What we've been reading March 2023 edition

Danielle Kinsey Blog Post

Living in a Material World

MARCH 2023

 

A monthly roundup of what we’re reading this month – or listening to – in the world of material culture, alongside updates from our editorial board.

 

Editorial Board: Thank you for reading, H-Material Culture subscribers! We continue to await a new platform that is being implemented across the H-Net servers and will let you know as soon as we have more information on that front. A better, more visually-engaging blog post function has been promised, at the very least!

If you have any question, comments, or, most importantly, suggestions for things you want to see on the list, please let us know. Interested in joining our editing team or writing a book review for us or creating some content for the list? We’d love to hear about it! Please direct all queries and comments to editorial-material-culture@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

 

What we’ve been reading

Jennifer M. Black:

Early this year, while finishing up revisions on an article about using material culture to write business history, I had the opportunity to review Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) and its relationship to material culture studies. At its most basic level, ANT recognizes the contingency of human actions as interrelated and dependent upon various interactions with a particular network or networks. When applied to history, ANT would suggest that a particular historical event, or outcome, would not have developed without the myriad interactions of various players and actors related to the processes that resulted in said outcome. In other words, history is contingent upon the people involved. For my work on advertising, ANT emphasizes the importance of understanding the range of interactions that results in the production of advertisements—the needs and desires of manufacturers, merchants, and others who advertise; the admen and other professionals who seek to meet those needs and desires; the supplementary professions who study public consumption to make advertisements more efficient and successful; and the public themselves, who communicate their own needs and desires through various feedback loops. While first postulated with regard to scientific thinking in the 1980s, ANT has become rather prevalent in certain historical circles over the last two decades. It’s impact has been wide-reaching, pushing scholars in other disciplines to consider how the theory might be applied to their own work (such as Kenneth Lipartito’s discussion of ANT for business history, and the Albena Yaneva’s discussion for the history of design).

 

ANT seems particularly relevant to material culture studies, though I think that in many ways, material culture scholars have long understood the kinds of contingent interactions Latour and others theorized. Within ANT, Latour asserted that even objects may have agency, influencing other actors within the network. This is a truism that material culture scholars have long asserted, and which continues to shape the field. In the early 1980s Ruth Schwartz Cowan asserted the power of household technologies to shape women’s work. More recently, scholarship on the US and Atlantic World has continued to explain the ways in which history has been contingent upon interactions and the influence of objects (as in Jennifer Anderson’s Mahogany and Zara Anishanslin’s Portrait of a Woman in Silk).

 

Having just stepped into the role of book reviews editor at H-Material Culture, I’m working on setting up reviews for a host of new works that continue to privilege the agency of objects, as Latour asserted (and material culture scholars have long argued). This is an exciting time for material culture scholarship. If any of our readers might be interested in serving as a reviewer for the network, please reach out to the editorial team or fill out our reviewer interest form on the H-Material Culture page.

 

Jennifer M. Black

Associate Professor of History

Misericordia University

Dallas, PA

 

Danielle Kinsey:

Jennifer’s work with ANT is the perfect segue into what I’ve been doing this semester because it’s very related: I’ve been attempting to teach an “Assemblage Theory Workshop” to fourth-year undergraduates in a British history seminar.

 

Assemblage theory conceives of all phenomena as a part of one and more assemblages (Latour might say networks, the philosopher Ian Buchanan might argue for “arrangements” instead) – it really is the ultimate “both/and” kind of theory that places multiplicity and connectivity at the center. And anything can be in an assemblage, as long as it has some kind of agential logic to it that has it working with other parts of the assemblage: a material thing/object/belonging/whatchamacallit, a memory, a spatial relationship, a sensory experience, a virus, ChatGPT, administrators, the cultural of time-discipline, a biological response, whatever the researcher can imagine including the researcher’s own hubris. This isn’t so different from ANT -- Latour places more emphasis on object agency and breaking down the subject/object divide, but lots of assemblage theory practitioners are happy to do that. And assemblage theory has some other baggage/philosophizing attached to it, particularly in how it draws from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (as translated from French into English by Brian Massumi). The main takeaway from assemblage theory is that an assemblage has effects that are more than just the sum of its parts and, to me, that is what lots of historians and others have been on about for decades in discussing multiple causality.

 

But teaching this to undergraduates in British history might not have been one of my best ideas. We started with reading excerpts from A Thousand Plateaus and two people dropped the course that very week. Those who stayed came to question all of their life choices as we went down the myriad rabbit holes that Deleuze and Guattari had left for us. We read Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory (D&G 2.0 as he describes it) and Ian Buchanan’s critiques of DeLanda (and others’, including many of the ANT scholars). But what really engaged students were examples of assemblage theory (overt and covert) in action. Standout favorites that dealt with material culture were:

 

My heartfelt thanks to these authors because they have really made this course come together!

 

Danielle Kinsey

Assistant Professor of History

Carleton University

Ottawa, Canada

 

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