theories of material agency and practice: a guide to collecting urban material culture
TRANSCRIPT
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
18
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
material agency and practice
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-
material agency and practice
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
material agency and practice
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
material agency and practice
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),
material agency and practice
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
material agency and practice
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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