Reading Response: Theory and Material Culture

This week’s readings tackled theory and material culture. While the writers use different aspects of material culture to link to theory, they all highlight the difficulty of theorizing things. Most theory focuses on abstract ideas whereas things are tangible. The benefit of these writings is that they can bring material culture studies to a wider academic audience.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” traces changes in art that resulted from technological innovations. As material culture studies, this piece is a great example of how different types of material culture affect one another and how society as a whole uses, reacts to, and develops alongside these changes. I admire Benjamin’s writing, in particular the way that he places his subject clearly within the present in which he wrote. Reproduction and questions of new technologies are as relevant today as they were in 1936. The themes of presenting and disseminating information and the blurry line between authorship and readership have particular importance for current cultural studies of the Internet.

Jean Baudrillard analyses the whole atmosphere of domestic spaces and interprets the symbolic meaning of the stuff within. This reading is more difficult to grasp than the others. Unlike Benjamin, who pinpointed the historic moment in which he wrote, Baudrillard is abstract and does not place himself in historical context. His theory of material culture ultimately highlights a constructivist perspective and looks for the ways people manipulate their surroundings to appear natural. This theory involves the scholar taking a more detached view a material than the other writings, which focus on material that is living.

Daniel Miller’s “Theories of Things” directly confronts the difficulties to theorizing about material culture and how humans relate to stuff. I am attracted to the framing theory. This theory acknowledges the stuff that humans interact with as being integral parts of daily life but also explains how these things become so normalized as to be invisible. This explanation of why stuff is sometimes invisible helps me understand why lots of theorists tend to disregard the material world. Miller’s idea that objects make people is also thought provoking and could relate to the Tempest Powder Horn because the horn’s owners (after the first) all grew up with the thing before it became theirs. In a sense, this approach gives agency to objects and takes it away from people.

Glenn Adamson’s “The Case of the Missing Footstool” focuses on how historians can use the gaps in the material record as ways to deepen historical interpretations. Adamson studied the footstool, common from the eighteenth century, but absent before. Adamson offers a few hypotheses, but the most effective is his nuanced interpretation of how the adoption of the footstool could represent a normalizing of exotic cultures.

I am not sure which approach best aides my interpretation of the Tempest Powder Horn. Despite its functional form, the horn is primarily decorative. I like Adamson’s method for looking at a classification of objects, but do not think it applies to the horn. Miller and Benjamin offer me the most. In terms of changing technologies, the horn’s meaning likely changed when guns were manufactured without the need for separate powder horns. This point in time may have helped determine why the horn was altered and revered in the later generations of the family.

Readings: 

Adamson, Glenn. “The Case of the Missing Footstool: Reading the Absent Object” in Karen Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Functional System, or Object Discourse,” in The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2005: 11-69.

Miller, Daniel. “Theories of Things,” in Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010: 54-78.