Material culture and symbolic interactionism

Material Culture and Technoculture as Interaction Phillip Vannini Culture is what people do together (cf. Becker 1986; Ingold 2000). Such a focus on collective doing, making, and the materiality and consequentiality of action-based cultural processes is what sensitizing concepts like “material culture” and “technoculture” are meant to highlight. Conceptualizing culture as action and interaction is intended to downplay the importance of cognitive cultural dimensions such as values, beliefs, codes, and ideas and to emphasize instead bodily engagements, techniques, skills, habits, and the materiality of the world of interaction. The scope of this chapter is to survey the ontological foundations of such ideas and therefore of perspectives that view material culture and technoculture as interaction. By taking some license in blurring boundaries amongst theoretical traditions, in what follows I review four basic principles of pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, performance theory, and social semiotics. The chapter is divided into four parts. Each part reviews one of the four principles that distinguish this pan-theoretical perspective: diffused agency, semiotic power, ecology, and emergence. While to some extent these four principles are inspired by David Snow’s (2001) well-known articulation of the four premises of symbolic interactionism, by modifying them as I do I wish to engage in a twofold extension. The first extension is pan-theoretical: I find these four principles to characterize perspectives other than symbolic interactionism as Snow does, and thus I expand the range of theoretical traditions identifiable as interactionist—whether the authors of the ideas I survey explicitly invoke their interactionist roots or not. The second extension is substantive: whereas Snow’s principles and remarks are primarily sociological, I attempt to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of material culture and technoculture. Ecology Ecology is the totality of relations amongst human agents, non-human agents, and their environment. Understanding material culture and technoculture as ecology means focusing on complex patterns of relationships rather than linear, hierarchical, and atomistic causes and effects (see Couch 1995). Relatedly, understanding material culture and technoculture as ecology allows one to dismiss facile views of technological change as “happy pastorals of progress or grim narratives of power and domination” (Carey 1989:9). An ecological way of conceptualizing their subject matter is central to pragmatism and symbolic interactionism (e.g. see Carey 1999), performance theory [in particular, see Schechner’s (2005:113-169) concept of ecological rituals 113-169], and the Gibson-inspired (1979) view of social semiotics espoused by Van Leeuwen (2005). In this section I wish to outline three interdependent components of this ecological view: a temporal one, a spatial one, and a third one based on self-indication and negotiation. To exemplify these ideas I am going to refer to my ongoing ethnographic study of ferry boat mobility on the West coast of British Columbia. In order to understand the cultural significance of a ferry boat to an island community we can think of the relation of the ferry to time, space, and the self-indications of the people who depend on it. A ferry’s daily and weekly schedule, navigation speed, and the duration of its travel to destinations deeply shape islanders’ sense of time, including hourly (see Hodson and Vannini 2007), daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms. Changes in scheduling are consequential. Changes in seasonal schedules made to accommodate higher tourist travel demand result in faster-paced island living during summer time and in the consequent temporary disintegration of some social bonds and rituals. For example, during the slow seasons of autumn, winter, and spring, on Thetis Island it is customary to wave at oncoming traffic and pedestrians while driving. But because of the higher intensity of foot and car traffic this ritual is suspended during summer time: “we wave at drivers during the slow seasons even before we recognize who is driving because chances are we know that person”—one of the three-hundred residents of Thetis Island explained to me—“but what’s the point at waving in the summer when chances are that you either don’t know the other driver, or more importantly that they don’t understand the courtesy rule of actually waving back?” A ferry is also enmeshed in spatial relations (see Vannini and Vannini forthcoming). The carrying and loading capacity of a ferry, for example, deeply shapes the space of islands and the sense of place of their residents. The relatively recent innovations in RORO (Roll On-board, Roll Off-board) technology have made the slow and risky boat side-loading of cars and freight antiquate, car-commuting via ferry faster, safer, and more practical, and consequently introduced small and remote islands to the road infrastructure and mobility culture typical of an automobile-based society. Of course this innovation is not the direct cause of changes, for these innovations merely introduced a possibility or an affordance which islanders interpreted and negotiated. Thus, self-indications do matter greatly. A self-indication is a process whereby persons point out to themselves the meaning of signs and consequences of actions. Some of the island communities I study, for instance, have rejected car ferries (but not foot passenger-only ones) entirely or seriously limited their sailing frequency, whereas others have either fully embraced them or rejected ferry service altogether. An ecological understanding of these dynamics requires that one take into consideration the multiple agents involved in the relationships that make up a technoculture as well as their self-indications and negotiations. Ecology is not a structure but an ongoing process. Ecological perspectives need be sensitive to change, adaptation, integration, re-integration, and disintegration. Relationships amongst human, non-human, and environmental actors afford (cf. Gibson 1979) polysemic and multifunctional opportunities for the constitution of new meanings, signs, interpretations, technics, uses, and techniques. Material culture and technoculture are therefore “the life-energy holding together diverse symbolic and material organisms” tending toward movement and change (Vannini, Hodson, and Vannini forthcoming). At the ontological core of this life-energy tension are two dynamics marking all ecological settings: integration and disintegration. In the limited space remaining here I want to mention two shapes that integration and disintegration can take: ecological carving and material claims-making (for more see Vannini, Hodson, and Vannini forthcoming). Ecological carving is a concept that describes action oriented at “carv[ing] out ecological niches” (Carey 1999:90). On the significance of carving as metaphor also see Tilley (2002). On the related significance of bricolage see R. Mitchell (2000) and on weaving as metaphor see Ingold (2000). Carving occurs by transforming environmental, material, symbolic, and human resources with the purpose of parceling out space and time and manipulating the boundaries and relations of these and other resources. The carving metaphor is intended to simultaneously convey the symbolic and material (though these concepts, as said, are neither opposed nor different) aspects of technoculture and material culture. The metaphor also highlights the orientation to bodily practice and to the everyday physical and material engagement of the world. As an expressive and instrumental action, the practice of carving assembles pre-existing elements of, and potential for, form while engaging in creative transformation. Interestingly enough, a carved object is itself a tool that works not only as a representation of the world, but also as a ready-at-hand technic that can be used for future carving and transformation. And it is no passive instrument either. Just like by carving the world humans make a claim on their possession of it, the non-human world engages in material claims-making of its own. Making a claim means to ask for something, to require something, and at times even to take something. This dramatic process is at the very basis of ecology. For instance, in “carving” a new scheduled ferry route to and from a remote island, islanders claim water as a space for making connections with the outside world. But the material word is no inert matter, offering resistance (Mead 1938), demanding re-adaptation, and making claims of its own. For instance, for its effective operation a ferry asks for an infrastructure that radically alters the insularity of an island, requires regular patronizing by its users (lest services be too expensive or cancelled due to the economic unfeasibility of infrequent travel), and even takes things away from its users (e.g. the freedom to structure time regardless of schedules, the isolated character of island spaces, etc.). Making a claim is not synonymous with independent determination. A claim must be answered, considered, and can even resisted and rejected. A claim is answered through self-indication, negotiation, and further ecological carving. The dramatic iterativity of carving and material claims-making—and the consequent drama of integration, disintegration, and re-integration (see Pfaffenberger 1992; Turner 1988)—shifts emphasis away from the idea of ecology as mechanical equilibrium (see Carey 1999:92) and exposes the emergent character of ecology. Diffused Agency Agency is “the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahern 2001:110). As discussed throughout this book potentially, anything—human or non-human, alive or not—has capacity for action. The principle of diffused (rather than merely human) agency underlines the active character of all subjects and objects implicated in material culture and technoculture contexts. Anything from individuals to single technological devices or natural objects (McCarthy 1984), and from persons and groups to whole infrastructures (Star 1999) can be directly involved in the making of culture. Extending conceptualizations of agency from humans to non-human actors is useful and helpful because it inductively parallels, describes, and captures the common, everyday processes through which humans act as if the objects they interact with had agency. Gell (1998) brilliantly demonstrates this through the example of a little girl playing with a doll and acting toward it as if the doll had human feelings, and the example of adults acting toward religious indexes, icons, and gods as if they had an obvious capacity for action. Arguably, neither plastic dolls nor photographic reproductions of Jesus Christ (or live, embodied idols themselves) can act on their own, but in settings where significance and force is attributed to them, their agency clearly transpires as an impression not all different in kind or intensity from the impression that humans have of their own agency. Thus, while it attempts to make sense of anthropomorphism, the principle of diffused agency dismisses all forms of determinism—from technological and material determinism, to biological and social reductionism—as erroneous. Understood this way agency is thus not something that a human being has, but is instead the diffused potential for action present in a social and material setting. One of the fundamental contributions of material culture and technoculture studies is the idea of mutuality. While contemporary symbolic interactionists have been more or less resistant toward this notion [though see the recent intervention by Owens (2007)], pragmatists and symbolic anthropologists have long agreed that “the lines between persons and things are culturally variable…[and that] in certain contexts persons can seem to take on the attributes of things and things can seem to act almost as persons” (Hoskins 2006:74). Not only does this notion open itself to the idea that non-human things have biographies (see Woodward, this volume), but it also lends itself to the characterization that things play a key role in everyday social dramas. Performance theory (e.g. Schechner 2005) and performance-based analytical approaches to the study of material culture and technoculture (see J. Mitchell 2006) are perfectly well suited for the study of material culture and technoculture as interaction. As the etymological root of the word suggests, drama is about doing, action. Performance-centered approaches can emphasize the value of studying the interaction—of both the human-human and the human-not human types—that lies at the basis of rituals, play, ceremonies, spectacles, crises, social dramas, cultural performances, and other everyday life performances. Performance-based approaches are in the position to highlight how in its performativity diffused agency is relative across contexts, dependent on relationships between actors, and how it is primarily concerned with creation, process, and practice. Objects perform. That is why we commonly refer to such things as high-performance vehicles, athletic performance shoes and gear, and so forth. Of course they do not perform alone. But neither do people; people and things perform together. We can think of material objects not as given or essences, but in light of how they perform and what they perform (i.e. the scripts they are endowed with and enact). For example, as I have shown in my recent ethnographic writing on the sinking of the ferry Queen of the North (Vannini 2008), this boat’s unique relationships with her passengers over time, her reliable performance at sea, and her dramatically painful demise created a powerfully convincing impression of her personhood and agency. As the ferry sank and people began to mourn a clear performative transformation occurred: right as the boat ceased to be functional as a machine she became more and more of a meaningful person to the residents of the British Columbia coast. The idea of performative transformation—which the sinking of the Queen of the North epitomizes—is a central one in both performance studies and material culture and technoculture studies. Simply put, performative transformation is an exercise in agency, and more specifically a creative passage entailing change in form and subjectivity. For example, it is through performative transformation that material objects become social subjects (see Gell 1998; Kuechler 2002). As John Mitchell (2006) points out in his review of performance-based approaches to material culture, performative transformation has as its focus the body, space, and things. Typical instances of performative transformation are initiation rites, death rituals (the Queen of the North’s sinking being one of them), masking and masquerading, and various other more or less extraordinary cultural performances and mundane social dramas (for an overview of what performances may entail see Schechner 2005). In relation to the latter, following the theoretical lead of Turner (e.g. 1988), Pfaffenberger (1992) has usefully conceptualized how conflicts arising over technological adaptation, innovation, and change work as the chronological succession of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration—an outline which I also adopted in the mentioned ethnographic study of the Queen of the North’s sinking. This treatment of drama and performance aims to transcend, while capitalizing on, Goffmanian dramaturgy and its limited attention to objects as inanimate “props” for impression management. Furthermore, it intends to show that diffused agency is not some kind of a stock resource that one has, but is instead both potential/capacity for action and its actualization. Just like gender is not something that one has, but is instead something that one does, diffused agency is not something that material technics have, but is instead something based on their performance. Another way of saying this is the true characteristic of materiality is not its essence, but instead its consequentiality, thus its agency. In giving heightened attention to the agency of material objects it is important not to lose sight of how agency is diffused. An over-preoccupation with the agency of objects might reintroduce into material culture and technoculture studies a form of technological or material determinism in disguise or perhaps even an instance of animism. Rather than agency alone and on wherein it lies, therefore, it is best to focus ethnographic attention on the dramatic and creative ways of relating between humans and non-humans (see Gell 1998). In this sense, to speak of diffused agency is to invoke an ecology of interaction. Emergence As described by Mead (1938:641) the concept of emergence refers to a process marked by interactive indeterminacy: “when things get together, there arises something that was not there before.” Such a seemingly simple idea is at the core of the perspective brought forth here as it outlines how interaction outcomes are inevitably conditional on both the action of all the actors involved and the nature of the pre-existing conditions in which action takes place. Conditionality is a fundamental characteristic of interaction: “once an emergent is formed through a particular process of interaction, it acquires certain characteristics that are qualitatively different from those of the preexisting conditions on the basis of which this interaction has taken place” (Chang 2004:413). An emergent, therefore, is the offspring of the enabling and inhibiting elements of the actions of all those involved. No determinism is possible. In Mead’s (1938) philosophy of the act we can find another key property of the idea of emergence. The process of the act—and its four phases of impulse, perception, manipulation, and consummation—depend at all times on the conditioning that the past exerts on the present. “Each phase”—Chang (2004:408) explains in his interpretation of Mead’s thought—“is constituted by a specific pattern of interrelation between the actor and its environment that generates certain kinds of emergents. Many of these emergents act back on the process of interaction as mediating factors.” Such a focus on the temporality of action and on historical trajectories is central in much of the interactionist (and constructionist, as we have seen in chapter three) research on technoscience (for a comprehensive on this field review see Clarke and Star 2003). Technoscience studies lie at the intersection of the history of technology, the interdisciplinary study of information technologies, and at least five different but closely related sociological fields: the study of knowledge, of work, of science, of medicine, and of technology. Though technoscience studies have much in common, at least theoretically, with material culture and technoculture studies, their empirical concern is often different. Ethnographic studies in this vast field have focused on work practices, materials, and what most famously have come to be known as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989); classification systems (e.g. see Bowker and Star 1999); clinical research and trials; knowledge and technology in the biomedical sciences (e.g. see Star 1995); computing and information technologies in the workplace (e.g. see Orr 1996); the constitution of scientific and technological disciplines and specialties, as well as the role played by controversies in the shaping of these social worlds (e.g. see Clarke 1998). An important manifestation of the principle of emergence in material culture and technoculture is the process of semiotic transformation. The concept of semiotic transformation refers to change intervening over time (i.e. diachronically) in the way objects are used and/or in the meaning attributed to signs. For instance, in my study of the culture of artificial suntanning (Vannini and McCright 2004) Aaron McCright and I observed how the meanings of tanned skin have varied over time and how both the sun and its delegated technics (namely, the artificial tanning tamp) have been put to different uses over time. Going back to the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, for example, we noted how in North America tanned skin connoted humble class origins due to its associations with outdoor workers such as farmers. Later—with the growing importance of outdoor leisure and tourism for the cultivation of individual lifestyle and taste distinction—tanned skin began to connote health, sociability, and class status, and thus to be viewed as attractive. Concurrently, medical authorities became more vocal about the benefits of prolonged exposure of the skin to the sun’s UV rays. Later in the 1980s and 1990s the invention and domestication (in the Western world) of the tanning lamp enabled those who could not afford to take periodical vacations to sunny locations to conspicuously display their bronzed skin and, implicitly, make status and identity claims. But with growing evidence in the late 1990s of the carcinogenic and otherwise harmful effects of excessive exposure to UV rays, and the growing sensitivity of the public to these issues, tanned skin began to be increasingly associated with poor health and tanning lamps with danger. Arguably as a response to such bad press much of the artificial tanning industry today promotes tanning lamps as effective devices to combat the winter blues, or what in commercial/medical terms has come to be known as seasonal affective disorder. Semiotic transformations are deeply interconnected with the power of meaning, and the power to frame and influence meaning: the topic of the next section. Semiotic Power Semiotic power (cf. Wiley 1994) refers to the consequentiality of representation. As Keane (1997:7) has remarked, representation is to be intended as both “depiction (representation as something) and delegation (representation by someone or something.” In other words, representation may work as something that “addresses itself to a mind” (Peirce 1986:62), but it may also work as something that has “qualities independent of its meaning” and something that has a “causal connection with its object” (Peirce 1986:62). To explain these ideas more clearly let us take the example of the human body and its capacity for sensation. In a series of qualitative investigations Dennis Waskul and I (Waskul, Vannini, and Wiesen 2007; Waskul and Vannini 2008) have begun to question the principle of symbolization (cf. Snow 2001). As Rochberg-Halton (1982), Knappett (2005), Gottdiener (1995), Dant (2005), and Keane (1997, 2003) have remarked, to think of symbolization is to disregard how representation does not always take place through symbols. Bodily sensations, for example, are often meaningful without having to rely on symbolism for their functioning. Take for example sexual/sensual touch. Stimulating one’s own body or others’ sexually is not arousing because of, or thanks to, its abstract (e.g. discursive) properties. Surely those types of mental associations may play a role, but tactile sensations are first meaningful at a more basic level: the level of their qualitative immediacy (cf. Dewey 1934) or firstness (Peirce 1986). Thus, masturbatory stimulation may be meaningful well before an individual has acquired the symbols (words, discourses, values, etc.) to define the social significance of this practice (Waskul, Vannini, and Wiesen 2007). What the above example highlights is that at the very least, according to Peircean semiotics or social semiotics (Van Leeuwen 2005; Vannini 2007), representation is of three types: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. Symbols—like words, or a stop-light at an intersection, or a diamond ring—can be “read” effectively with the meaning intended by the producer only after an individual has been socialized to the semiotic conventions and lexical rules of a culture. Symbolic representation is the most commonly examined kind of representation—especially due to its relevance in structuralist and post-structuralist research and theorizing—as it highlights a fundamental characteristic of human interaction: the ability to create signs and conventions on which all members of a culture rely for finding meaning. The study of symbolic representation has been so prevalent in the social and cultural sciences that many scholars have erroneously begun to equate semiotics with the study of symbolism. And because many students of symbolism have a tendency to view symbols as ephemeral, deeply rooted in discursive practices, extremely malleable to the vagaries of social construction and deconstruction, and entirely dependent on mental associations and social conventions for their meaning, several scholars of material culture have begun to dismiss the very usefulness of semiotics. But this needs not be so, for other kinds of representation are extremely important to a materialist version of material cultural studies, namely indexicality and iconicity. Iconicity is a relation of continuity, self-reference, or resemblance between an object and the form its representation takes. Realistic drawings and sculpture are a classic example of this. Indexicality on the other hand is a relation between action and its consequences. A lightning is indexical of a storm, for example, or the olfactory sensation of a smell indicates that an odoriferous source must have created it. Both iconicity and indexicality require interpretation like symbolism does, but the interpretation of the former is rather different in nature because it deeply relies on habit, skill, and taken for granted relations. Because in everyday life they most often go unquestioned it is possible to say that iconic and indexical meanings are particularly powerful. This is the case of bad smells, for example. As we found after asking a diverse group of people through the use of research diaries, very often what smells bad is viewed as bad—that is, morally despicable or aesthetically inferior—and treated as such. Thus a foul-smelling home is uncivilized, a foul-smelling individual is rude (or worse), and a fragrant aroma is the aroma of sanctity, purity, beauty, or health (Waskul and Vannini 2008). What is even more interesting is that these relations are immediate; we do not just smell an odor, carefully debate its possible values, and then select the most appropriate set of denotations and connotations. Rather, we smell something bad, unhealthy, low class (Waskul and Vannini 2008) and simultaneously engage in instantaneous self-indication. Semiotic approaches to the materiality of everyday life like this highlight how the material world has an immediate qualitative potential for meaning-making (Dewey 1934) and how it exercises consequential action. In arguing for semiotic power instead of symbolism I am therefore arguing for a tripartite idea of the sign and representation that overlaps with the idea of techne (Vannini, Hodson, and Vannini forthcoming). As discussed in that paper: According to Peircean pragmatist semiotics meaning emerges out of the triadic interaction between an object, a sign vehicle—known as representamen—that stands for that object, and the sense that someone makes of this relation—known as interpretant. This triadic model of signification can be extended to techne. A basic instance of techne—that is, a single technological act—can be explained through a similar model which comprises also three units: a technic, a technique, and an object to which the technique and technic are directed. The elements within the models of semiosis and techne overlap as follows: the representamen corresponds to the technic, the interpretant to the technique, and the semiotic object in Peirce’s model corresponds to the desired end to which the technic-mediated technique is directed. Within this model interpretation and embodied practice, meaning and bodily purpose, symbolic and material mediation of the world overlap. Understanding techne and representation as the sides of the same coin allows us to view signification and delegation through the same lens. This is a lens that frames action and in particular interaction with material objects as having a “social dimension beyond their symbolic meaning” (Dant 2005:111) and this suggests that, as Dant (2005:111, my emphasis) continues, “as the social human being interacts with an object, she or he must take account of what the object is doing or about to do and must fit their line of activity to the intentions imbedded in the object.” Thus, in doing something with objects, in embodied action, in the practical undertaking of the materiality of the world we tend to rely less on symbolism and more on the power that objects afford. Understood this way these are signs and “things that shape the self and the mind” as well as the body (Carey 1989: 316). And finally, understood this way material culture, technoculture, interaction, and culture become inseparable and synonymous. Summary Interactionist approaches to material technoculture are based on four intersecting principles: ecology, diffused agency, emergence, and semiotic power. Together, these principles demonstrate how material technoculture resides neither in non-human objects nor in human actors, but instead in the emergent product of their interaction. The application of these principles to empirical research design and data analysis should free researchers from imposing either humanistic lenses on the material world (which impose an excessively ethnos-centric ideology on data) or deterministic ones (which impose reductionist tendencies). Beside their potential for post-dualist material culture studies, the application of these four principles has also the obvious potential of changing ethnography as a strategy of data collection, analysis, and representation. 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