Notes from "Stuff" by Daniel Miller

The Following are notes from "Stuff" by Daniel Miller and not my own writing

Miller. D (2010) Stuff Polity Press Cambridge Malden USA

THEORIES OF THINGS

The Sense of Order Gombrich. E (London Phaidon Press 1979)

Focus on the frame …Gombrich argued that when the frame is appropriate, we simply don’t see it (49) because it seamlessly conveys to us the mode by which we should encounter that which it frames. When it is inappropriate we notice that it is there.

Material objects are a setting. They make us aware of what is appropriate and inappropriate (50)

Surprising conclusion is that objects are important, not because they are evident, but quite the opposite. The less we are aware of them, the more powerfully they can determine our expectations. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so. (50)

Much of what makes us what we are exists, not through our conscious senses or body, but as an exterior environment that habituates and prompts us. (51)

The phrase “blindingly obvious” implies when something is sufficiently evident it reaches a point at which we are blinded to its presence, rather than reminded of its presence. (51)

Claude Levi – Strauss “Structuralism” - Central idea is that we should not regard entities in isolation. A  Desk, a dining table, a kitchen table, etc. … both the objects and the words we use for them, achieve definition by contrast with what they are not, as much as from what they are. (51) Structuralism focused on the relationship between things, rather than the things themselves. We understand each in relation to the whole system. (51)

Pierre Bourdieu (anthropologist) “Outline of a Theory or Practice”

Bourdieu ….theory of socialisation … in UK we learn to eat with knife and fork, in China they use chopsticks. We sit on chairs; other cultures squat on the floor. All things we learn to use are the stuff that makes up our environment. (53)

Bourdieu called this The Theory of Practise …the everyday us of things lead to consistent interaction with things. (53) Objects help us to learn how to act appropriately. Bourdieu used the work “habitus” meaning unconscious order. This is nature.

Culture gives us our second nature, that which we habitually do without thought.

Karl Marx – humanity starts with nature itself. Our social evolution consists not of advances in consciousness per sé, but in our increasing capacity to create an artefactual world from nature, first stone and pot … agricultural systems …. Urban life ….. Industrial revolution ….which represented a vast acceleration in our capacity to create “stuff” (58). We make “stuff” through labour. By creating “stuff” we also create other problems (59). e.g. we make cars which in turn lead to environmental concerns, oil consumption, accidents and carbon footprints. With Hegel each stage creates a new thing outside of ourselves, and we progress to the extent that we are able to see ourselves in this extension of ourselves, which is after all our own product. The reason we make things is because they potentially extend us as people. We make them through labour. By seeing ourselves in this world we have created, we gain in complexity, sophistication and knowledge. Hegel (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit or Phenomenology f Man EXAMPLE – An amoeba becomes aware that it exists inside itself the more it is aware that there is another that exists outside itself. (55) Development changes our consciousness and allows us to develop further. E.g. Law has developed through reason, thought and discussion … to reach an agreement.

Marx put this as follows: “the object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species- life of man; for man reproduces himself not only intellectually in his consciousness, but actively and actually and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he has created.”(59) But Marx has almost bypassed the need to create a theory of culture from Hegel and gone straight to a theory of material culture. Hegel saw the process he described, where consciousness creates by positing something outside of itself, as a form of self-alienation. For Hegel this was an almost entirely positive and certainly a necessary process for our development.

Miller refers to objectification as self-alienation

It is the way we enhance our capacity as human beings. By creating stuff we can grow ourselves. Every time we do such a thing, by the very same process we also create a contradiction, a possibility or progressing ourselves if the thing we made then develops its own autonomous interests. By creating the car we also crate pollution, road accidents and landscapes devastated by motorways. (59)

Marx starts with a vision. Nature of itself belongs to no one. So the things we create from it should be to the benefit of all those who are responsible for that creation. But as Hegel argued, once something is externalised, it can also become oppressive, and we can lose consciousness that it ever was our creation. Marx argued that this happens in capitalism, which fools the workers into thinking that what makes this material world is not their labour, but the resources of capital. Marx stops writing about the second part of the Hegelian process, but concentrates on this moment of rupture, when consciousness is taken away from us and uses terms such as fetishism, reification and alienation. He leads the argument to a Utopian state called communism. Hegel says that we need to accept the integral contradictions where people own and have rights to the place they live in which helps them to identify with that place. (60)

Simmel, a 19thC social theorist (and an eloquent theorists of the positive qualities of money saw that quantity, the increase in the amount of stuff  we possess, itself posed a contradiction. The Australian Aboriginal’s traditional culture had relatively few material things, but was hugely rich in kinship and elaboration of cosmology. However, as they have drifted towards the fringes of urban life, they may have lost much of their traditional culture. Many have ended up reduced to alcoholism. Simmel would have described this as the subjective only gains when it can assimilate the expanding objective culture. What we cannot assimilate oppresses us. He wrote essays on the contradictions of the metropolis.  A place where, if we try and relate to too many things, but have no substantial relationship to any one of them, we can become largely indifferent to the world and to ourselves. We are then being reduced, rather than expanded, by the sheer quantity of things. (62)

Australian tribes – dreamtime – the time of the ancestors who lie at one remove from people, but whose actions and consequences remain an integral part of the lives of the living, ancestors remembered in myth. They recognise that there are prior forces which have already created the world in which we come to be socialised. But in turn we can come to act upon those forces. The Walbiri retain contact with ancestors through the dreamtime and re-enact this relationship in ceremony and ritual today. It is the same landscape and order which is used to legitimate the critical relationships of kinship and social order which give individuals a sense of who they are. So both ancestors and contemporary people externalise themselves as culture and recognise themselves in that which has been created. They objectify. And in their myths they possess also a theory of culture that explains this process. (63)