The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View

This article retreats from an entirely relational treatment of matter, to rediscover the object nature of things. The thingly relations of things include object relations; materials provide affordances or potentialities to humans. The brute matter of things has effects on us that go beyond social ne...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New literary history 2014-12, Vol.45 (1), p.19-36
Main Author: Hodder, Ian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ants
Coal
Dairy cattle
Ecology, Agency, Entanglement
Electricity
Global warming
Homo sapiens
Humanity
Humans
Milk
Smartphones
System theory
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Summary:This article retreats from an entirely relational treatment of matter, to rediscover the object nature of things. The thingly relations of things include object relations; materials provide affordances or potentialities to humans. The brute matter of things has effects on us that go beyond social networks. We cannot reduce things solely to the relational, to a semiotics of things. To do so undermines the power of things to entrap, and particularly to trap the more vulnerable. In the modern world, we have come to see that we need to use things sustainably and responsibly, to care for things. But this care and sustainability themselves too frequently involve further management and control of animals, plants, landscapes, resources, and humans. A long-term archaeological perspective shows that our attempts to fix things by finding technological solutions have led to an exponential increase in material entanglements. It is in our nature as a species to try and fix our problems now by fiddling and fixing, but such responses may have their limits.
ISSN:0028-6087
1080-661X
1080-661X
DOI:10.1353/nlh.2014.0005