Hybrids and Social Justice

         This week's readings are perhaps the most challenging of the semester because they ask us to consider some larger connections to our relationship with things.

         Brian Latour's "Crisis" certainly gave me a sense of unease just based on the title. In his essay, Latour explains that the way that we create our scholarship and understand ourselves fails to link how they relate to larger chains of networks. He identifies three different categories - nature, politics, and discourse - that we use to distinguish the study of the world around us. Latour critiques this separation and connects it to his conversation about what it really means to be modern. The reason Latour's essay made me feel uncomfortable - and probably rightfully so - was because it made me realize how much the discipline of history, the one I'm most familiar with, fails to engage with so much around it. The irony isn't lost on me that, in theory, history is supposed to be everything, right? And yet, and I include myself in this, we often fail to connect the past to so many different chains of networks that makes me think that historians aren't doing enough when we separate categories that don't really exist. Talk about an existential crisis...

         Shifting gears a bit, Laura Levitt's essay in her upcoming manuscript explores how objects relate to understanding trauma. Levitt uses Edmund de Waal's book The Hare with the Amber Eyes as a lens towards understanding how objects serve as a window looking at the Holocaust. The way that Levitt explores how objects can also serve as a route to justice in situations such as these reminds me of the shifting emotional responses that crop up when we have these conversations about our relationships to objects. It has certainly defined my own project for me. I initially thought that my emotional response to my license plate was unimportant. The most that I felt when I looked at or thought about it was slight nostalgia for a time that I never live through. But as I discovered how an everyday object with such high visibility was manufactured in a prison with such poor conditions - a seemingly invisible place - I was repulsed and intrigued by it. I wondered what my findings meant beyond my project. I'm still trying to figure that out, but Levitt's essay helps me to think about how objects can relate to social justice.

The Senses

                This week’s readings on soundscapes are helpful in trying to understand another facet of material culture study. Mark M. Smith traces the historiography of sound in history and argues that the history of sound allows historians to enhance our understanding of the past and helps us to see how past peoples interacted with their environments. Looking at three different examples, Smith shows that sound studies are not just a minor perspective, but that this entire methodology is an opportunity to explore more than just the things that we can see.

                One example that Smith draws upon in his historiography is Emily Thompson’s Soundscape of Modernity. Focusing on the first three decades of the twentieth century, Thompson looks at architecture, among other things, to understand how Americans in urban spaces such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles shaped their built environment around their cultural constructions of sound. Sound, shows Thompson, helped to create modernity, which she defines as efficient, a commodity available for consumption, and an overall sense that humans had “technical mastery” over the environment. Thompson shows us how we can use sounds to understand place and time, which will certainly be helpful in my project.           

                When I first began researching my project on the license plate, all I could think about was the loud noises that must have been created as it was manufactured. Once I located my plate’s provenance, the sounds, conversations, and uproars of the Western State Penitentiary and the male inmates who made these plates between 1971 and 1976 became even more intriguing to me. This made me think about how its location shaped the area's sounds as well. Located just outside the city of Pittsburgh, a major steel manufacturing town until 1980 or so, is equally important to understanding Western State’s surrounding conditions. As deindustrialization crippled Pittsburgh during these years, I wonder about how the city’s soundscapes changed over time. I wonder if they became quieter over time as factories were abandoned, rendering Western State and the surrounding area even more invisible than they may have already been. Thompson’s source base is helpful in my project in the sense that it helps me to understand how the built environment of the penitentiary created a soundscape that shaped the reality of those who encountered and created it every day. 

Memory and Materiality

            With last week’s readings still fresh in my mind, I see concepts from Daniel Miller’s work in Stuff within historian Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. Miller reminded us that objects make us, just as we shape them. Savage shows us the politics of this exchange during one of the most defining periods of American history – Reconstruction. Specifically, Savage examines the monuments designed and erected throughout the United States that served to commemorate and memorialize the Civil War. He comments on how the academic traditions of sculpture literally shaped and limited how sculptors created monumental designs to reimagine and recreate the new racial order supposedly created after the abolishment of slavery. Sculptors and commemorative groups contended with these new meanings, but often ended up harkening back to a time that perceived blacks in a childlike, liminal phase and celebrated a white, male paternalistic model of civilization. What this shows us is that monuments offer a window into understanding how blacks and whites, the North and South, visualized their post-Civil War reality that the American Revolution had failed to achieve. Through the structural study of these monuments, we see that while slavery was abolished, the underlying paradox of oppression and freedom was perpetuated. Civil War monuments allowed privileged Americans to shape the past on their terms to face their nebulous present.

            Which raises the point that Savage not only succeeds in talking about the history of memorialization, but his work serves as a good public history conversation as well. Savage helps us understand how late nineteenth century Americans built their history through objects, but what about now? How are the objects we choose in the museum setting shaping the audiences we will work with every day? Ken Yellis offers some insight into this conversation. Focusing on the Mining the Museum exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society in the early 1990s, Yellis explores the sometimes contentious relationship between museums and their audiences. The artist behind Mining the Museum brokered an interesting juxtaposition of objects, such as the Ku Klux Klan hood and the baby carriage, to explore the museum’s history, but it was also at the cost of some backlash as well as positive responses. That was over twenty years ago – have we learned better ways to talk about the objects public historians use to tell stories about the past? Because if we are to listen to Savage and Yellis, this stuff matters and has tinges of a moral imperative as well. I admit that I don’t have an answer to the questions I’m asking, but it’s made me remember the pressures and responsibilities that come with public historical work. Even when objects are no longer used for the same intent for which they were first built, we’re still using them for different purposes. We need to be better about talking about the fluidity of objects and the built environment if we are to show our public that artifacts and history never existed in a fixed past.  

Commodities and Consumption

              This week’s readings ask us, once again (and perhaps more explicitly this time), to reconsider how we view the relationship between ourselves and things. British anthropologist Daniel Miller cautions at the end of his aptly titled book Stuff that “denigrating material things, and pushing them down, is one of the main ways we raise ourselves up onto apparent pedestals. From this height we make claims to a spirituality entirely divorced from our own materiality and the materiality of the world we live within” (156). We are challenged to discard the notion that objects are superficial and reinsert ourselves into a world filled with objects that we make and that make us.

                Miller starts off this conversation in Stuff and walks us through his unconventional approach to material culture. His aim is not to define or create convention for material culture studies, but to show us that variations exist in how we interact with the things around us. My favorite chapter in Stuff that drives this point home is his case studies on clothes in Trinidad, India, and London. Miller shows us that clothes don’t just say something about who we are, but sometimes they become a part of us. For example, Miller discusses the sari in India and how it almost serves as an extension of the women who wear them. By examining this, “we can see that there are a multitude of different expectations and experiences that are a direct result of wearing a particular item of clothing” (31).         

                Miller also challenges us to think about universalism and particularity as not in opposition, but that we should think about how and where these ideas might exist in one another. Igor Kopytoff eschews the polarization of another dichotomy, people and things, in “The cultural biography of things.” Kopytoff argues that objects, like people, also have biographies that are informed by various contexts – economic and cultural, and I might even add racial, gender, social, etc. Seth Bruggeman employs this perspective in his cultural economic biography of the Shenandoah River gundalow and how it helped drive Shenandoah Valley’s economy during the nineteenth century. This biography is intriguing because it looks not just into the gundalow’s original use, but also looks at its reuse later on. I was interested to read this because it made it clear that stuff has a life that extends past its original intent. It adapts and is adapted to new cultural constructs all the time.

                Kopytoff’s perspective isn’t just useful in Bruggeman’s study, but it’s also helpful for my project, as so far as his idea that conflicting identities are inherent in objects. He writes that the “drama here lies in the uncertainties of valuation and of identity.” For example, the prison in which my bicentennial license plate was made has a long history that stands in direct opposition to the symbolism of freedom that my plate intends to portray. Koptyoff helps me to articulate some of the struggles I’ve had characterizing its conflicting meanings.

                Finally, Peter Stallybrass' essay “Marx’s Coat” looks at how Karl Marx used his coat to help make his argument that capitalism is driven by the exploitation of labor. By giving some sort of agency to the coat, says Stallybrass, we see that the coat serves as Marx’s access point to a privileged setting like the British Museum. The coat as the driving force of this narrative reminds me of our first readings for this class in Turkle’s book. Placing objects as the center of our narratives, rather than peripheral to them, shows just how much we need our stuff. We can’t take our stuff, just like we can’t take ourselves, out of the culture we were born into or have chosen to occupy. 

Place and Cultural Landscapes/Built Environments

          This week’s readings challenge us to think about space, time, the built environment, and cultural landscapes.  J.B. Jackson’s A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time is one of the most intriguing works we’ve read in this class thus far. Jackson looks at many different kinds of landscapes – New Mexico, mobile homes, parks, gardens, etc., where he makes his point that space helps determine how humans interact with surrounding environments. In turn, it engages with how humans shape those spaces. His study in particular is fascinating because of how it looks at what his contemporaries may have considered mundane. His extensive conversations of roads, for example, is illustrative of Jackson’s point that roads are places, too and not just means of getting to other places. Jackson helped me to think about the in-between spaces that often get overlooked.

            These liminal spaces, an anthropological term to denote the “not quite” spaces during rituals, are important themes for this week as well. One of my favorite readings in this class was Sue Bridwell Beckham’s discussion of Southern porches as liminal spaces occupied by women. In it, Bridwell looks at the porch as a place where social mores broke down in courtship, black-white relationships, and gendered interactions. This offers an insight into how historically marginalized groups exercised their agency, often in opposition to the status quo. This is certainly relevant in Robert W. Weyeneth’s study of the built environment of Jim Crow South, in which he categorizes “the spatial strategies of white supremacy” to construct environments that isolated and partitioned whites and blacks from one another. These constructed spaces shaped how blacks and whites interacted within their racial own groups and outside of them. Most interesting is Weyeneth’s conversation about how African-American communities in South Carolina counteracted these constructions by creating alternative spaces to meet their needs previously denied to them in a segregated world.

            Most interesting of all is this week’s thematic structure in which these scholars highlight the silences of in-between spaces. It has made me think a lot about some of the silent spaces I’m not thinking about in regards to my license plate. Thanks to Jackson, the road is another excellent entry point into thinking about my object. What other spaces did it occupy, and how? How, if at all, did the meanings of the license plate change as it moved across various landscapes? It certainly helped to change visual landscapes when present, but I’m hoping to explore how its surrounding environments effected it. 

The Image as Object

          This week’s readings are particularly pertinent as I work through my project because they offered some tools to think about the text and images on my license plate. While intellectual Roland Barthes explains how semiotics (the study of signs and symbols in language) helps us to understand the multiple layers of meanings in text and images, the art historian Wendy Bullion offers her understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Philadelphia through her study of visual illusions (trompe l’oeil) in various contemporary artworks. In both cases, they produce rich cultural analyses through their focus on the image as object.

            French scholar Roland Barthes, significant contributor to the study of semiotics, gives us some tools to talk about images in his “Rhetoric of the Image.” Using an advertisement, Barthes classifies its images as having three different messages: linguistic, coded, and non-coded. Linguistic messages come in the form of text and often support the messages of the images it accompanies. They serve to “fix” or anchor various meanings into place to “counter the terror of uncertain signs” (197). Coded messages are found in the images themselves, but a very specific cultural understanding needs to be in place in order for someone to derive information from the images. In the case of my license plate, this makes sense. Someone from another country might look at the bell in the center as just a cracked bell, but almost any American would immediately identify it as the Liberty Bell. Finally, Barthes identifies non-coded messages that serve as literal rather than implied representations of something.

            Wendy Bullion in Citizen Spectator adds to this conversation in her study of art and the larger cultural trends in Philadelphia during the early federal period. She argues that trompe l’oeil techniques served to emphasize the importance of seeing and awareness as a means to avoid deception. How people saw these images and interacted with them in various spaces throughout Philadelphia, explains Bullion, played an important role in shaping citizenship in early America. She shows in paintings by the likes of Charles Willson Peale that images of illusion had their own multiple, material perspectives within the image themselves that were further compounded by the perspectives viewers brought to it. This is really important because while Barthes explains that several elements are used to anchor and fix meanings in images, Bullion deconstructs and uncovers the overt and hidden perspectives within these trompe l’oeil pieces. Objects have perspectives, too. 

            Barthes and Bullion have given me a lot to think about as I continue on with my project. I need to unravel some of the imbued cultural precepts of my license plate and understand how these are created. For example, I know just by looking at the plate that it’s a license tag. But why do I know that? Surely someone else would view it differently, or maybe even as a foreign object. Bullion helped me to step outside my ideas about the license plate as a measure of state control and look at citizenship a bit more. And how are people engaging with this particular license plate? Her extensive conversation about people’s interactions in various exhibition spaces to images helps me to think about license plates as another kind of social viewing. The bicentennial plates were meant to be seen and displayed, which raises questions about what its images communicated not only to the state but to the countless people who drove past it at some point or another. So much to discover!

           

            

Tools, Technology, and Making

          Our class is setting foot in a pottery studio in Old City Philadelphia to make our very own pottery! In some ways, this is a self-conscious exercise in creating something to help connect us to some of the material cultural theories we’ve discussed in the past month. The actual creation and manufacture of my own object, the Pennsylvania bicentennial license plate, is what intrigues me the most about its history. Who really owns it before, during, and after its production?

            Professor of furniture design David Pye offers a framework to help us understand two different kinds of craft and workmanship. Free workmanship is a type of production which Pye associates with risk. There is no predetermined end result, which accounts for the risk that is involved in achieving an imagined final product. This risk, according to Pye, does not exist in regulated workmanship. This is one in which the final result is predetermined and cannot be altered once the process of production is set in motion. Pye also thinks about the idea of quality – things of “best” quality are more expensive in comparison to something of “ordinary quality” (Pye 348). This makes me think of its value, a monetary one in the context in which Pye uses the phrase. I imagine that its value relates to its function – just how well does an object serve its intended purpose? And what cultural markers surround its production and public perception that makes a group determine something as valuable or not?

            Evgeny Morozov engages in a conversation about the changes in popular perceptions of “making things” over time. The Arts and Crafts movement, explains Morozov, died out by the end of World War I. It offered an attempt at fostering autonomy in industry, but as critiqued women’s advocate Mary Dennett, the worker has no freedom to toil on crafts, and she considered how this question surrounded around persistent issues of inequality. Morozov thinks about the reemergence of the “maker” movement in the 1960s through today. He argues that this movement serves as a democratizing effect in which people can sidestep a reliance on a larger capitalist system of mass production.

            These readings seem to emphasize human agency and the potential that “making” has on expressing choice and individuality. However, in the context of my object, I’m not sure that this necessarily applies at face value. I can’t help but think about Mary Dennett and her critique that mass production and the cost of human labor leaves no time for what Pye is describing as a workmanship of risk. I’ve begun preliminary research on the production of license plates, and I’ve found several newspaper articles that document that Pennsylvania did indeed have license plates manufactured in prisons around the time of the 1976 bicentennial. I cannot say for certain that my particular object was made in a prison, but it does make me contend with this possibility. How do I create a study that examines the agency of those who produced it, when seemingly, bodies are being used as labor to create an object that is largely used as a measure of civilian regulation, surveillance, and control? If in theory, choice is not an option for the makers, then what does it say about the chain of networks I’m trying to understand? I have more questions than answers at the moment, but Pye and Morozov have helped me to think about what can happen when choice and democratization might not necessarily define production.