that material objects should be attributed in

a thoroughgoing explanation of social dynamics. The social sciences previously

constructed their development in its entirety on the opposition between the world of

humans and the world of nature. They cultivated the notion that the former was so

distinct from the latter as to justify the founding of an autonomous disciplinary

approach: indeed, for a certain period they even called themselves the ‘human

sciences’. Although this assumption never dominated in the protracted disputes on

method typical of the historical-social sciences, it was nevertheless taken for granted

in their theoretical approaches and in their routine scientific practices – so much so

that the social sciences appropriated the philosophical terms of ‘individual’ and

‘subject’ to denote the focus of their inquiry.

A science of subjects, as sociology has conceived itself to be for more than a

century, refuses to acknowledge that objects can perform an active role. The latter

have been reduced to merely passive spectators of the events enacted on the stage of

history, where subjects (whether individual or collective makes no difference) are

always the protagonists. In the best of circumstances, objects have been reduced to

facts, that is, to products of human activity or of nature. In other cases they have

been conceived as instruments: for example, as means of production or as media,

that is, docile servants to the subject their master (individual or institutional, again it

makes no difference). In yet other cases they have been simply ignored, conceived

as mere objects, the frame of a picture, the stage set for the human drama, or again

as objects of value, and therefore respectfully left to economics to deal with.

For reasons that I cannot elaborate upon here, but which certainly have to do with

the transformations which have taken place in the everyday use of artifacts since the

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advent of mass production, and therefore with the change in the functions performed

by things in people’s lives and their interactions, today the attitude of many

sociologists towards the social role of objects has changed. In various quarters, it is

now being asked how inanimate things, and more generally non-humans, may

determine the social phenomena which we observe. Not only is it wondered where

the “missing masses” of the social structure are, as Bruno Latour (1992) enquired in

a well-known essay, but attempts are being made to understand how these non-

human masses are able to exert influence on the lives of humans, through what

mechanisms, and with what results. Analysis in this regard is highly diversified,

both in the hypotheses that it seeks to corroborate, and in the rhetorical devices that

it uses. Flanking the many followers of Latour and actor-network theory are

anthropologists inspired by the work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (1979),

sociologists of consumption imbued with the theories of Jean Baudrillard (1968 and

1972), Colin Campbell (1987) or Daniel Miller (1987), and then historians,

philosophers of science, and theorists of design, each with their own approach and

point of view.

The aim of this book is to make a new contribution to the debate. It is ‘new’ in its

theoretical approach, because conceptualizing the biography of objects brings to

light, it is argued, otherwise obscure aspects of social life. It is ‘new’ in its

methodological choice of combining scientific reflections with the histories of things

viewed from the standpoint of designers of objects. Here objects are not only

thought but also presented [?]. However, it is not my intention to introduce this book

of multiform content by various minds as if it were possible to confine within a

single container a multiplicity of stimuli and reflections, which instead move in

numerous unexpected directions. Rather, I shall put forward some general

considerations of general character that show the usefulness for the understanding of

society of an approach which conceives objects as the subjects of biographical

trajectories.

The ‘life’ of objects?

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Objects, or inanimate things, have histories which can be gathered and recounted.

Moreover – and this is the explicit thesis of the book – they have biographies. This

claim may be perplexing. How is it possible to narrate the lives of lifeless things? A

biography is the narrative (() of someone’s life (). So how can an

inanimate object have a life to narrate? To be sure, every object is born and every

object dies: all of them exist for a limited (though sometimes long) period of time,

during which they undergo transformations wrought by the surrounding world.

Hence they have ‘histories’ This consideration is, at bottom, extremely banal. Yet

the expression ‘biography’ should only be used in a metaphorical sense, by pure

analogy with the existential trajectory of every living being. It is essentially

expressionless/vacuous/?.

It is not by chance, in fact (and this will be seen when reading the essays in this

volume), that the life of objects used to be treated almost exclusively through the

artistic forms of discourse: literature, drama, the figurative arts. It entered Western

culture and our understanding of the world as a useful rhetorical device with which

to create a connection between human existence and that of things, the purpose

being usually to recount something new about human existence, rather than about

the life of things. The analogy created by this device with objects expands

perception of the lives of subjects. Things are treated as being mouthpieces for

people.

Analysing the biographies of objects within the social sciences means something

different. It is an invitation to take seriously the idea that things have lives of their

own. Not, of course, in the animistic sense of the expression, but rather in the

sociological one. We must take seriously the idea that material objects have their

own social lives. Hence they should be considered, in explanation of the workings of

society and of individual social phenomena, as subjects able to contribute to

collective processes of reality-production. And taking this idea seriously entails

being prepared to use scientific methods to gather empirical evidence on this social

life of things.

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In what follows I shall address two tasks in particular: firstly, I shall seek to

describe (very briefly) how the notion of the biography of objects first arose and

how it has been treated since then; secondly, I shall discuss what I consider to be the

main features of the biographies of objects, and which I shall propose as possible

topics for further analysis.

Going beyond the anthropocentric view

The interest of social scientists in objects understood as subjects with their own lives

dates back to the 1970s. By this I mean an interest in objects not only as entities that

pass through conception, birth, various life-phases, death and decomposition, but

also as social subjects able to modify the system of human interactions with their

presence. Previously – probably also because of the scant consideration made of the

design disciplines – objects entered the domain of the human and social sciences

along access routes of another kind.

There was first the high road of Marxism, which regarded objects as essentially

the fruits of human labour, and therefore as products ready for either use or

exchange. The Marxian theory that distinguishes and opposes use value and

exchange value – at least as it is set out in Capital (1867, It. transl. 67-115) – was

based on the relationship between the object and the work necessary to produce it.

An object is essentially a product, and what happens to it after its input into the

world is important only insofar as whether it is used to satisfy the need for which it

has been created, or whether its unexpected destiny is to become a commodity. The

‘original sin’ of the transformation of objects into commodities – that is, into goods

available for exchange – was the fact that workers in early industrial society were

unable to consume the goods that they had helped produce. The important issue,

therefore, was not objects and their transformations but the presence or absence of a

correlation between the producer and the consumer. It was the asymmetry between

these two subjects that turned commodities into devices enabling some social classes

to dominate others.

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There was then the entry route of semiology and its sociological reinterpretation.

This gave rise to the ambitious project of describing the system of objects as a

particular type of semiotic system – as a language parallel and analogous to the

system of natural language. Roland Barthes (1964) first developed this idea,

applying it in some of his essays to concrete cases (fashion, automobiles). His

approach was that of a semiologist, so that he privileged meanings and their

structural laws over human behaviour and the effects produced by the use of things

on the collectivity using them. Jean Baudrillard (1972) then examined this latter

aspect more thoroughly, showing that actors in the society contemporaneous to him

– at the beginning of what thereafter came to be called late modernity (or

postmodern society) – used objects as status symbols with which to achieve upward

social mobility,. This conferred a particular value on objects which Baudrillard

called “sign value” and therefore gave them a role in social interactions.

Finally, a third route was followed by anthropology and archaeology. These for long

considered the products of material culture to be testimonies to social structures and

cultural processes no longer visible (archaeology) or not yet understandable

(anthropology). As Bonnot points out in his contribution to this book, this approach

mainly treated objects in positivist terms as affording reliable evidence or

manifestations of a culture and its institutions – that is, of humans’ lives in societies

not amenable to our cognition (see also Gabus 1965). The term most overtly

evincing this conception of objects is ‘fetish’. For long after its introduction into

proto-anthropological studies by de Brosses (1760), the notion of ‘fetish’ was used

by Western science to explain the claim by certain objects that they possessed lives

of their own. Such objects were artifices, fictitious gods, or enchanted objects

because they had been made such by humans. They were therefore devices and

inventions of the subjects whose imprint they bore (Apter and Pietz 1993; see also

Latour 1996 and 2002, as well as Dant 1999, 40-59). To the eyes of civilized

Westerners, fetishes were not the animate objects that they claimed to be, but clues

to the mind, and therefore to the culture, of the subjects who had produced them.

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These various views on material things share underlying anthropocentric

assumption: things are raw materials to which someone (a human subject) has given

a specific form to satisfy some sort of need. In and of themselves they are

uninteresting, because they exist in the world of humans only as furniture, as frames

for social interactions. For instance, a dining table prevents me from getting closer

to, or further away from [in che modo?], the person opposite me, but it neither

creates nor determines my relationship with him, which is independent of it. The

table merely influences that relationship, favouring or obstructing it. What makes

things interesting, therefore, is human beings: the fact that they assume material

things in their world and use them in some way. They use them, for example, as

commodities of exchange to produce and exchange wealth, thereby preserving

privileges and inequalities. Or they use them as status symbols to produce and

communicate class membership, thus reproducing power relations constituted and

massified by consumption goods (for example, by employing objects to signal

differentiation by their marginal differences from the corresponding model: see

Baudrillard 1968 and 1974, It. transl. 89-104). Or, finally, people use objects as

artifacts of material culture in order to engage in quotidian activities and celebrate

the rituals which structure everyday life by ordering social relationships, the use of

space and time, food consumption, etc. All three of these approaches are interested

in objects only as expressions of the thoughts, actions, and human relationships

which have given life to them. On the one side stands the human world, namely the

world of values, ethics, art, religion and, in general, the spirit able to produce goods

with no practical purpose but inestimable spiritual value. This is the world of wilful

action and meaning production. On the other side stands the world of things, of

matter, and therefore of the signs left by the passage of humans; the world of the

objects which people use to engage in communal life and employ in the difficult

work of stabilizing social relations, collective beliefs, and common institutions. The

former is the world of life; the latter is an inanimate and arid world.

But the world of objects is not like this. A table does more than merely influence a

human relationship from outside; it can also create that relationship and shape it.

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Tables – horizontal and stable flat surfaces – enable human beings to place objects

on a support surface without having to bend to the ground. They perform the second

and equally important function of making themselves immediately recognizable

from a distance as support surfaces. There is no need to state this with a notice, nor

to accompany it with an instructions booklet. Thanks to these characteristics, a table

also functions as a pole of attraction, an object which captures, if not people’s

attention, then certainly their bodies. A table placed in any setting soon becomes the

prime focus for interaction among human beings in the vicinity. A table attracts

bodies, it contains them within a circumscribed space defined not by an external

border but by a central hub. It thus creates relations among the subjects who sit

down at it or gather around it. A table in a factory canteen, in a hotel lobby, or in a

woodland clearing creates acquaintance and even friendship among people who

have not deliberately sought each other out, but have been attracted and set in

relation solely by the table’s presence. The table acts socially, not in representation

of the person who has put it in that place, but by virtue of its personality. Its

presence in the world, the social role that it performs, do not have the sense of mere

testimony to already-existing human actions or relationships. On the contrary, tables

are part of the human drama as characters in a certain sense enfranchised.

The same applies when objects incorporate an appreciable technological content,

as Bruno Latour showed in masterly manner when describing the automatic door

closer (Latour 1992). Objects of this kind do not merely incorporate a series of

functions and behaviours that humans delegate to them because they cannot perform

them by themselves, or cannot delegate them to other humans. Conversely,

technological objects prescribe (Akrich 1992, It. trans., 58) particular patterns of

behaviour for humans; and such behavioural prescriptions are not always those

anticipated, desired, or inscribed in objects by their producers. Objects, in short, act

as autonomous subjects. Of course, an automatic door closer incorporates part of the

work of an usher. But, as already happens with an usher, the door-closer also

imposes particular forms of behaviour on the person passing through the door; it

expresses “role expectations” which must be fulfilled (Latour himself underlines the

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analogy between the two concepts: see Latour 1992, It. transl., 121): a certain

trajectory in space, a certain speed of passage through the doorway, certain

movements of the hands or other parts of the body. But the most important aspect is

that the prescriptions which an object enjoins on its human interlocutors are not

usually referable to the situation that its designer and producer originally envisaged

and inscribed in the object. The object is not a mere extension of the body and the

will of one or more humans; rather, like a puppet, it possesses its own personality

liable to surprise the puppeteer and induce him or her to make unexpected and even

unwanted choices. Social actors are taken over by the things which they themselves

have fabricated (Latour 2002, 220).

An object, therefore, and not only one with an appreciable technological content,

is endowed with a personality – with a specific character – and this objectual

personality interacts with those of humans to create a close-knit network of social

relationships in which objects are protagonists. Thoroughly understanding any social

phenomenon, whether microsocial (interaction at a post office counter) or

macrosocial (the national liberation movements of the 1970s), requires examination

of the role performed in it by material objects (the glass screen at the counter, the

Kalashnikov in the hands of the revolutionary). But the position occupied by an

object in a social situation, and therefore the role that it performs, is not defined a

priori; nor does it depend solely on the contingent context. It also depends on the

history of the events in which the object has participated, and which have left an

indelible impression on it. At times, these are physical imprints on the material

substratum (the right breast of the statue of Juliet facing the entrance to the Capulet

house in Verona bears the imprint, as shown by Figure 1, of the odd customs of

tourists). At other times they are accretions of sense on the object’s immaterial

meaning (Yasser Arafat’s particular use of the kefiah has made it into something

more that a simple kind of headgear, especially if worn in Europe). The personality

of objects, therefore, does not depend on the choices and intentions of those who

have produced them. It depends above all on the succession of ‘experiences’ (in the

metaphorical sense) which objects have accumulated during their lifetimes: a table

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may have been created as a sacrificial altar to a god; but it may thereafter have been

used as a work block by a blacksmith, or as a landmark by hunters: once considered

a testimony by an archaeologist, it is now a curio for museum visitors. These ideas

are not far-fetched. In around 580 BC, the giant Kouros of Samos (Figure 2) was

originally created, it is presumed, as a votive image and therefore served the twofold

purpose of representation (still highly schematic) and intercession. But we cannot

know what the statue really signified for the artisans who sculpted it from stone.

Certainly something different from the meaning attributed to it by the Romans, who

used pieces from the statue (the head and a leg) to construct a villa and a cistern on

the outskirts of the ancient sanctuary. And still very different from the meaning

given it by the archaeologists who discovered and excavated the remains of that

cistern, or by the tourists who today observe the statue, thoughtfully and from a

respectful distance, when visiting the Archaeological Museum of Vathi.

The social life of things

From this perspective, the invitation to consider the biographies of objects as

furnishing useful and original insights into the social world is backed by the promise

that they yield new categories of analysis. This springs from the intuition that

speaking of the “lives” of things is not simply a rhetorical device or a metaphor, but

something serious and very real. It is a concept which better than others can describe

what happens within human collectivities.

Historically, the expression “cultural biography of things” became current

following the publication of The Social Life of Things, in 1986. Edited by Arjun

Appadurai, this book contained a short essay by Igor Kopytoff entitled “The

Cultural Biography of Things”. Kopytoff drew attention to the fact that the

attribution to objects of use value or exchange value (we may add, with reference to

Baudrillard, symbolic value) is an altogether arbitrary operation. And anyway it

explains little unless the dynamic and mutable character of the existence of things

over time is not borne in mind. Few commodities remain the same from their

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conception to their destruction. And in any case an object’s nature as a commodity is

not ascribed. On the contrary, Kopytoff observes, it can always be revoked, and

during their lifetimes things usually go through moments when they are reduced to

mere exchange value, and moments when, in relation to the world of humans, they

perform other functions and acquire other values. This is particularly evident, by

way of example, at the time of an object’s agony when it becomes rubbish to be

thrown away or recycled. Being ‘rubbish’, in fact, is a wholly specific condition, as

Michael Thompson pointed out in his Rubbish Theory (1979). It suspends and

radically modifies the everyday existence of things, depriving them of their

customary social role. In this sense, it involves a qualitative shift in their biography,

and not just a quantitative one (as the various transitions in the history of an object’s

commodification, i.e. its trade, might otherwise lead one to suppose). But, above all,

the agony of an object does not equate with its destruction. From being rubbish it

may gradually or suddenly be reborn as a durable object when it enters the sphere of

vintage or antique collecting, art, historical testimony, or archaeology. The same

object just previously discarded has now been singularized as a collectible, or in any

case been protected against destruction (see also Engeström and Blackler 2005, 313-

5).

Kopytoff instead analyses the processes of economic exchange. He observes that

our perception of things when we treat them as mere commodities of exchange

standardizes and homogenizes them. When things are exchanged, a value is restored

to them which is “objective” in the sense of being measurable, comparable with that

of other commodities, and expressed, obviously, by money. This reduction to a

common denominator – or better to a common metric – enables us to acquire or to

get rid of objects with great facility, thanks to the expedient of money-mediated

exchange. But this is not possible with people qua individuals or subjects. As such,

people are irreplaceable, and therefore cannot be exchanged for other people. This

makes their purchase and their sale impossible – with the obvious exception of

human beings whose dignity as persons is not recognized, such as slaves and very

often – as Francesca Rigotti points out in this book – women.

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The interesting aspect is that this removal from the sphere of exchange frequently

concerns, Kopytoff stresses, things as well. Not for the world would I give away the

old pocket watch that my grandfather bequeathed to me on his deathbed. Or the

spectacles which I like because give me a touch of class. Whilst numerous

“common” objects are exchangeable, equally many of them are non-commodifiable,

“uncommon”, or singular. Kopytoff cites the examples of sacred objects, public

monuments, and collectable objects (which are not at all unique, as demonstrated by

multiples in art or stamp collecting, but also by the histories of industrially

manufactured objects, or certain design products, whose owners are likely to place

them where they can be displayed rather than used – on the mantelpiece in the living

room instead of on a shelf in the kitchen). But any common and quotidian object

may, at a given moment in its life, be singularized by someone and thus become

uncommon: even, for example, the bolt which I carry in my pocket and use as a key

ring.

According to Kopytoff, the succession of singularizations undergone by an object

constitute its biography. And it is a “cultural biography” in that its turning-points are

determined, not so much by economic or technical factors (sale, a mechanism which

breaks), as by changes in the meaning that the object embodies for the humans with

which it interacts (the object that lay forgotten in my grandmother’s closet and is

now my dearest memento of her but for my son will only be an interesting antique to

sell at a flea market). Reconstructing the cultural biographies of objects means

wondering where they originated and who produced them, but also how they have

been used, what status has been attributed to them, what their careers have been,

compared with the career deemed “ideal” for that kind of object, and what effect has

been produced by their presence in interactions among humans (Kopytoff 1986, It.

transl. 79-82).

After its publication, Kopytoff’s essay was widely cited and much used in the

sociology of culture to give efficacious interpretation to the central role increasingly

assumed by material culture in what many have called the consumption society: a

society in which the presence of goods in people’s everyday settings (and,

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consequently – but only consequently – the possession of material goods) performs

the crucial functions of establishing social equilibria and constructing personal

identities. The expression coined by Kopytoff was used to give more precise

specification to what was a still hazy intuition, but when many attempts had been

made to show that the notion of consumerism alone is not sufficient to interpret

contemporary society, and that the meanings of people’s lives are determined

increasingly less by what they “are” (social affiliation) and increasingly more by

what they “do” (consumption): from Baudrillard’s (1968) system of objects to

Douglas and Isherwood’s (1979) world of things, to Luisa Leonini’s (1988) lost

identity. Consumption is studied today as a source of identity, of social inclusion,

and of personal fulfilment. This shifts the focus in analysis of material things from

their status as products (and therefore as usable materials) to that of tools for the

social construction of reality, and therefore to meanings intrinsically provisional and

negotiable.

False friends

This last aspect requires further exploration. As I explained at the outset, the notion

of the biography of objects is useful for the study of society because it furnishes

greater explanatory completeness: depth is given to the variables at work behind

social phenomena. But this can only come about if the biographies of objects are

taken seriously, and not in a metaphorical sense. It is not easy for this to happen

because of the ingrained habit of treating things as the simple mouthpieces of

humans. I am not referring here to the approaches still widespread in common sense

– for example that of designers – which instead acknowledge that material things

have a non-material, semantic content able to transmit meanings to the people that

encounter them. These approaches believe that such meanings are imprinted within

objects by their producers, by those who have created them and given them shape.

They are consequently objectified, materialized, given once and for all in the

experience of the recipient (or recipients). To my mind, conceptions of this type – of

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which a leading example is the attempt by Gianfranco Marrone to develop a theory

of interobjectivity (see especially Marrone 2002, 17) – still regard objects as

instruments in the hands of human beings, and do not grant them any social

autonomy. The semantic content is exclusively the work of a human subject, and the

physical object is nothing but its material vehicle, the messenger (the mouthpiece). I

am referring instead of the recent sociological theories of cultural processes which,

following Baudrillard, have revealed the importance of the consumption of things

for definition of their social meaning.

Baudrillard recommends “superseding a spontaneous vision of objects in terms of

needs, the hypothesis of the priority of their use value” (Baudrillard 1972, It. transl.,

7), because the primary status of an object is not given by its pragmatic use, nor by

its material function, but by the social acts which allow it to acquire a sign function.

Michel de Certeau proposes that consumption should be conceived as a second

production – as an activity which, if neglected, prevents correct description of the

constellation of meanings that material culture assumes in a given society. Of

course, the producers of artifacts, particularly industrial ones, conceive them as

bearers of distinct semantic content and usually surround them with discourses

designed to support this representation (advertising, packaging, marketing strategies,

etc.). But de Certeau’s thesis, with which I fully agree, is that this representation

imposed “from above” tells us nothing about what it [che cosa?] signifies for its

users. It is first necessary to analyse how it is manipulated by those who have not

created it; only then can one gauge “the difference or similarity between the

production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its

utilization” (de Certeau 1990, It. transl. 8; see also Miller 1987, 190). It is clear that

this shift from an economic conception of consumption to one which highlights its

cultural and communicative function is essential for granting social protagonism to

things, in that it frees them from subservience to their creators. But this is not

enough. Freeing things from enslavement to their creators does not restore dignity

and autonomy to them if it means ‘democratically’ subjugating them to the

consumer. The reference to objects would not add much to our understanding of the

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social world if objects were solely the inert weapons with which social actors fight

their battles for better status. The anthropocentrism of the producer, or of the

transmitter, is replaced by the anthropocentrism of the consumer, or the recipient.

Once again, things are reduced to being the mouthpieces of people, to being

communication media. This also emerges from de Certeau’s conception: just as

words are appropriated by those who utter them, and make arbitrary use of them for

their own purposes and interests, so too, according to de Certeau, are the products of

the cultural economy appropriated by consumers to implement their social tactics.

This demonstrates that there are “false friends” – to use an expression from

linguistics – in the theory of the social life of things. These “false friends” are

studies and publications which apparently try to innovate how we consider objects,

but in fact adhere to the traditional conception, or say something else. Consider for

example the admirable collection assembled by Vladimir Archipov, and illustrated

in a recent compendium (Archipov 2006), of more than one thousand home-made

objects crafted by simple Russian citizens in the difficult period of transition from

the Soviet Union to a Western-style system of consumption. The objects consist

largely of simple artifacts expressing the inventiveness of people suffering numerous

hardships. They were not intended for sale, only for self-consumption, and yet they

pertain iconographically to late-industrial consumerism. Archipov states (2006, It.

transl.. 9) that “they all have three characteristics in common: functionality,

uniqueness, and the testimony of the author, who is also the user”. Yet these

characteristics express an approach that does not conceive objects as able to interact

with personalities in the network of social relationships. What interests Archipov is

solely the design and creation process, the generation of things as testimonies to the

social environment whence they have sprung and of which, once again, they are

mouthpieces. “I consider as true design”, Archipov said in an interview published by

Abitare (no. 483, June 2008, p. 48), “the simple and spontaneous objects, almost

archaic, self-produced by ordinary people”; objects which do not belong to the

universal commerce of sense and are therefore do not have occasion to express their

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personalities in the system of collective relationships [non capisco il testo in

italiano].

There are other works more or less at variance with the arguments put forward in

this book. Sherry Turkle (2007) has collected 34 biographies of objects written by

scientists, humanists, artists and designers. Her book considers objects in terms of

their evocative capacity, their power to influence many aspects of everyday life

(play, desire, meditation, etc.). But the stories reported are, in truth, autobiographies

of the subjects who have written them; and objects appear mainly as witnesses to

events which have taken place in the lives of people. Their evocative capacity is

treated more as an ability to represent effects than to produce them in social

contexts. More attentive to this latter theme is perhaps Lorraine Daston, not so much

in her book Biographies of Scientific Objects (Daston 2000) – which only studies the

processes by which particular entities, at a particular time, acquire the prerogative of

being considered scientific facts, using an approach typical of recent studies on

science and the technology – as in her collection Things That Talk (Daston 2004).

Although the latter book does not take a biographical approach, it attributes to things

– at least by hypothesis – the gift of eloquence, and thus a capacity to impose

themselves on social subjects regardless of their will. This is the case of

photographs, for example, which – whether veridical or deceptive – impose

themselves on the person who looks at them (and who has taken them) as

independent entities.

A personality in transformation

Pointing out that things possess biographies which can be more or less completely

reconstructed and recounted serves not only to aid understanding of their role in

determining social phenomena regardless of the projects that have brought them into

being. It also serves to emphasise the mutable character of their social presence. The

personality of objects is by principle a changing personality. The missing masses of

society are not static, or substantially static, masses as geographical or climatic

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features are understood to be in certain traditional sociological theories. They are

dynamic masses, nuclei of energy which evolve over time; and as they evolve, they

contribute crucially to social change. Latour implicitly pointed this out when he

dwelt on the example of the automatic door-closer which went “on strike” at La

Villette (Latour 1992, It. transl., 94). It is clear that strike action, or interrupted

operation, by a technological mechanism is a novelty compared with its previous

social presence, a change in the role which it performs in the collectivity. The most

evident dimension of the biographies of objects is therefore the succession of

functions (or dysfunctions) that they incorporates in regard to the collectivity by

which they are used. Latour calls this debrayage: particular collective actions or

functions are delegated to a material object, and are therefore repositioned or

translated in it. The object thus incorporates a social role which it then interprets and

performs autonomously and “creatively” with respect to the original action

programme. Moreover, during their lifetimes, objects receive multiple, sometimes

simultaneous, delegations which transform their social role. The biographies of such

objects are hence the histories of these various delegations, among which we may

certainly include the particular action programmes of commodificiation and

singularization to which Kopytoff drew attention.

But the biographies of objects, like those of humans, are more complex than this,

and they depend on a set of factors. They have other dimensions besides that of

debrayage. Clarifying this aspect requires drawing another distinction, this time

analytical, which can be expressed thus: objects have biographies, types of object

have histories, in the same way as individuals have biographies whilst nations and

institutions have histories. Many objects of contemporary industrial production

belong to a family (the series), to a clan (the brand), to a category (the type), and this

largely determines their destiny and social role. But the biography of a material

thing cannot be reduced to the history of the type to which it belongs, because this

would hide its individual life-events, which instead are impressed upon it and

contribute to producing its meaning for us. It is one thing to describe the vicissitudes

of the watch inherited from my grandfather, quite another the vicissitudes of the

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object “watch” in the history of humanity. Examining the biographies of objects

therefore requires one to recognize that as individuals objects are important in

determination of the social world. Of course, the social history of objects has a long

and authoritative tradition, and it has been of great help in understanding historical

epochs and civilizations. But as a rule it has not affected the conventional view of

things as mere sedimentations of human activities; nor has it served understanding

of the wholly special role assumed by things in determining social phenomena in the

contemporary world. The reverse applies to the biographies of unusual objects.

These deliver to us “living things”, social subjects – “actants” Latour would say

(1987, tr. it. 109-120) – able to interact with other social subjects and determine

their trajectories. Objects are endowed with personality to the extent that the status

deriving to them from the type to which they belong (for example, watch) sums with

a specificity due to their individual history (for example, my grandfather’s watch).

This specificity often manifests itself, as said, through the physical imprints that

biographical events have on a thing. The chipped cups with somewhat faded colours

in which I serve coffee to my guests “speak” to them by virtue of that chipping and

that fading. It is not necessary to point out that they are antiques. Likewise, many of

the objects collected by Archipov testify through their dilapidation to the use that

has been made of them. Conversely, a new coffeepot never used before testifies,

through the absence of visible imprints of use, to its inability to produce good

coffee. The performative force that these traces left by use confer on objects is such

that at times the productive system anticipates in an object, in a family or in a

category of objects the physical imprint of the use that will be made of them.

Fontanille (1995), cited and commented on by Marrone (2002, 23-27), gives the

example of ergonomic objects, like whisky flasks shaped to resemble the curve of a

breast or a buttock. Such objects already incorporate the form that they would

acquire after a long period of use. Perhaps more convincing is the example by the

jeans faded, and perhaps even deliberately ripped, during their manufacture. This

indirectly testifies to the importance that an object’s biography may have in

determining its meaning for the collectivity and, therefore, its ability to perform an

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autonomous role in the definition of social phenomena. A pair of jeans faded

because of the use made of them cannot produce, in the social world to which they

belong, the same reactions as produced by jeans of the same kind fresh from the

factory. The biographical signs that usage (“consumption” in the proper sense)

imprints upon a material object alters its personality, usually enriching it as time

passes. Hence, the custom of purchasing pre-faded jeans springs from the need, or

the opportunity, to exploit to one’s advantage the particular personality which faded

jeans project when they are worn in a social gathering. The events that punctuate the

life of an object leave imprints on it, on its material substratum, and these imprints

modify the perceptive characteristics of that object, and therefore its social presence.

Immaterial biographies

There is finally a third fundamental dimension of the biography of objects. This

extends beyond those incorporated in the material thing and therefore warrants

discussion (all too cursorily here, given the complex issues involved). Consider what

happens to humans as well. Biographical events imprint themselves on our bodies,

modifying them over time: we lose our hair, we get wrinkles, our facial expressions

change. These transformations modify our social presence in collective situations,

for example inducing others to offer us their seat on the bus. Nevertheless, on their

own, these changes are not enough to explain the particular social status accorded a

human body (prior to any communicative interaction). The transformations of the

material appearance of the human body do not always produce the same social

consequences: in some societies the elderly are more respected, sought-after,

desired?, by the young, in other societies less so. The meaning of a certain state of

affairs in a particular society always derives from the encounter between that state of

affairs and the cultural tradition in which it is embedded.

The biography of an object, like that of a human, is therefore inflected not only by

the events that materially imprint themselves upon it, but also by the meanings

which interlocutors attribute to it; meanings which do not depend solely on its

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physical appearance. An object’s biography is inflected by changes in its material as

well as immaterial constitution. And this is what makes the biography of a social

subject – whether human or non-human – extremely volatile. The immaterial content

of objects in the human world depends structurally on the experiences of humans as

beings capable of signification. Individuals never have experience of things, but

always of “things composed of their qualities” – to adapt Husserl’s expression. A

table is never just a table for us, it is always also something more, a table in its

givenness: an executive table, a support surface, a barrier, a point of attraction, a

routine desk, ugly clutter to be thrown away, firewood to be burned to keep warm.

In short, we do not live in a world of things, we live in a world of meanings. Hence,

possessing immaterial content is not a prerogative of some things rather than others.

Not only works of art, design objects, fashion items, museum exhibits possess a

symbolic dimension in addition to the material one. If human beings live in a world

of meanings, all objects enter their experiential world solely in the form of

meanings.

To be added is that meaning is always, by definition, meaning-for-me – individual

meaning. It springs from the interaction between the actual experience of a person

and the stock of his or her previous experiences. It is therefore closely bound up

with his or her individual biography. Meanings can be collective only in a general

sense, by analogy, and only to the extent that a history of common (i.e. similar)

experiences unifies a certain collectivity and makes the biographies of its members

in certain respects kindred. But if meanings are by definition individual meanings,

the immaterial content of any object of experience is relative to whoever experiences

it; it is essentially subjective. This means that the immaterial content of objects is

never given once and for all; it is always the volatile, momentary product of their

encounter with a human, or of the encounter and negotiation among several human

around them. The meaning of things varies as the people who experience them vary.

The Gioconda that I contemplate in the room of an art gallery is not the same

Gioconda that the person next to me is contemplating. Objects are “living things”,

subjects of an individual biography, also to the extent that they possess an

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immaterial dimension (a semantic content) that is never fixed, defined, or stable, but

constantly fluctuating in relation to the flow of everyday “encounters” between the

object and humans. Of course, nor is the material content of an object ever really

fixed: the cup may be chipped, fabric wears out, things lose colour. But these are

changes immeasurably slower than the volatility of meaning, so much so that is

often the resistance and durability of matter that enables us to protect constellations

meaning (a poem, a piece of music) against their natural perishability (we preserve

them on paper, on tape, in bytes).

Conclusions

Sociological theory on the biography of objects is still only embryonic. But it seems

to open numerous directions for inquiry whose developments are at present

unpredictable. Thorough theoretical treatment of the topic does not yet exist –

except, perhaps for Latour’s, which, however, does not enjoy broad consensus

among sociologists because of its bold and paradoxical character. Nor has empirical

reseach been conducted to verify the real impact of objects, and of the biographical

histories imprinted in them, on social dynamics in real situations. This area of

analysis is therefore open to every attempt to verify its potential and limits – as well

testified by the essays collected in this book, even to the extent of substantially

denying that objects are dynamic, as argued by Francesca Rigotti.

My observations in this article certainly require more detailed discussion which

encompasses a series of lateral issues without which they risk appearing arbitrary. I

propose them nevertheless as the basis for analysis to improve our understanding of

a society in which the consumption of material things has reached levels unthinkable

even a century ago, and which are entirely inexplicable by simply citing the human

drive to satisfy material needs. Implicit in them [che cosa?] has been dissatisfaction

with the various versions of a critical theory of society. Moreover, behind the

critique against the dominant power system – the system of mass production that

standardizes the world of objects, the consumerism apparently induced by

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advertising, the (alleged) homogenization of opinions by the media, the

globalization or McDonaldization of Western consumption – lies a conservative

nostalgia for a disappearing world and an evident difficulty to adapt to the new one.

Such dissatisfaction must induce us to look anew at consumption practices. We must

understand that these are social practices as forms of interaction, without too hastily

assigning them to the category of degenerate social bonds. Recognizing the social

role of objects and its biographical basis, I submit, offers ample possibilities in this

regard.