Download - Theories of Material Agency and Practice: A Guide to Collecting Urban Material Culture

theories of material agency and

practice: A Guide to CollectingUrban Material Culture

Alison Clarkeuniversity of applied arts vienna

abstract

In understanding the objects of urban life, social scien-

tists formerly emphasized formal phases of acquisition;

mechanisms such as advertising, retailing, and marketing

placed at the forefront of their theorization. The lived tra-

jectories of material culture have taken on a new pre-

science for museology as contemporary anthropological

discourse and everyday urban practice increasingly

acknowledge the embeddedness of “things.” Highlighting

examples of the recent intersection of social science dis-

course, museology, art practice, and popular culture, this

article explores concepts of material agency as a source

for thinking through future collecting of urban material

culture. [material culture, material agency, contemporary

museology]

Do you have something you would never give

up? Like a favorite childhood toy, a military

medal, or a memento? Something that lives on

your wall, your mantle, or [is] buried in a corner

of your dresser? Something that evokes a time

or person in your life, a place youmiss, or some-

thing you hope for?1

The Portland Art Museum’s “Object Stories” ini-

tiative, from which this quote was taken, invites the

general public to reflect on the significance of the

everyday objects that surround them and to explore

the relations of people and things through the process

of biographical revelation. This article explores the

ways in which the popular contemporary museologi-

cal trope of the “object story” acknowledges how col-

lecting and curatorship have become an integral

practice of everyday urban life—for notions of mate-

rial agency are not confined to the theories of social

science but are made explicit in the display schemes

of local and national museums, as well as contempo-

rary art practice and fiction.

This emphasis on the potency of objects as bear-

ers of human history, intertwining the intimate and

formal, has emerged as a popular way of opening up

the role of museology to the general public. In the

most general sense, this is how one might define

material agency, and it has become a common trope

of the 21st century within museums seeking to high-

light the humanity of things. For example, an enor-

mously successful British Museum project in

collaboration with the BBC Radio (the UK public

broadcaster) featured the museum’s director, Neil

McGregor, telling the “history of the world in 100

objects” (MacGregor 2012). Exposing the diversity

of the British Museum’s extensive holdings, the

radio show featured one object a day during a 15-

minute slot. The 100 objects spanned prehistory to

urban 21st-century culture.2 Commencing with a

1.6-million-year-old stone axe and culminating in

the 100th object that “speaks” for the 21st century,

the radio series provoked great public debate regard-

ing the choice of a single museum item iconic of the

start of a new millenium. Using an interactive format

that included blogs, video excerpts, and social media,

listeners were encouraged to discuss their own most

“significant object.” Submissions ranged from a Henry

Moore sculpture to a grandmother’s nightdress.

The public was also invited to submit their choices

of significant 21st-century objects online so that the

processes of museological selection and the disparities

between professional and popular choices would be

made explicit. While the Apple iPhone constituted

the majority audience vote as the exemplary 21st-cen-

tury object, the director himself chose a solar-pow-

ered lamp and its power charger. A permanent gallery

constructed to display the 100 objects and the publi-

cation of a best-selling book (MacGregor 2012) for-

malized the project’s intent.

In museological terms, the perception of objects

has changed quite a bit over time since the days

objects were displayed on pedestals as formal didactic

specimens or rare collectibles. The hierarchies that

separated art and utility have given way, at least in

some contemporary museum contexts, to more

humanistic understandings of the value of things in

which the material culture of urban life, from a 1979

Honda Civic to a plastic hula hoop, is as valid for

interpretation as a marble bust of Julius Caesar or the

Rosetta Stone.

Generally, however, such approaches adhere to

the notion of objects as silent “bearers of meaning”

museum anthropology

Museum Anthropology, Vol. 37, Iss. 1, pp. 17–26© 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/muan.12045

in which human action and history are embedded,

and their agency is only invoked through the act of

interpretation. Beyond this established museological

trope, what impact might theories of agency in

material culture have on collecting policies of the

future? How might theories that have become com-

monplace in material culture studies address the

shift from the analog to the digital, the material to

the dematerialized? This article considers concepts

of object agency that have emerged in transdisciplin-

ary contexts encompassing areas such as art practice.

It highlights how curatorship and collecting have

become commonplace practices outside the

museum, as urban lives (underpinned by phenom-

ena such as eBay online auctions) rely on the intri-

cate deciphering, circulating, and display of an

abundance of goods. A key aspect emerging from

urban culture is that of the brand, which manifests

itself as another aspect of material agency generating

a notion of objects as “liquid assets” whose value

can be gleaned rather than possessed. The collecting

of urban material culture must take into account

these new modes of fleeting possession and fluctuat-

ing value and the concomitant dispersal mechanisms

of “stuff.” As museums move toward a digital future,

in terms of their modes of dissemination and con-

tents and acquisitions, taking on board new anthro-

pologies of urban culture and concepts of material

agency is imperative.

Contemporary museum policies, collecting strate-

gies, and anthropological approaches must move

beyond a base critique of objects of consumer culture

as mere expressions of the inauthentic—in both

Western and broader urban cultures. The expanding

culture of brand agency fills the everyday practice of

all urban lives. But the practice of dispersing, collect-

ing, and ridding oneself of stuff reveals how it is pro-

cesses and interactions—the webs of agency that

cross material and immaterial domains—on which

contemporary museums need to focus rather than

simply the static icons that present and perpetuate

stable and static interpretations of subject–objectrelations. Newly defined categories of urban material

culture need to emanate from understandings of

these processes; contemporary museology must look

beyond the object form to the interactions and agen-

cies that mutually incorporate people and things as

their source.

The assertion of the agency of things—or in aca-

demic terms what has been described as a “recent

agentive turn in social theory” (Hoskins 2006:74)—has culminated in what is arguably the single most

defining influence on the understanding of material

culture in the last two decades. I do not seek to pro-

vide an exhaustive literature review of agency in the

field of material culture, but rather I consider its

major tenets and their relationship to the ways in

which we understand how specific objects in the

urban sphere might come to have more power than

others.

A major tenet of anthropology, which runs coun-

ter to Western rationalism, is that lines between per-

sons and things can vary by culture. “In certain

contexts, persons can seem to take on the attributes

of things and things can seem to act almost as per-

sons” (Hoskins 2006:74). Anthropological studies of

exchange, such as those of Boas, Mauss, and Strath-

ern, have, in particular, drawn attention to the ways

in which objects of ritual function can be gendered

and acquire histories and biographies. Objects, as

Annette Weiner’s (1992) classic study of Trobriand

Islanders’ exchange contends, can become inalien-

able, like persons (nonexchangeable and socially

tied), and used to perpetuate and generate kin. Simi-

larly, alienable commodities, such as supermarket

goods, can be rendered inalienable in the work of car-

ing (Miller 1998). Persons, on the other hand, can be

rendered alienable as Igor Kopytoff (1986) argued

over three decades ago in his seminal essay “The Cul-

tural Biography of Things,” which was published in

Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) edited volume The Social

Life of Things.

The notion that things, like people, might have

biographies transcended anthropological discourse,

going on to influence other disciplines including his-

torical and material culture studies. In 1999, archae-

ologists Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall

identified a major shift in social science perspectives

by asserting that:

the new focus [on the biography of things]

directs attention to the way human and object

histories inform each other […] the central idea

is that, as people and objects gather time, move-

ment and change, they are constantly trans-

formed, and these transformations of person

material agency and practice

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and object are tied up with each other. [Gosden

andMarshall 1999:169]

Just as persons invest aspects of themselves in

things, it is now an established framework across dis-

ciplines of material culture that things themselves

might be said to have biographies. The idea of things

as inanimate and passive carriers of meaning or

“props” of master narratives has been abandoned in

favor of theories of agency deriving from a range of

theoretical perspectives. The hybridity of object–sub-ject afforded by social anthropologists to “other” cul-

tures is now more broadly applied to modern

societies. Classic examples from the fields of science

and technology studies, and the anthropology of art,

respectively, are Bruno Latour’s (1996) narrative of a

“failed” object of engineering (a Parisian monorail

dubbed “Aramis”) and Alfred Gell’s (1996) study of

an indigenous hunting trap. In both cases, the objects

of technology are afforded an agency beyond the

intentions of any given “maker.” Defying the rational

logic of modernity, Latour (1996) and Gell (1996),

from differing disciplinary perspectives, make their

respective objects “live” in the sense that both act on

the networks of people and things in which they are

embedded.

From a European perspective, the theories of both

Latour (1996) and Gell (1996) marked a key concep-

tual shift in understanding the relations among the

material, technological, and social. Latour (1996)

famously challenges the duality of society and its

objects, and the ways in which this duality plays out

in relation to the practice of science and its distinc-

tion from society. To quote Daniel Miller,

[Latour] has been able to demonstrate that [the

practice of science] actually bear[s] little rela-

tion to its own dominant representation—that

the reality of the world consists almost entirely

of a hybridity within which it is impossible to

disaggregate that which is natural and lawlike

and unchangeable and that which is human,

interpretative, and at times capricious.

[2005:11]

Miller goes on to point out that the corollary of

this hybridity theorem lies in the extent to which a

notion of our humanity is “enhanced by rendering us

cleansed of any such determinist or mechanistic qual-

ity” (Miller 2005:11). Latour highlights the agency of

the nonhuman world and critiques social science’s

reduction of the nonhuman to the status of an “epi-

phenomenon of the social” (Miller 2005:12). Like Ko-

pytoff and Hoskins in their established theories of

biographies and things, Latour’s concept of agency—that things, like people, have affect—as he illustrates

in a sentient monorail design in Paris and a bacterium

in a laboratory, lends us the clear notion that “mate-

rial forms have consequences for people that are

autonomous from human agency” (Miller 2005:11).

Things are not just a merging of social and mate-

rial components, whereby technologies and objects

are entangled in society or “scripted” as in social con-

structivism, nor are they merely a means of media-

tion; rather, they are actors with independent agency.

This might be a university lecture room door that

generates hierarchical access for certain inhabitants of

a building over others as in Yaneva’s (2009) study of

university architecture whereby the workings of spe-

cific door handles prioritize entrance to certain social

actors over others, or the vegetation occupying homes

much as their human householders might in Hitch-

ings’s (2004) study of houseplants and their need for

nurturance that engender types of social relation. As

Miller succinctly summarizes,

A computer that crashes, and thereby prevents a

form from being submitted on time, an illness

that kills us, a plant that “refuses to grow”—these are all examples of everyday understand-

ings of the agency embedded in and engendered

by things. [2005:11].

While the actor network theory (ANT) approach

popularized by Latour (1991) and his contemporaries

has had an enormous influence on thinking about

material culture in the last two decades, as a theory

originating in science and technology studies that

considers objects within a social network, it has also

been critiqued by anthropologists such as Miller as

being little more than “a partial throwback to struc-

turalism” whereby “what matters may not be the enti-

ties themselves, human or otherwise, but rather the

network of agents and the relationships around

them” (Miller 2005:11).

While Latour’s (1991) theory of material agency

emerged from science, technology, and society stud-

ies, Gell’s (1998) highly influential Art and Agency


19

tackled the issues of agency from the perspective of

art and, more specifically, the anthropology of art.

Refuting a purely aesthetic art theory, Gell (1998)

considered art and artifacts as having “distributed

agency,” thereby suggesting a theory of “inferred

intentionality.” The creative works of a person or

people become their “distributed mind,” which turns

their agency into their effects, as influences upon the

minds of others. In other words, Gell’s (1998) theory

of the agency of artifacts revolves around the notion

that “art is about doing things, it is a system of social

action,” and things have agency because “they pro-

duce effects, they cause us to feel happy, angry, fearful

or lustful” (Hoskins 2006:76).

Gell’s (1998) is a theory of “natural anthropomor-

phism,” which Miller observes bears a striking resem-

blance to the logic expressed in the daily news media

in which there is always a search for blame, the search

for intentional action; “the only difference is that in

contemporary journalism we insist the blamemust be

attached to persons, while other societies would be

prepared to blame evil spirits of some kind” (Miller

2005:13).

Contending that anthropologists, unlike philoso-

phers (by inference Latour), are “mediators” and that

common sense understandings of object and subjects

may maintain distinctions of people and things,

Miller (2005:14) argues that it is through the empa-

thetic ethnographic encounter that “people for whom

common sense consists of a clear distinction between

objects and subjects” are acknowledged. Further-

more, Miller (2005) questions Latour’s dependency

on the objects of science, asserting that “by placing

the emphasis on objects of science, rather than on

artifacts, we do lose something of that quality of the

artifact redolent with prior historical creativity”

(Miller 2005:12).

So can there be then a specificity of agency in rela-

tion to urban material culture that embraces that

quality of the artifact? Within sociology the agency of

urban and mass-produced material culture has rather

belatedly emerged as a scientific subfield within the

discipline.

Tim Dant (2005), a British sociologist, has simi-

larly noted that even within a sociology that seeks to

foreground materiality, there has been a reluctant

acknowledgment of theories of agency and a residual

resistance to the notion of agency distinct from soci-

ety. Dant’s (2005) study of materiality and society,

largely based on his own empirical study of cars, per-

haps best typifies sociology’s recent engagement with

the agency of things. He proposes that the optimal

means of understanding material culture lies in con-

sideration of the everyday, practical interactions

between people and things, subjects and objects. He

challenges the conventional focus on the creation of

“meaning” that has emerged within the historiogra-

phy of sociological and anthropological consumption

studies that has all too frequently reduced objects to

markers of social status, viewing culture as instru-

mentalist (i.e., a means to an end) or nothing more

than an emulative battle of semiotic signs used to

define social difference whereby objects are nothing

more than signifiers of social standing. He thus aligns

himself with a phenomenological approach that says

culture as practice is mediated in an embodied,

unconscious manner.

Dant acknowledges the necessity to move beyond

the object being seen as merely “a vehicle of the inten-

tions and designs of the culture that can shape the

actions of the individual” (2005:60). However, he is

unable to accept a notion of autonomous agency and

concludes that material things “acquire agency from

the human actions which form them” (Dant

2005:60). For Dant, the agency of objects is essentially

human agency transferred to material objects. To

quote Dant directly, “objects as yet have never been

able to demonstrate sufficient autonomous intention

or reflective awareness to be equivalent to human

agency” (2005:60). In keeping with much sociological

discourse, he reduces the notion of agency back to the

concept of objects being “incorporated into the life of

a person” (Dant 2005:60).

Harvey Molotch (2011), urban sociologist and

author ofWhere Stuff Comes From (2003), decries the

ways in which sociologists have traditionally treated

material culture objects as markers of social standing

and rarely as objects of agency within themselves.

Building on the thesis of Latour (1991), he traces the

mechanisms of production, “the actants” at work in

the network of relations around everyday product

design from toasters to cars. His study of the New

York City subway, which was carried out with student

Noah McCain and published in an anthology titled

Design Anthropology (Clarke 2011), considers the

transport mechanism as an integrated system of hard-


20

ware, individual, and “society” (Molotch 2011). His

recent edited volume, with Laura Noren, exploring

the materiality of urban life, tellingly titled, Toilet:

Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (2010),

addresses the emergence of an urban technology and

culture that perfectly illustrates the agentive aspects

of design in “public” space.

The notion of material agency, then, has been

broadly acknowledged across social science disci-

plines over the last two decades and has culminated

in a series of significant publications as previously

surveyed. In museological terms, however, it is con-

temporary art practice that has championed the con-

cept of material agency as a means of exploring the

interrelatedness of subjects–objects in the urban set-

tings of late modernity over the last decade.

Liquid Assets: The Practice of Urban

Material Culture

Art practice and fiction, which so often explore simi-

lar territory to that of academic anthropology, have

emerged as principal cultural forces in unpacking the

nuances of contemporary people–thing relations. Thefollowing section offers specific case studies initiated

by artists and writers that might also be of particular

significance to museological studies in following the

otherwise invisible trajectories of the urban material

culture that defines our social worlds. These examples

of artistic production, from fake auction catalogues

to literary fiction, show how meaning is made of sub-

jects and objects in the urban context. Outside the

constraints of conventional museological institu-

tions, their experimental approach offers new and

salient examples of the issues pertaining to the con-

temporary collecting of urban material culture.

In 2001, one of Britain’s leading conceptual artists,

Michael Landy, rented an abandoned department

store in London’s premier shopping stretch on

Oxford Street. Titled Breakdown, Landy installed an

industrial crushing and shredding machine to destroy

his lifetime’s collection of possessions from his

deceased father’s sheepskin coat to a kitchen vegeta-

ble peeler. Breakdown was a self-conscious explora-

tion of how objects come to make up the urban

subject. Set in the busiest shopping street in London,

visitors to the ad hoc gallery space came in loaded

with shopping bags, fresh from purchasing the very

objects Landy and his operatives were in the process

of destroying. Landy publically stripped himself of all

of the things that amounted to his personhood in

urban life, from his clothing to his (then analog)

music collection, in a central London location that

was the epitome of urban consumer living, a place

teeming with shoppers who dropped in casually to

view the decimation of his intimate objects. Security

operatives prevented individuals, set on “saving”

items from the crusher, from launching themselves

onto the object conveyer belt. These objects were not

just an extension of the artist himself, the accoutre-

ments of urban personhood, but they were also agents

within themselves. An inventory featuring over eight

thousand objects that an urban dweller occupying a

small apartment might typically have in their posses-

sion was an artistic output of the installation (Landy

2008).

Landy’s installation captured a 21st-century turn

within popular culture, as well as academic discourse,

toward the problematization of things—and the

agency of “stuff”—in contemporary life. During this

same period, numerous media, from a prime time

BBC television show titled Life Laundry showing

householders decluttering their homes and emotional

lives through the ceremonial ridding and re-evalua-

tion of objects to the launch of U.S. magazines such

as Real Simple: Life Made Easy, indicated a sense that

stuff and its ensuing relations needed to be controlled

and restrained. And it is through the disposal and dis-

persal of stuff, which is considered in this section of

the article, as much as the collecting and keeping of

stuff, that the intertwining of subjects and objects is

made so visible within the urban context.

A similar art intervention by the U.S. artist Leanne

Shapton (2009), titled Important Artifacts and Per-

sonal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan

and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion

and Jewelry, revolved around an auction catalogue of

the soon-to-be divested possessions undergoing “liq-

uidation” at the demise of a four-year relationship

between two characters—poignantly arranged for sale

on Valentine’s Day 2009 in New York. The relation-

ship of a couple, Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris

(fictional characters identified as the owners of the

goods in the prestigious, glossy auction prospectus),

is charted through the minutiae of their material cul-

ture as a means of sketching out the more general

schema of the codependency of people, things, and


21

urban life. Both the auction house, “Strachan and

Quinn (London, New York, Toronto),” and the cata-

logue’s contents, ranging from a Tiffany key ring to a

pair of kitsch poodle figurines, are fictional, but the

brutal reduction of 332 once-intimate objects to base

market value is instantly recognizable in its evocation

of the agency of “stuff” in the making and unmaking

of intimate lives and urban personas.

Like Landy’s Breakdown, Shapton’s (2009) crea-

tion delineates the trajectories of lives woven from

a patchwork of mundane and singular objects, and

documents their aesthetic genres and contexts of

acquisition. Extending Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984)

classic theory of taste and class, the lives of the

depicted couple are painstakingly carved out from

a repertoire of urban Bohemian liberal tastes.

French sociologist Bourdieu’s (1984) highly influ-

ential study, published under the English title Dis-

tinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,

argued that everyday cultural practices and tastes,

far from being expressions of individuality, are red-

olent of social class positions, culturally reproduced

and tied to a hierarchy of power relations. While

the Bohemian urbanite might be economically

poor, through the acquisition of specific repertoires

of taste, they may be said to be rich in “cultural

capital” (Bourdieu 1984). The apparently trivial

choices in clothing, ornamentation, d�ecor, or read-

ing matter actually convey one’s distinct social class

position; the negotiation of taste is a negotiation of

power. Shapton’s work makes fun of this concept,

displaying a range of tastes in action from the jux-

taposition of high art and popular culture to the

informal connoisseurship implied in the careful

selection of tweed suits acquired from an obscure

city thrift shop. The observed detail of clusters and

constellations of items offers a nuanced depiction

of social class as practice that exceeds that of even

the most articulate sociologist:

LOT 1128. Three items with a postcard: A box

of Yorkshire loose tea. An orange cashmere Paul

Smith scarf, some wear. A sterling silver dog-

collar choker, good condition, with original

box. Included is a postcard of the Jacques Henri

Lartique photograph “1928 Lac d’Annecy,”

reading in part: “Buttertart, You sounded so ill

on the phone, am sending tea for your throat

and a bright orange scarf for your neck. Also

something fromAgent Provocateur….x Dimen-

sions vary. $40-60. [Shapton 2009:49]

Often formerly nurtured artifacts are reduced to

the sum of instrumental, objective description exem-

plifying a process that is excruciating and sardonic in

turn. This mechanism captures the all-too-familiar

precariousness of stuff in our modern lives and the

ways in which it most often simultaneously occupies

the realms of sacred relic and valueless detritus

(Miller 2008).

Shapton’s (2009) auction catalogue—part novel,

part art intervention, part ethnography of urban

material life—is contemporaneous with Orhan Pam-

uk’s (2008) The Museum of Innocence. A novel set in

1970s Istanbul, The Museum of Innocence incorpo-

rates the collected urban artifacts of memory (from

discarded olive stones; lost earrings; and 4,213 ciga-

rette butts to a Turkish brand of cola) in the telling of

an obsessive love story embedded in the lived experi-

ences of the Turkish transition from tradition to

modernity. In some respects, the novel amounts to an

explanation of Pamuk’s collecting rationale for his

actual urban museum, the Museum of Innocence,

recently opened in Istanbul, with the provenance of

objects actively piecing together the novel’s places

and relationships.

The main protagonist in Pamuk’s (2008) novel

puts together a collection of stolen and borrowed

items as melancholic and nostalgic reminders of love

lost in a time of Istanbul’s turbulent transition to

mass urbanization. At this time, local breads and

drinks are replaced by global brands, and designer

brands usurp traditional goods. The author has estab-

lished the real museum in the C�ukurcuma area of

Istanbul, featuring 1,000 objects charting the daily

material life of the city since the 1950s, with an

accompanying catalogue (Pamuk 2012).

Has the agency of “real” objects taken on a newly

defined contemporary fascination at the historical

moment in which the hiatus between the traditional

analog and modern digital world throws the existence

of tangible “stuff” into sharp relief? As urban lives

become increasingly dematerialized through the

ubiquity of new technologies and the shrinkage of liv-

ing space, these examples of artistic genre reveal

(through the process of divestment and the process of


22

reclamation) how our opportunities for collective

remembering are ever more reliant on the flotsam of

everyday life. Neither the phenomenon of urbaniza-

tion nor the types of interpersonal relations urbaniza-

tion invokes can be understood outside the agency of

objects.

Notably, while mimicking the lush auction house

catalogues of iconic figures, such as Jackie Onassis

and Diana Princess of Wales, whose own public auc-

tions of accessories, gifts, and clothing marked out

the trajectories of their (purportedly tragic) lives,

Shapton’s (2009) delineation of urban stuff is argu-

ably more evocative of the object cultures revealed in

contemporary online auctions such as eBay. Her

staged depiction of a succession of items ripped from

their domestic setting, conveyed through subjective

narrative, echoes the thriving eBay culture that has

made the otherwise hidden intermingling of people

and things extraordinarily visible at the click of a

mouse or an app. Getting rid of “embedded” stuff

(once cherished, nurtured, used) has taken on a new

transparency in the 21st century.

Online auction has effectively transformed the

afterlife of goods, gifts, and brands in a way that

makes value, or the negotiations around value, readily

transparent. In his extensive study of online trading

practices, Ken Hillis has argued that spaces such as

eBay offer a collective forum for retrieving and reviv-

ing memory, “a collective archive of everyday mate-

rial culture in which ‘the past’ becomes a material

object, and [eBay] an endless documentary record

available for present-day personal appropriation”

(2006:141). eBay contains the largest and most exten-

sive collection of urban life, multiauthored and fluid,

that has ever existed. It is a consensual museum col-

lection that at first appears driven by market transac-

tion, but on closer inspection must be understood as

a cultural phenomenon driven by similar (but often

unspoken) museum parameters such as nostalgia and

sentiment, as expressed in Pamuk’s (2012) The Inno-

cence of Objects.

The eBay company promotes “collectibles” as a

mainstay of eBay trading, thus appealing to what Hil-

lis describes as “the fetishized Western desire to

acquire under the rubric of collecting what previously

was missing or lost” (2006:142). From a museological

perspective, eBay is a historically unprecedented

open-source democracy of urban material culture

freed from the hegemony of curatorial authorship.

The extraordinary transparency of online auctions,

whereby personal narratives expose the values

accrued around everyday objects and brands, offers

an invaluable anthropological resource in rethinking

policy for future urban collecting and collections.

The deliberate articulation of the company’s rela-

tion to memory has been observed as extending the

media-friendly, human-interest aspects of eBay that in

turn serve to increase the overall site activity (Hillis

2006). Examples of this phenomenon include the infa-

mous grilled cheese sandwich purportedly etched with

the face of the Virgin Mary, which sold to an Internet

casino for $28,000, and the case of the embittered par-

ents who sold off their children’s PlayStations on

Christmas eve for an enormous profit (as bidders

sought to collectively punish the children for their

undisclosed naughtiness). Both stories have achieved

the status of urban myths largely through their appeal

to the narrative encircling the traded items and the

stark way in which everything and anything (ridicu-

lous or sacred objects, children’s Christmas gifts) can

be instantaneously released into a brutal marketplace.

But more than moral tales of our times, urban myths

emanating from such collective online activities are

instantly recognizable as expressions of the complex

interrelatedness of modern everyday lives (the search

for spirituality, the often thankless task of parenting)

with the agency of banal things.

Exchange and use values negotiated on eBay

invoke elaborate, at times sensational, narrative histo-

ries contextualizing an object’s past—and it is this

process that actively transforms immaterial commod-

ities into highly coveted items. This may take the

form of a simple story describing the acquisition of a

particular item, a vintage labeled jacket from a Paris

boutique, or the reason why this season’s brand new

“must-have” fully packaged MAC lipstick is available

for sale at three times its original cost. The narrative

treads a thin line between enhancing the “saleability”

of the object and rendering it inalienable. Further-

more, these narrative devices adhere to local styles

and repertoires that are sensitive to very specific

understandings of commodity cultures.

Selling the wedding dress of an unfaithful former

wife after she hastily moved out may have enormous

comic weight in the United States (modeled by the

abandoned husband, the item sold for over $6,000),


23

but this might not translate well, for example, to an

Austrian eBay where the market is in its early stages

and its “economy of fun” is yet to be established. It is

the narrative effect of these spatialized performances,

Hillis argues, that “exceeds the transactional logic

that comprises the commonsense understanding of

eBay as a giant garage sale, swap meet or old-fash-

ioned auction house writ virtual” (2006:142).

This genre of semi-ethnographic fictional litera-

ture, art practice, and online auction mechanisms re-

affirms the necessity of taking into account the lives,

agencies, and economies of things, that is, their con-

stellations, traces, and dispersals of value in motion

rather than as static records of captured meaning.

Brand Agency: The Dispersal of Urban

Material Culture

Prior to the present-day widespread access to open

digitalized sites of consumption (such as online auc-

tions), used and “out-of-season” goods (from cloth-

ing to furniture), circulated in markets managed

almost exclusively via expert mediators or direct face-

to-face encounters within geographically bound

parameters (Edwards 2005; Lemire 2004). The move

away from thinking of things as static entities to per-

ceiving them as agents in a broader, dispersed net-

work parallels interdisciplinary scholarship that has

arisen in response to a perceived overemphasis within

the field of consumption studies on the empirical and

theoretical significance of first-phase consumption

and the understanding of material culture from the

perspective of advertising discourse, retail mediation,

and marketing. The shift from first-phase consump-

tion to waste, decay, disposal, dispersal, ridding, and

secondhand markets has taken on a new significance

within both social sciences and historical approaches

to consumption and material cultures as attention

expands to the complex networks and practices urban

material culture occupies (Clarke 2000; Crewe and

Gregson 1998; DeSilvey 2006; Gregson 2007; Gregson

and Crewe 2003; Hetherington 2004; Lucas 2002;

Reno 2009). Despite the timely expansion of research

beyond purchase, display, and conventional models

of ownership and consumption, modern brands (as

marked forms of material culture belonging to an

exceptional hierarchy of value within first-phase con-

sumption) have received minimal scrutiny with

regard to the particularity of their dispersal. Although

there is an enormous literature charting the historiog-

raphy of the brand going back several decades, much

less has been written about the brand in dispersal and

disposal or indeed its agency.

Classic historical resources, such as Henry May-

hew’s (2010) descriptions of second-hand trading in

early 19th-century urban London, revealed the dis-

tinct specialism traders had as “expert mediators”

tied to selling specific genres of goods. The growth of

global trading sites such as eBay has wrenched sec-

ondhand goods from the networks of expert traders

into the risk-filled and unbounded realm of public,

informal connoisseurship on a mass scale. The con-

temporary dispersal of used goods is no longer tied to

any “logic” of expertise or mechanisms of remerchan-

dising or place. Contrary to Baudrillard’s (1996)

notion of the brand as an ephemeral sign offering

fleeting, “short-term gratification” (see also Wen-

grow and Bevan 2010) in the discordant, placeless,

online market of secondhand wares, the brand takes

on a new “virtualized” agency of endurance and

solidity; it is easily identifiable and trackable.

The dispersal of brands and the practice of brand-

ing have long been understood as a defining feature

of urbanization and modernity. Archaeologist David

Wengrow (2008) has recently gone so far as to suggest

that branded goods, and their agency, actually origi-

nated with the urbanization of Mesopotamia around

3000 B.C. As personalized relations between traders

and buyers diminished when cities became estab-

lished, urbanites increasingly encountered products

of uncertain origins distributed by strangers. With

the rise of mass-produced commodities, branding in

the form, for example, of symbols on bottle seals and

caps of commercial drinks offered a secure means of

distinguishing goods. Wengrow (2008) considers

bottle stoppers impressed with symbols found in the

ancient city of Uruk (urban population of 20,000) as

evidence of the first images in human history to be

mechanically mass produced in “urban temple-facto-

ries” as brands—thus transforming urban relations

and the fabric of urbanity itself.

The goods that archaeologists can research as evi-

dence of urban living, the diasporic patterns of their

distribution, are traceable in material form. In con-

temporary culture, can we continue to consider mate-

rial goods as static markers of style and place or as

possessions in any commonplace understanding of


24

the term? Economists and marketing experts recog-

nize a shift to models of “lease ownership” in which

brands and goods are literally “hired out” in anticipa-

tion of their symbolic devaluation as they fade out of

fashion. The emergence of alternative, temporary

forms of possession, driven by the increasingly

nuanced and visible urban culture of stuff that can be

“out of date” before it reaches the traditional shop

floor due to the accelerated rate at which information

is disseminated via online informal sources, is also an

acknowledgment of the often incalculable, uncontrol-

lable agency of things.

Conclusion: The Death of Stuff

The move toward the digital and away from the mate-

rial also brings into relief the definition of urban

material culture as a specific subset of broader mate-

rial culture. Things, through their material and

immaterial manifestations, do not easily follow a pre-

scribed pattern of distribution or use. Brand agency,

while universally acknowledged as a feature of urban

living and modernity, is neglected in the everyday

museum context and collecting policies. Yet, our

homes are filled with brands such as IKEA. As anthro-

pologist Pauline Garvey suggests, this brand “is not

only a noun but a verb: ‘Ikeaization’” (2011:143). At

once a style of furnishing, a form of distribution and

retail, a corporation, and a temporality, IKEA and its

multiple agencies reveal the extent to which brands

and their agencies are enmeshed with the values of

everyday urban life.

Much is written in popular media and academia

alike of the “death of stuff,” which leaves museums

and collecting in an apparently precarious position—at least in regard to their traditional roles as guardians

of things, their meanings, and categorizations. The

transfer of emphasis from material goods to digital

interactions is a defining feature of contemporary

urban culture. People are just as likely to “inhabit”

dematerialized spaces and objects; their laptops and

smart phones are replete with memories, social rela-

tions, microcosmologies, rituals, and performativities

as the bricks and mortar of homes or the tangibility of

objects (Clarke 2011). The collecting of urban life in

the 21st century demands fresh approaches drawn

from the cross-disciplinary fields that share a contem-

porary concern with material agency and its implica-

tions for understandings of our future selves.

notes

1. Opening page, “Objects Have Stories. Tell Us Yours.”

http://objectstories.org, accessed November 7, 2013.

2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld, accessed Novem-

ber 7, 2013.

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