Things and Objects

Quilts, handkerchiefs, shoes, chintzes, porcelain cups, wallpaper, and cupboards—these are the kinds of objects that crowd the pages of historical inquiries into the material culture of Georgian Britain and early America. Compare these with the range of things that find their way into discussions of material culture in neighboring disciplines. Evocative Objects, which considers the contribution of things to thoughts and emotions, includes knots, an apple, ballet slippers, and even single-celled organisms (slime mold).Footnote ¹⁷ Trying to find an answer to the question “How are things?” the philosopher Roger Pol-Droit examines his bed and his clothes, but also a tombstone, a paper clip, and the street lamp outside his window.Footnote ¹⁸

Historians of eighteenth-century material culture have tended to concern themselves with a particular slice of the world of things. Domestic objects and personal possessions loom largest, especially soft furnishings, clothing, and furniture with a special meaning for personal and family identity, such as Hannah Barnard's cupboard studied by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.Footnote ¹⁹ Material culture mainly stops at the domestic doorstep, rarely connecting to urban networks, to the office, or to the brutal materiality of iron, steel, or bullets. The material world is mainly “soft,” decorative, and visible.

John Styles and Amanda Vickery have noted the “gaps and mismatches” between American and British historiography: “Foodways, house forms, and domestic self-sufficiency, have been almost entirely ignored in British academic circles, until very recently.” These differences, they suggest, “reflect the absence of a distinct academic field in Britain to play the role that material-culture studies have performed for the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America.”Footnote ²⁰ Of course, this complaint is now outdated, given the publication of works such as Deborah Cohen's Household Gods (2006). It is also a surprising conclusion, given the flourishing of material culture studies in British anthropology and archaeology and the wave of work in sociology and science and technology studies since the 1980s. What we are dealing with is not the absence of an intellectual environment as such but the fact that few historians have joined it. The social science literature, in turn, has rarely seen it necessary to include historians in its anthologies. The Handbook of Material Culture (2006) includes thirty-three chapters, of which only one is by a historian; tellingly, it is about home furnishings, by Robert St. George, an expert on the domestic in New England. This does not mean that the past is missing in the social sciences. Rather, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and others tend to write about history with their own tools and concerns.

What are the reasons for this gulf? It would be wrong to simply invoke empiricism or historians’ generic inability to connect soft and hard matter. After all, historians elsewhere like Fernand Braudel or Daniel Roche move between the home, clothing, and infrastructures.Footnote ²¹ Rather, I believe, it has to do with the dominant focus on symbolic communication. The main interest among eighteenth-century British historians has been in objects as communicators of personal and social identities. A recent example is Ann Smart Martin's fascinating Buying into the World of Goods, which unfolds the commercialization of “backcountry Virginia.” For instance, slaves bought looking glasses by selling chicken and produce. In her case study of the ribbon, Smart Martin notes that the ribbon can be easily displayed or hidden, but she is mainly interested in ribbons as “consummate desirable things,” signs of emotional investment and attachment, and as gifts at a fair (“the fairing”).Footnote ²²

This interest in objects for symbolic communication has yielded a range of insights about identity formation, manners, and the cult of the domestic. Recent work by Vickery on wallpaper highlights the specific language of decorum, which associated “pretty” design with “neatness” and abhorred “showy” extravagance.Footnote ²³ Other work has shown how consumer goods changed meanings as they moved from one class to another. When workers and artisans dressed up in cotton, they did so within their own culture, not simply to emulate the middling sort.Footnote ²⁴

Both these strands can be read as challenges to the “conspicuous consumption” and “distinction” theses. Nonetheless, the research orientation retains the imprint of Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu as major points of reference. Things are interesting because their appropriation promises to reveal processes of social stratification and identity formation. It is probably no coincidence that the hegemony of this approach to objects came at a time when questions of identity loomed so large in Western societies. The thing is a means to an end. It is not the starting point of inquiry, let alone its center. In short, historical material culture studies have been more about culture than about material. Objects are “bundles of meaning.” But are they only that?

The boundaries of things are not as self-evident or fixed as we may wish. Some metaphysicians dispute that tables are “real” objects since they are ultimately composites of atoms, quarks, and empty spaces in between.Footnote ²⁵ But even outside metaphysics, things are ambivalent. Some scholars include tiny organisms, like the protist Dictyostelium chosen by Evelyn Fox Keller as her object to think with. Her slime mold is not an agent with a will or intentions, but neither is it like a table. It has a built-in program of development.Footnote ²⁶ Histories of material culture would no doubt look different if such organisms were admitted entry. Other objects live in a gray zone, moving back and forth between inanimate and animate existence. Clothes, for example, have a suppleness of movement that endow them with a kind of “half-life.” “We live our clothes,” Pol-Droit has written, “as though they were alive. Your trousers do the walking.” They “are integrated into the body's memory.”Footnote ²⁷

Other things have different kinds of qualities. A sponge is a thing that absorbs and releases other things. Boilers, pipes, and cables live a more concealed existence, except at moments of installation, maintenance, or breakdown. This diversity probably defeats a uniform theory or history of objects. Still, this brief discussion alerts us to two important dimensions. The first concerns the ambivalent status of many things that are neither dead nor alive. This challenges a view that things are passive objects or simply appropriated by people. The second relates to function. Alongside things that primarily signal meaning and identity, there are others that accomplish tasks or enable humans and other things to perform tasks. They create warmth or cold, enable mobility, store and release objects, or process communication. Many operate at several levels at once—a car symbolizes status, moves people and objects, provides a private space-time zone, and produces pollution.

So far, things and objects have been treated as synonymous. There are, however, intellectual traditions that draw distinctions between them. Mostly, things have been viewed as prior, more authentic, and less polluted than objects. Marx famously described how commodification transformed a table from an ordinary piece of wood into a transcendent object standing on its head, more mysterious than if it were dancing.Footnote ²⁸ Yet commodification only captures some of the extra qualities that things carry as objects. People give them distinct values and arrange them in assemblages. And these can change in the life of the same commodity. As Bill Brown has noted in his excavation of thingness in postbellum American literature, “Value derives from the appropriation of a pre-existing surplus, the material object's own excessiveness.”Footnote ²⁹ In other words, “use-value”—a concept Marx employed only at an abstract level—obscures the concrete values that emerge in material culture but are not determined by an object's status as commodity as such.

Philosophers have long debated the boundaries between things and humans. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular emphasized their embodied relationship. For Heidegger, things show their thingness only in the process of being put to use, literally proving their readiness to the human hand ( Zuhandenheit), whereas objects live in a state of distant presence or contemplation (Vorhandenheit). A hammer is known and experienced differently in the process of hammering than when it is lying unused in a cupboard or is being observed. When hammering, a person appropriates an object and turns it into a thing, releasing a form of embodied knowledge. Materiality is not distinct from human existence, or Dasein. It is part of an organic relationship. And it is an active process.Footnote ³⁰

Merleau-Ponty, similarly, emphasized the body as a material entity. Touch, sight, and hearing create a sense of being and bodily knowledge that is through and through connected with the material world around it. Recent sociologists have used Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the “habit-body” to study how car mechanics rely on their bodily memory of tools, parts, and tasks.Footnote ³¹ Although historians do not have the privilege of retroactive ethnography, the habit-body is a subject worthy of inquiry because nervous and motoric memories are built up, modified, or lost over time. In addition to the symbolic values people placed on things, the question then is also what they did with them and how these interactions shaped their materially embodied selves, practices, and relationships.

Such approaches to the embodied materiality of human action raise deeper questions about agency and causation fundamental to the discipline of history. Most historians have proceeded from human actors outward, asking how people in the past have assigned things meanings or put them to use. To focus, by contrast, on how things, hands, and senses come together points to a more open, fluid view of action. Here things play an active role too, weaving their way into material culture and human selfhood through practices that are more than simply the result of subjective decisions or intended meanings.

The most influential (if controversial) platform for exploring the “agency” of things in the past couple of decades has been actor-network theory (ANT). Spearheaded by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and others, ANT tries to transcend multiple dualities: between society and nature, between technology and society, and between human and nonhuman actors. “Students of technology are never faced with people on the one hand and things on the other,” Latour has emphasized. “They are faced with programs of action, sections of which are endowed to parts of humans, while other sections are entrusted to parts of nonhumans.”Footnote ³² Seeing agency as distributed between humans and objects demands the overhaul of “traditional” social theories that, according to Latour, have looked at the world through an anthropomorphic, object-alien prism left behind by the Enlightenment. “Society” and “the social” are not distinct domains but simply a set of ties in the assembly of networks composed of nature, things, tools, technologies, and humans.

In the past twenty years, ANT has grown into a formidable research network applied to an ever-growing range of subjects, from the laboratory to the electronic car all the way to alcoholic liver disease.Footnote ³³ Evaluating this evolving corpus of research falls outside the aims of this article. However, ANT is interesting for our concerns because of its basic assumptions about the place of things in modernity. Latour's pleas to give things greater respect are backed up by an indictment of the moderns for having neglected or altogether ignored them. The historical neglect of the “missing masses” is traced to a constitutional defect at the heart of modernity: the hegemony of the Cartesian subject and an object-alien view of the world that from the Enlightenment has sealed off politics and society from the material and natural world.Footnote ³⁴

It is perhaps ironic that a theory like ANT, so concerned with resisting grand narratives and abstractions (like “society”), draws on such a flat view of modern history. Yet modernity consists of competing traditions. There was no single discourse of things. Rather than posit a succession of mutually exclusive eras—object-aware pre-Enlightenment cultures followed by object-alien modernity and then a more object-centered present era—a first step would be to inquire into the genealogy of things.

“Things” were certainly in flux in the eighteenth century, but the flow was not all in one direction. For some, things triggered anxieties of dehumanization and dependence. For others, they were sources of knowledge and a new social order. It is hard to see a general turning away from things, as presumed by Latour and others. While materiality largely disappears from the household economy in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), things found a new voice in commercial exchange.Footnote ³⁵ Power and status now derived from control over possessions rather than over persons.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, the eighteenth century gave birth to a new genre of “thing-biographies.” Here, teapots, a guinea, a dog, and a black coat came alive to describe people's foibles and cruelty. In advertisements, lost things “cried out” for their owners. These “it-narratives” were about “the soul of the thing,” as Jonathan Lamb has put it.Footnote ³⁷ They are examples of the “excess” things carried over and above being a commodity with a price. Possessions lost (or stolen) retained a sense of the owner's identity. Eighteenth-century literature explored the porous boundaries between object and subject. Moll Flanders is consumed by her desire for clothes and objects, which takes over her subjecthood. Sexual desire could turn the body into a thing. Conversely, in the process of circulation, objects absorbed human qualities.

Authors were worried what fashion, printing, and the commodification of prose were doing to their standing and used the autobiography of things to satirize the marketplace.Footnote ³⁸ But these narratives also offer telling accounts of the more general ambivalence of what objects are and do to people once they enter into a relation of ownership. Objects here are, precisely as Latour has written for the present era, “more interesting, variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material and networky.”Footnote ³⁹ Above all, things were considered risky. One motivation behind today's rediscovery of materiality is that things have always been with us (and part of us) but that we have been neglectful owners. Surely, things deserve better. Adopting a more humble, caring attitude to things will make for a more realistic, ecologically safer way of dealing with problems in human-nonhuman relations.Footnote ⁴⁰ If eighteenth-century literature has a lesson, by contrast, it is that giving things greater voice can have troubling outcomes. The objects “who” talked about their lives in commercial circulation ridiculed human vanity, selfishness, and ignorance. As Lamb has observed, the “enlargement of sympathy discloses relations that are neither comfortable nor sociable.”Footnote ⁴¹

It-narratives were part of a larger preoccupation with things that runs across the modern period. William Blackstone devoted the second and longest book of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) to Of the Rights of Things, which drew distinctions between a host of things, from movable things versus land to domestic versus wild animals. It also offered astute observations on how things have left their imprint on human behavior—the transmission of property through inheritance, for instance, was said to make people good citizens, setting “the passions on the side of duty.”Footnote ⁴² At a time of growing debate about slavery, the boundaries between things and persons were inevitably contested. Material objects and their polite use as well as ownership were a running thread in the philosophical and advice literature on respectability, manners, and civility. This is well known among eighteenth-century historians, but how little of this has found its way into the social sciences is further evidence of how underdeveloped the exchange between these fields remains.

It is difficult and probably unwise to try to paint a single, unilinear history of things. Some scholars point to Kant or Locke and suggest that they reveal a fundamental difference between an object-indifferent, subject-centered West and a more thing-friendly East.Footnote ⁴³ Whether individual thinkers can stand in for entire cultures is questionable. We lack the sustained comparative studies for such grand claims. What we have suggests a more complicated picture. Anxieties about things were nothing new or unique to eighteenth-century Britain. Many scholars who have studied material culture have found contemporaries warning of a new tyranny of things in their particular period and country. We should resist the temptation of claiming a revolution in a particular time and place. Renaissance Italy had a lively culture of shopping and commodity credit that raised fears of social dislocation.Footnote ⁴⁴ In late Ming China, novels like Chin P’ing Mei (The plum in the golden vase, 1618) warned of the dangers of corruption lurking in objects used excessively or inappropriately.Footnote ⁴⁵ After the Civil War, American commentators worried that a new a cult of things was sapping personal character and public spirit.Footnote ⁴⁶ Instead of viewing these individually in terms of sharp breaks or novelty as national historians have done, these discourses are perhaps better viewed as members of the same family, articulated through different intellectual and literary traditions but with shared concerns nonetheless.

What set eighteenth-century Britain, and subsequently also the United States, apart was less a hostile or object-alien attitude than a set of positions that embraced things as positive agents in the advance of civilization. Moral critics no longer controlled the field: they now had to reckon with vocal supporters of consumption. Some roots of this revalorization can be traced back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. As Harold Cook has shown, Dutch explorers and scientists came to champion a more concrete, material form of knowledge in which, instead of distant contemplation, personal acquaintance with nutmeg, tea, tulips, and other things became critical. Touch, taste, and smell were prized. Detailed description lay at the heart of this “tasteful objectivity.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The upgrading of material things spread to other parts of public life and knowledge too. It was from within this Dutch context that Mandeville developed his defense of material self-interest as a source of public benefit in his controversial Fable of the Bees. An appreciation of things, self-interest, and sociability were to become entwined in the culture of exchange. In eighteenth-century Britain, writers from Barbon to Adam Smith began to imagine that the pursuit of goods might have benign effects, including drawing the poor into commercial civil society.Footnote ⁴⁸ The discourse of respectability and decorum promised stability in the midst of flux. It offered a hierarchical society a hierarchy of taste: more, new things did not have to lead to social disorder as long as they were consumed appropriately. By the early nineteenth century, the cynical, dystopian outlook of it-narratives, in which things told of their careless, self-centered owners who sold them, lost them, or pawned them, had given way to a more positive, educational genre in which dolls and whipping tops explained to children the reciprocal nature of respect and caring: if you treat things with care, you will be treated well too.Footnote ⁴⁹

If anything, these moderns were placing too much trust in things, not too little. The civilizing effect of things became an integral part of the imperial project of commerce, Christianity, and civilization. If becoming used to more material possessions would habituate children to look after things and people and teach the domestic poor self-discipline and industry, the same logic motivated missionaries and imperialists in nineteenth-century Africa.Footnote ⁵⁰ Introduce Western clothes, tea, cooking utensils, and ornaments, and the things would steer the natives from superstition and sloth to a Christian regime of domestic economy and self-improvement. Africans would have been surprised to hear that Western Europeans were object-alien in this period.

Choice and Practice

In the past decade, the concepts of choice and individualism have been subjected to critique across the human sciences. Broadly speaking, revisionism has worked in three directions. One group, coming from within economics and psychology, has qualified the model of rational choice, emphasizing that rationality is “bounded,” that choice can be “myopic,” and that people prefer to minimize loss rather than maximize gain.Footnote ⁵¹ Ultimately, however, these revised models remain anchored in an instrumental individualist view of human action. A second group has looked at routines, habits, and practices that altogether break with the paradigm of individual, momentary choice; people, for example, choose food in a shop, but the fairly consistent and slow-to-change food preferences in many societies suggest something other than a momentary calculation of costs and benefits. Consumption involves many “ordinary,” everyday practices that were obscured in an earlier focus on shopping and conspicuous consumption: gardening, washing, listening to the radio, practicing hobbies. Finally, there have been attempts by a third group to broaden the concept of choice and to recapture richer historical meanings that were lost in the hegemonic rise of rational choice after the Second World War. It is the last two groups that are of interest here.

Choice retains a curious, dominant place in historical studies of consumption, and this has affected the type of things studied as material culture. Some goods have received interest as heirlooms, but most goods studied are ones that have been bought new in the marketplace. Twenty-five years ago, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb presented eighteenth-century England as the site of a consumer revolution.Footnote ⁵² More and more people, servants as well as lords, acted out their choice as consumers in the marketplace. Here was a proto-nation worthy of Thatcher's Britain. McKendrick's thesis has attracted much debate, opposition, and refinement. Commercialization had longer roots, some have pointed out. Others have painted a more pessimistic picture of the standard of living.Footnote ⁵³ Still, there is little denying that the terms of debate remain those set by McKendrick.

John Styles has provided the most sustained, critical examination of McKendrick's thesis to date.Footnote ⁵⁴ Styles broadly supports the optimistic picture of the spread of new clothes and other material possessions across society. At the same time, he traces the flow of goods to “plebeian consumers,” not to choice and markets but to charity, gifting, inheritance, and secondhand provisioning. The practice of pawning had been noted by earlier scholars, but Styles surveys the whole network of acquisition, appropriation, and passing-on that flourished outside or alongside shops.Footnote ⁵⁵ He groups these practices together as “involuntary consumption.” This is useful as a contrast to the idea of people as shoppers. It complements research that has highlighted indirect and collective dimensions of shopping, which frequently involved intermediaries like servants, family members, or slaves or group outings.Footnote ⁵⁶

Analytically, however, involuntary consumption is self-limiting, defining itself negatively against an idea that choice means individual, voluntary action. It switches sides but remains within the analytical field set down by rational choice. Involuntary consumption might refer to someone on a hunger strike being force-fed, but it fails to capture the interactive dimensions of trust, reciprocity, and solidarity that are involved in receiving charity or handing down clothes.Footnote ⁵⁷ Renting a room furnished with a bed, a teapot, and other consumer items involves a mix of first- and second-order choices—if tenants had not wanted teapots, landlords would presumably not have provided them. By trying to reclaim the eighteenth century from the clutches of a market model of choice, involuntary consumption also minimizes the continuities of alternative systems of provisioning in our present. Many things that people consume today are not freely bought in the market—school meals, roads, furnished apartments, family dinners, or the advertisements that are sliced between the action in a sports match one has chosen to watch.

“Modern consumer goods are cheap, disposable, infrequently repaired and quickly worthless,” Styles writes. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, goods were “costly, durable, much-repaired, and readily marketed second-hand.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This is, of course, true for certain goods like clothes in early twenty-first-century Britain, but even this trend is very recent and uneven and hardly typical of modern consumer culture. Darning, sewing, knitting, and handing down clothes were prominent practices for most of the twentieth century. In a highly “modern” society like Japan, goods are not simply tossed out because something new arrives in the household. American garages are full of second, even third units of consumer durables. Modern goods may be cheap in one context but valuable and meaningful in another. There is a cottage industry of social science studies on secondhand and charity shops, collecting, recycling, yard sales, family gift networks, and hoarding and unhoarding.Footnote ⁵⁹

The limitations of individual choice, then, are not something peculiar to the period before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, in sociology and science and technology studies, the past few years have seen a burst of interest in “ordinary” consumption. Instead of choice, a main inspiration here is the theory of practice and an interest in the evolution over time of practices like eating, walking, or washing the body. A practice is the result of doings and sayings that are linked together through a series of understandings, rules, tasks, and emotions.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some are daily routines, but there are also practices that reproduce these linkages through less frequent performances, such as skiing or celebrating Carnival. Medieval and early modern historians are, of course, familiar with “customs.” Historians writing about “modern” consumer culture, however, easily tend to forget these habitual dimensions. Arguably, this blind spot has its roots in a “modernist” view that sees custom/tradition and commercial society/modernity as sequential orders, the latter colonizing and exterminating the former, as in E. P. Thompson's “moral economy.”Footnote ⁶¹ It echoes nineteenth-century ideas about human evolution and modernization. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed there was an inverse relationship between human intelligence and the power of habits over actions. Émile Durkheim and Max Weber too saw habits and rituals as the sign of traditional societies in contrast to the reflexive thought and conscious action of modern societies.Footnote ⁶²

Have habits and routines declined in the process of modernization? For Norbert Elias and Henri Lefebvre, modernity stands for the growth of such disciplining routines. Lefebvre saw modern society as a vast form of “dressage” that “broke in” humans through its social institutions, rites of conduct, and business: liberty was mainly an illusion.Footnote ⁶³ There are, however, also ways of thinking about habits and intelligence as complementary. In his Psychology (1892), William James approached habits and reflexive thought as partners: the more bits of daily life were handed over to routines, the more it freed up the “higher” faculties of mind.

Practices are useful for reconnecting consumption to the study of things, materials, and technologies without falling into the trap of technological determinism. As Elizabeth Shove and colleagues have emphasized, studies often allude to the importance of novelty for consumer culture but rarely examine how new things come about, how their material composition changes, and how this affects social life.Footnote ⁶⁴ Products have ideas of how they will be used designed into them; future practices are “scripted.”Footnote ⁶⁵ But they are also subject to local contexts of “appropriate” use. Following routines, like the shift from bathing to showering, reveals how patterns of everyday life are reproduced, adapted, and changed.Footnote ⁶⁶ The focus is not just on what things mean but on how things are done.

Practices have a dynamic force of their own, creating sensations, competencies, and plans of doing more or doing things differently. They are entangled in a creative interplay with materiality. Practice research gives attention to the materials out of which products are composed—new materials, like plastics, introduce “new concepts of performance” and carry new cultural meanings. Studies of home improvement in Britain, for example, show how new products and tools like fast-drying paint or quick-fix plumbing have democratized competence (away from specialized decorators). These are examples of “delegation”—that is, how certain functions are conferred from human actors to tools and technologies. A door with an automatic closing device, one of Latour's examples, both takes over from people the job of closing the door and encourages them to think they should close that door if the mechanism happens to fail. At the same time, the use of technologies (new and old) depends on people's competencies—and these have histories. Existing practices can trigger new projects. Kitchen renovations, in this view, do not simply arise from a surrounding materialist culture advertising shiny new goods but are the accomplishment of specific practices.Footnote ⁶⁷

Practices thus look beyond possessions. Instead of taking either object or individual as its starting point, research on practices focuses on how users, things, tools, competence, and desires are coordinated. The life of objects, in other words, is not prior to or independent of social practices but codependent. This also means that value is not based in a product or its meanings but in how it is put to use. The “search for the source of stuff,” as Harvey Molotch has argued, needs to look for the “continuous stroking between object and action” that stabilizes things. An object such as the chair acquires its durability because it has become tightly connected with practices, norms, and symbolic meaning.Footnote ⁶⁸

A theoretical turn to practices, then, raises a host of historical questions for the evolution of material culture, especially about the different “careers” of consumption practices, about the changing ways in which people have become committed (and uncommitted) to practices, and about the role of technologies, competencies, and expectations of use in steering their development. The question is no longer whether people in different historical contexts have more or fewer goods or whether they are involuntary or voluntary consumers, but how they use goods in changing patterns.

It would be shortsighted, however, to throw the baby out with the bathwater and suspend consideration of choice altogether. Choice deserves a broader conceptual and historical frame. “Rational choice,” Mary Douglas has emphasized, is problematic not because people are not rational but because the economistic model trivializes the many social and moral layers of rationality at work when people make choices. These range from buying goods for oneself, friends, or family to choosing things for a dinner party—indeed, making choices about what kind of dinner party one wants. “These sort of choices are the mainspring of culture,” Douglas writes. “They are not trivial choices at all, they are absolutely fundamental for the whole life of a people.” Choice becomes more, not less, important in this view: “In the end, the consumer's choices should be seen as moral judgments about everything: about what a man is, about what a woman is, how a man ought to treat his aged parents, how much of a start in life he ought to give his children, how he expects himself to grow old.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Pragmatism offers a useful argument for seeing choice and routine as interconnected rather than as opposites. Habits, John Dewey argued, were not just “means, waiting, like tools in a box, to be used by conscious resolve.” They “constitute the self,” forming “our effective desires” and furnishing us with “our working capacities.” It would be a “perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter and activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit.” Actions have consequences and thus involve reflecting on things previously done as a “matter of course.” At the same time, “every reflective choice tends to relegate some conscious issue into a deed or habit henceforth taken for granted and not thought upon.” Habits and choice thus feed each other. Dewey and his followers in the home economics movement rejected utilitarianism. Rationality was “not a ready-made antecedent which can be invoked at will and set into movement.” Rather, it was an ongoing developmental process of testing, learning, and searching. People had to manage a permanent overflow of preferences and biases. Choice therefore becomes a deliberative search for “a way to act, not for a final terminus.”Footnote ⁷⁰

These approaches are interesting in their own right, but they are also a useful reminder that history consists of rival traditions of choice and consumption. In the past two decades, studies of shopping and collecting have highlighted the advancing validation of goods and consumption in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.Footnote ⁷¹ Anxieties about the demoralizing effects of consumer culture never vanished but were a reaction to a growing embrace of things. Shopping, window-shopping, and flaneuring were core practices that opened up civic spaces, especially for women. What set Britain aside from societies on the Continent and parts of the United States where taxes were levied on department stores was an increasingly dominant acceptance of choice and consumption as vital to the public interest. The above discussion suggests that to understand this process, we also need to place these domestic and extradomestic material practices within a broader context of the intellectual traditions and political economy that reframed choice and the public identity of consumers. The association between consumers, the public interest, and social ethics in free trade culture in Britain is one such context.Footnote ⁷² The dominant regime of free trade created a new favorable climate for consumers in public life that, in turn, made for a less antagonistic and less regulatory environment and for a civic culture that was more accepting of choice and things. Free trade promised material improvement without the excesses of materialism. Studies of material culture and political economy, clearly, stand only to gain from one another.

Material Politics

To expand the focus from possessions to things and from having to doing has implications for political history. Historians have long noted how objects have acted as political symbols, vehicles of community, ingredients of the public sphere, and instruments of political communication.Footnote ⁷³ The approaches introduced earlier prompt a more profound reassessment of the material essence of politics. Things appear at once more integral to political processes and sensibilities and more fragile, precarious, and politicized than in conventional accounts. Instead of starting with political actors who then appropriate objects for symbolic effects, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty see the material world as woven into people's bodies, identities, and actions. Things, in other words, recruit us into politics as much as we recruit them. And, in addition to highly visible objects, these include the hidden material networks, technologies, and relationships that shape everyday life. The evolving entwining of things and users in practices finally shakes assumptions about the stability, order, and disciplinary power of things. Late or neo-Foucauldians have looked at how state power can be objectified. Scholars interested in “evocative objects,” by contrast, have stressed how things act as sources of individual self and emotional stability. Both these accounts distract from the more fluid and troublesome life of things. Things are not just friendly companions or instruments of power. Things are also trouble. They break down. They cause us grief, anger, or bewilderment. How they work depends on how people use them, and uses differ on the ground. For politics, this means conflict and resistance, not merely discipline and control.

In contrast to most histories of material culture, in which an interest in culture tends to neglect politics, the return to things in the social sciences puts politics center stage. Taking things seriously as knots of social knowledge and action raises questions about the liberal paradigm of politics associated with subject-centered forms of autonomy and critical reason. The most passionate call for a new politics has come from scholars keen to raise things to the level of actors themselves. For Latour, the resurgence of objects as things means the end of modern politics defined through political representation and deliberative reason: “The parenthesis that we can call the modern parenthesis during which we had, on the one hand, a world of objects, Gegenstand, out there, unconcerned by any sort of parliament, forum, agora, congress, court and, on the other, a whole set of forums, meeting places, town halls where people debated, has come to a close.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For Latour, Hobbes, Rousseau, Rawls, and Habermas are symptomatic of “the strong object-avoidance tendency” of modern political philosophy. This critique picks up where Heidegger left off. Heidegger had emphasized the original political etymology of Ding/Thing used to denote Thingstaetten and other assemblies. Heidegger too called for a less utilitarian approach, a more meditative Gelassenheit or “releasement” toward things.Footnote ⁷⁵ Latour extends this concerning attitude to the political realm. Modern politics, Latour argues, has had a lopsided view of representation concerned with how best “to gather the legitimate people around some issue.” What this tended to ignore was how to represent “objects of concern” and bring them into those representative arenas. The liberal model of politics needs to be complemented by a new Dingpolitik in which objects rejoin people in processes of representation.

Latour is careful to note that in practice these two modes of representation have always been mixed. Still, it is difficult not to read his manifesto for a Dingpolitik as an indictment of modern political culture that reaches well beyond particular philosophers. Between the lines there lingers a sense of nostalgia for a time when things had their political place. To call for a new beginning in which “politics is no longer limited to humans” but “incorporates the many issues to which they are attached” implies that in the modern period it had been just so limited.Footnote ⁷⁶

We have already noted some of the problems with this rather monochromatic view of modernity supposedly so divorced from things. It is difficult to see the procedures of representative politics as the dominant concern of “modern” societies outside a small core of liberal countries in the northwest of Europe. Even within the so-called heartland of the Westminster model, any perusal of parliamentary papers and election materials would quickly bring out just how much politics incorporated the matters of concern to which representatives, voters, and state and business were attached, from empire, land, and railways to infrastructures and public health. Outside formal politics, the rise of anthropology in the late nineteenth century, exhibiting the material civilization of indigenous cultures, and the string of writers, intellectuals, and artists trying to capture the social force of things—from Henry James to George Perec and Pablo Neruda, from Dewey to Heidegger and the Annales school all the way to the late Robert Rauschenberg—point to a much more vibrant engagement with things than suggested by the thesis that modernity introduced a sharp divide between human and nonhuman, “society” and nature.

Before simply rejecting Latour as problematic history, however, we might historicize his concerns into questions for research. How have things impinged on political processes, spaces, and sensibilities in the past? What has been the place accorded to things in different traditions? To what degree has a liberal model of parliamentary representation favored the exclusion or inclusion of certain dimensions of the material world and shaped the representation of their concerns? What can attention to materiality tell us about power, its changing force, direction, and distribution?

In modern British history, the scholars who have especially engaged with these questions have done so coming from a late Foucauldian background. There is a historiographical and biographical logic to this, in particular for Patrick Joyce and James Vernon. They are interested in how discourse and language created key categories like “the people,” informed the constitution, and shaped democratic sensibilities, so they have already explored a domain of politics beyond parties and parliaments.Footnote ⁷⁷ The recent turn to technopolitics can be viewed as a retreat from a fascination with discourse, but it can also be read as a continuation of that intellectual project by other means, examining the creation and diffusion of political subjectivity through the apparatus of technologies.

Significantly, this corpus of work so far retains the earlier focus on the mid- and late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its critique of more heroic Whiggish or social democratic narratives. Its overarching concern is how the newly dominant regime of liberalism relied on ostensibly nonpolitical instruments of rule and, especially, self-rule. Joyce, Chris Otter, and Tom Crook look at how maps, urban networks of gas and water, and the “modern cubicle” of bath and toilet have “normalized” Britons into liberal subjects practicing governmentality on themselves; Vernon's work on hunger and the school meal extends this technopolitical gaze beyond liberalism to the welfare state.Footnote ⁷⁸

There is much to appreciate in this work, not least its engagement with science and technology studies and with theoretical debates about the political. Ironically, from the perspective of materiality, the problem of this theory-conscious literature is perhaps not that it goes too far but that it does not go far enough. Its interest in materiality remains tied to a late Foucauldian interest in the disciplining force of technology. The material world appears a fairly pliant instrument of rule. Sewers, roads, and maps are of interest to Joyce because of the “technosocial solutions to political questions that were to be found [there].” The “‘political’ nature of these solutions,” he continues, “lay precisely in the way they were realized as ‘technical’ and so outside the political.”Footnote ⁷⁹ These are strong assumptions. Why presume separate political and technical worlds; why presume that technologies and networks externalized political processes rather than penetrated each other? And why necessarily present these technological processes as “solutions”?

As in Foucault and Nikolas Rose, perhaps the most influential interpreter of governmentality ideas in English, historical studies of technopolitics emphasize the power of experts, the effectiveness of disciplinary techniques, and the ordering of power.Footnote ⁸⁰ While these studies are intended as critiques of governmentality and its various instruments (the school meal, the toilet, the market), they run the risk of reinscribing a view of the world according to experts rather than recovering the world as lived by people.Footnote ⁸¹ Theoretically, they acknowledge that the material is never durable on its own but requires ongoing maintenance.Footnote ⁸² In practice, however, governmentality's concern with order and experts leads to relative indifference to what users actually did with (old and new) things and technologies or with the political tensions and conflicts that arose from competing understandings of appropriate use between users and experts.

The treatment of urban networks illustrates both the potential insights and the self-imposed limitations of the governmentality approach and suggests how a more user- and practice-oriented approach might enrich our understanding of material politics. As Joyce rightly points out, the Victorian city “was no longer simply a metaphor for good government but its privileged site.”Footnote ⁸³ Sanitary reforms and urban networks exemplify the “rule of freedom” at work. The civilizing ambition of new forms of conduct, hygiene, and private comfort was symbolized by the shift from an intermittent to constant water supply in the late nineteenth century. Joyce begins not with how people used water but with the biological vision of the city advanced by Robert Vaughan's The Age of Great Cities (1843). Subsequent reforms appear as expressions of the material and mental fusion of body and city. With running water, urban networks pumped new disciplinary powers of cleanliness and selfhood into homes. For Joyce, these interventions in personal conduct are characteristic of what he terms “liberal” rule and of the transformation of the political. The “material inculcation of privacy,” he argues, “is a further instance of how the state ‘subsisted in’ material forms into which certain kinds of agency and knowledge are ‘engineered.’”Footnote ⁸⁴ The state came through the pipes. But it was never a visible, direct expansion of the political. Rather, Joyce argues, it was an instance of the “evacuation of the political.” Crook, in his study of the cubicle, invokes similarly a “sequestration of ‘the political,’” which came with a “depoliticisation of other spheres.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, Joyce sees the “agency of running water in the Victorian home” as dependent on “this separation of the political from the supposedly ‘objective,’ from the material, and from the technological.” This separation was the ruling principle of liberal self-rule: “Interventions in the supposedly objective ‘material' world of urban infrastructures therefore permitted the ‘social' to operate freely, and according to its own equilibrium as a natural system.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Elsewhere Joyce invokes a Foucauldian view of the mutuality between power and resistance, but there is little of this in the historical account of pipes and water. Technological networks, he acknowledges, have their flaws, but these are noted only in the abstract as part of how “liberal political reason” kept itself alive: by creating problems “around which governance might be thought and prosecuted.”Footnote ⁸⁷ There is an appealing intellectual symmetry between the core pieces of this model. Water, sanitation, and the material world are “black-boxed” as the domain of science and technology, an idea Joyce borrows from Latour. Privatization and depoliticization work hand in hand. The home becomes a space separate from the political, in which individuals regulate themselves without interference. Throughout there is a distancing between private and public, individuals and the political, the material and the political. But is it true?

Whatever some engineers or social planners might have envisioned, urban networks never managed to black-box water as the domain of technical experts. Rather than distancing the material from the political, pipes and constant supply brought them into collision. Instead of an “evacuation of the political,” cities saw an expanding world of material politics. Similarly, in colonial India, the export of the metropolitan gravitation scheme ran into local antipathy, religious resistance, and environmental obstacles.Footnote ⁸⁸ In British cities in the late Victorian period, legal and political disputes over rates and ownership were joined by debates concerning the material hardware and use of constant supply and new conveniences like baths and water closets, including conflicts over legitimate and wasteful use, meters, and the maintenance of pipes and cisterns. New networks, with their sheer cost, deeply divided many towns into competing factions and, indeed, expert cultures. Attempts to regulate the use of privies and sewers brought a transformation of nuisance law that introduced new powers (the nuisance inspector) and new spaces for complaint and friction.Footnote ⁸⁹

The battles sparked by the repeated failure of constant supply reveal the gap between “liberal” ideals of equilibrium and everyday practices and politics. For Londoners, the 1890s brought repeated scarcities and the temporary suspension of constant supply; in South and East London, the “water famine” in the summer of 1895 lasted ten weeks.Footnote ⁹⁰ Some of the causes were natural. But disruption was also a result of material practices that never smoothly followed the engineers’ script. Water companies fought endless battles against “wasteful” consumers who left their taps open to catch the water while away at work. These were not just problems created by “liberal political reason” but in part resulted from changing technologies themselves. “Water London” was carved up between eight water companies and lacked a unified circulatory network.Footnote ⁹¹ Networks were far less durable than imagined. In addition to leaking pipes, poverty often conspired against “appropriate” use. Doors and fittings were stolen, neglected, or in some cases turned into cheap fuel. How people used water technologies continued to differ markedly too. For most Britons, constant supply did not come with a private bath and private toilet until the middle of the twentieth century. Bathing involved a mix of private and public, individual and familial routines, often among members of the same household. Some washed at the sink every night. Many boys took showers at school, while their sisters were washed at home in a zinc bath on Saturday afternoons.Footnote ⁹² Even for the middle classes it is easy to exaggerate the bath as an instrument of self-rule. In 1870s Sheffield, respectable middle-class men measured their use of water as no more than the equivalent of 65 baths a year for an entire family.Footnote ⁹³

New private technologies had political spillovers. The introduction of baths, toilets, and constant supply did not make people turn away from public life to take care of their private bodies. Use, cost, and care were matters of public concern as well as private self-rule and led to political mobilization and new social movements like consumer defense leagues. Far from black-boxing them, the battles over water illustrate how a network introduced new “matters of concern” into the political arena. In London, those who favored a public takeover of the water companies, and whose demands were eventually satisfied in 1902, firmly believed that the “problem” of “water famines” was of a political nature, requiring a political, not technical, solution. Their hope rested on an explicitly political notion of the private user: as joint stakeholders, people would stop wasting water and would become responsible citizen consumers.

Urban networks and water are, of course, only one example and cannot possibly capture the range of material politics that stretches from local “nuisance” to national battles over copyright and standards of industrial design.Footnote ⁹⁴ Still, they allow for some suggestions. One is that to look at things and technologies in use is as important as the imagined uses scripted by experts. Modern societies, indeed, depend on a good deal of routinized practice and self-rule, but—and perhaps especially so in “liberalism”—this also means that practices have a space to diverge and evolve. The objectification of power is not something peculiar to the state. Material politics also grows from within civil society and can have a politically expansive and (to a degree) emancipatory thrust, as shown by the consumer leagues.

There are some affinities here with the older research on everyday life pioneered by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, but with significant qualifications. Certeau also took Foucault to task for a one-sided concern with clarifying “how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology.” It was equally important “to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline.” The practices of everyday life—from cooking, walking, and reading to watching television—involved “ruses” and transgressive tactics that would potentially reveal “the network of an antidiscipline.”Footnote ⁹⁵ This remains a useful insight. Yet it unnecessarily sets up a divide between private consumers and public governance and commercial systems. By contrast, the above discussion shows that to take users and practices seriously means also to recognize that they leave their mark on the world of things, how things work (or fail to work), and how material is organized and distributed. People here are neither passive, disciplined dupes nor heroic agents of antidiscipline, but “co-producers” of systems of provision.Footnote ⁹⁶

Finally, our understanding of material politics could be enriched by complementing a focus on order and rule with one on disruption and conflict. Drought is just one example of the fragility of human-material relations. Things, as Latour has stressed, should not be reduced to clear, fixed objects but appreciated for their complicated, uncertain nature. Science and technology scholars and organizational sociologists have examined high-risk accidents and system breakdowns, from nuclear disasters to train crashes and foot and mouth disease.Footnote ⁹⁷ The subject of disruption could be taken much further into the interstices of everyday life. The increasingly complex interdependence of systems means that modern societies are as rich in disruption as they are in routines; arguably, some disruptions have become routine, from traffic jams and canceled trains to electronic spam and queues for public services.Footnote ⁹⁸ Goods and technologies break down and require human elasticity and maintenance.

Disruptions bring to life the dynamic relationship between humans and things. They illuminate the fractured microhistories of routinization so often invoked in studies of governmentality but so difficult to capture with its disciplinary armature. Historical studies could helpfully pick up on older ideas of William James and Leo Stein about disruptions as moments that reveal the nature of things. When a quotidian object whose performance is taken for granted fails to work, Stein argued, its thingness becomes apparent. James used the example of looking at a landscape upside down to discuss how a break in habits can reveal otherwise hidden properties in objects; while the habitually known representational meaning of the picture is lost, other previously unnoticed aspects like shadings and texture are revealed.Footnote ⁹⁹ Similarly, it was droughts that brought out Victorians’ diverse norms, habits, and technologies of using water. The study of breakdowns and dislocations might encourage greater respect for the fragile materiality of social life. This is not a plea to focus exclusively on disruptions or misuse at the expense of habits and their naturalization. Rather, disruptions are useful heuristic devices giving us access to the lived human experience with things and to contingent and competing patterns of use. They point to the open, evolving processes of routines and highlight the material and social processes that need to be coordinated to successfully turn practices into habits.

Conclusion

In the past two decades, historical work on material culture has primarily looked at objects to reveal processes of symbolic communication and identity formation. These remain valuable research questions, but they are no longer the only ones. This article has explored three additional dimensions: a conceptual broadening from objects to things, practices, and material politics. In these spheres, things appear as integral parts of relationships and subjectivities rather than as instruments of meaning appropriated by a prior subject. It has, perhaps, been unfortunate that this point has become linked with the more controversial claim that things have “agency.” Whatever we think about this stronger claim, it should not distract from the more easily acceptable proposition that things and humans are inseparably interwoven in mutually constitutive relationships.

For the study of history this poses particular challenges but also offers opportunities. The opportunities lie in a more open exchange with neighboring disciplines about the evolution of social processes, of how humans come to behave and interact as they do, and the ways in which things and technologies become integrated in practices, evolve, and dissolve. For political history in particular, attention to the changing material dimensions of politics creates bridges with histories of technology and the everyday. Material politics, in this view, is no longer a separate subdomain in which shifts in political ideas and party politics play themselves out, such as in battles over municipal reform. Nor is the material and technical a separate zone for political projects of rule. Rather, the material is recognized as a conduit of political processes that helps shape (and not just reflect) political identities, concerns, and fields of action.

Showing things greater respect also has implications for the practice of history. Traditionally, the practice of history has been exceptionally text-based. Cultural history added iconography. A turn to things would call for further extensions, complementing the study of text and symbols with that of materials and technologies. Anthropologists have discussed the costs and benefits from the turn away from a more material engagement with cultures to a more formal, text-based profession in the first half of the twentieth century. For historians, there may be gains from more open, mixed forms of research and documentation. Letting things in would expand the historical archive, the form of research training, and the kind of materials that we tend to think of as sources. The material world has too much history in it to leave it to the social sciences.