The Material Turn on 1 March 2014 at UEA London was an extremely thought-provoking event that brought together the Material Witness cohort and research staff to consider the shifting sands of cultural studies over the last two decades, in particular the assemblage of disciplinary approaches and discourse labelled the ‘Material Turn’.
Alixe Bovey‘s introductory paper provided a view on the constellation of ‘turns’ that have had a bearing on disciplines such as art history through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A timely reminder of how the many pursuits of art historians testify to the various ‘moments’ of a single discipline.
This event, however, was not simply concerned with how art historians have been addressing materiality. The programme represented several disciplinary perspectives, from literature through to museology and archaeology. My own paper focused on agency, which I take to be a fundamental part of the rethinking of material culture; a shift away from ‘rational’ distinctions between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘person’ and ‘thing’. Alfred Gell’s influential Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998) encapsulates a uncomfortable proposition that such dichotomies are illusory, and that humans make, think about, and respond to material culture as if it were capable of acting. Gell’s point here is not that objects can ‘do’ anything in particular, merely that there is a perception (or ‘abduction’) of agency by humans.
Seal matrices and their impressions in the Middle Ages provide an interesting body of material with which to test out Gell’s ideas. For Gell, the agency of objects emanates from something or someone else. Seal impressions, and the discourse and metaphors surrounding sealing practices and identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Brigitte Bedos-Rezak has recently shown, provide a useful way into rethinking material culture ‘in action’. Gell’s expressions of agent-patient relations, I argue, provide a way of articulating the various interactions with objects, not simply what they ‘mean’. A very productive question from the audience raised the matter of function – and this in itself is circumvented in Gell’s discussion of agency. Would it be more useful to bracket out the functionality of an object and see if this is where agency lies? The remainder being ‘meaning’? Or is it difficult to sustain such distinctions? In my view, agency does a better job of dealing with form, function and meaning in material culture because all three involve the interactions of agents and patients (people making, doing and recognising) in various permutations.
Catherine Richardson‘s perspectives on early modern inventories demonstrated a very dynamic connection between words and things, and the search for patterns of significance in domestic space. How an object is described in an inventory and where it was located reveal a wealth of information about how early modern middling classes may have viewed their material worlds and, ultimately, their material selves. Embodiment is certainly a key strand of the Material Turn, having found a home in anthropology and archaeology. The embodiment of authors and readers also emerges from literary studies: the textual as prompt to visual in the mind’s eye.
Fiona Savage‘s case study addressed the biographies of objects from the perspective of museum professionals. Her recounting of the quest to track down the conditions in which objects enter a museum’s collections, the terms on which those items are held, how they are then treated and understood by later generations of curators, researchers, visitors and source communities was fascinating, not only because of the meticulous nature of such an enquiry, but also for our almost total reliance on the paper-based archive. Elsewhere I have explored the problem of the ‘dead interface’ with regards to archive creation – and in the context of museology, the digital cocoon of documentation (in the form of email correspondence, databases and web content) seems ever more fragile when compared to its paper-based predecessors.
Dan Hicks was our keynote speaker of the day. In his paper ‘Three Types of Material Witnessing’, he illustrated our engagement with the ‘material’ with three models – ‘objectivity’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘something else’. These roughly conform to a chronology of scholarship ranging from the Enlightenment, antiquarianism, through modern archaeology to interdisciplinarity and reflexivity. In short, understandings of material culture can be singular (that there is one ‘true’ sequence of events, or meaning to those events) or multiple (that there are many interpretations of material culture, with often different but plausible sequences of events and meanings). The problem is, is it enough for scholars to pinball between these two views on material culture? Hicks demonstrated, using several key moments in archaeology, that objects were multiplied and distributed through writing, drawings, photography and models. At each moment of their reproduction new contexts and discourses emerge so that our view that a single object (e.g. a knapped flint) is unchanged as time moves on could be altered by appreciating that each reproduction of that same flint generates a new and different ‘object’. Frequently, scholars do not base their projects and endeavours on these ‘unchanging’, ‘unique’ artefacts – they instead base them on other objects that are related only by virtue of resemblance. To pick up again on society’s digital migration, is our drift away from the material object allowing for the creation of new ‘worlds’ of objects?
University of East Anglia