On Assemblages and Machines

The animated figures stand
Adorning every public street
And seem to breathe in stone, or
Move their marble feet.

(Pindar O.7: 95–97)

The series of mythic tales surrounding the titan Prometheus has become a wellspring for theoretical reflection on the articulation of things and humans, an Iron Age urtext for today's material turn (e.g., Bredekamp 1995; Kaufman-Osborn 1997; Sennett 2008). Aeschylus's version of the story, based on the account in Hesiod's Theogony, centers on the punishment of humanity's savior. Zeus, unimpressed by "witless" mortals, had resolved to destroy humanity (Aesch. PB: ln. 444; trans. Smyth). In order to save them, wily Prometheus instructed humans in the workings of the object world, teaching them how to use wood and brick to build homes, how to yoke animals to bear burdens and plow fields, how to harness horses and build boats to travel great distances, how to devise medicines to heal the sick, how to read the sun and stars to understand the seasons, how to discern portents in the flights of birds and other auguries, how to represent the world in numbers, and how to preserve the memory of these arts in letters (Aesch. PB: ln. 450–70). But it was the defiant titan's theft of fire from Olympus that doomed Prometheus. Zeus ordered that he be bound to the bare mountain rock of the distant Caucasus for his transgression. Humanity was saved, but we too were bound, chained ever after to labor and its instruments, an object world without which the species that Hannah Arendt (1958) described as "animal laborans" (cf. Sennett 2008: 6) would surely perish.

In Works and Days, Hesiod attended less to Prometheus's woes than to the consequences of humanity's transgression against Zeus. In retaliation for Prometheus's intervention, Zeus commanded Hephaestus to fashion Pandora "[to] mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face ... And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature" (Hes. WD: ln. 60–70; trans. Evelyn-White). Zeus bequeathed this unfortunate golem — a product of craft (Sennett 2008: 11) — on Epimetheus, Prometheus's brother, along with a jar containing all the ills, plagues, and miseries of the earth. Epimetheus was captivated by this gift of Olympus, misrecognizing Pandora's anthropomorphism for humanity, her "endowments" for gifts. Driven by curiosity, Pandora opened the jar and let out the evils therein, allowing "countless plagues" to "wander amongst men" (Hes. WD: ln. 100).

As the philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998: 186ff) has persuasively argued, the story of Prometheus alone makes little sense without the doubled figure of Epimetheus, who links the survival of humanity to its fall into the world of animal laborans. However, the mediating role in the story that ties together its key components — Prometheus's theft and Epimetheus's scourge — is played not by humans but by material things. In the first half of the story, objects serve as instructors to humankind, elevating the species from its rude state by teaching us crafts that are simultaneously material (e.g., how to build) and social (e.g., how to dwell). In the second half of the story, anthropomorphized material — a sentient compound of earth and water in human form — brings evil into the world. The caution in the Promethean cycle is not against the terrors of things acting per se but rather against things conscripted to act like, and appear like, humans, a la Pandora. This Promethean recognition is an archaeological insight, an acute awareness of the workings of things in human society (for Aeschylus, Prometheus's legacy) and a caution against conflating the operation of objects with the actions of humans (the mistake of Epimetheus when he welcomed Pandora).

Posthumanist philosophy has waged a powerful assault on the traditional hierarchy of things, arguing for a project of ontological leveling by pointing out how things from electrical grids (Bennett 2010) to Amazonian worms (Latour 1999) act agentively "like" humans. "A touch of anthropomorphism," Jane Bennett argues, "can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations" (Bennett 2010: 99). I am in sympathy with the political agenda that animates Bennett's intervention, an effort to check the "earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption" (Bennett 2010: ix) that have been fed by representations of a passive material world, ready for exploitation. But anthropomorphism inevitably leads directly back to anthropocentrism, reinscribing the categories of human action as the only conceivable form of action in the world. As the Promethean cycle makes clear, objects interact with us, but they act like us only at our peril. Instead of forcing things to behave like we do, our focus should instead be on understanding their forms of action. But if objects do not act like us, how do they operate?

THINGS AND OBJECTS

It is difficult to define the operation of the things that surround us when we have only a vague sense of what they are. Despite our aesthetic captivation by commodity forms from the ridiculous (e.g., the catalog of things advertised on late-night American television) to the sublime (e.g., the inventory of Gary Hustwit's 2009 documentary Objectified), despite the dependence of the global economy on colossal migrations of raw materials and finished products, and despite our dedication to negotiating social distinction through material diacritics, we lack even a basic census of the world of things. A recent study conducted in Seoul found that the average South Korean household contained more than 10,000 individual objects (Nojima 2005). To roughly generalize from these data would suggest that there are between 8 and 17 trillion objects in households around the world, to say nothing of the factories, government offices, military bases, museums, archaeological sites, and, of course, landfills, where generations of past things now pile up in a purgatory between disposal and decay (Rathje and Murphy 1992; Reno 2008). And this population of things continues to grow ineluctably. It is difficult to imagine a theorization of the material world that does not also chart what for lack of a better term we might call not demography or biography, but resography, an account of material composition and distribution, formation and decay, topology and technology.

More concerning than the absence of even basic resographies is the lack of detailed studies that examine the mechanisms through which the sea of material culture shapes our lives. There is no shortage of studies that celebrate, deplore, or simply note the power of things in the contemporary moment (e.g., Findlen 2013; Glenn and Hayes 2007; Henare et al. 2007), but there are surprisingly few that provide an encompassing account of how we should theorize the human–object encounter. Archaeology has been steadfast in documenting humanity's phylogenetic encounter with things, which began more than 2 million years ago with the production of the first stone tools. However, the discipline has also tended to undervalue its unique intellectual mandate to define the forceful forms of historical and social determination embedded in our relationship to things, instead sublimating the object world into the ethnographic concepts of culture (e.g., Kidder 1924; Taylor 1948), system (e.g., Flannery 1968; Plog 1975), or text (e.g., Hodder 1986: 122; Tilley 1991: 16–17) and the historical epistemologies of events (e.g., Schliemann 1875), personages (e.g., Carter and Mace 1977), and thick description (cf. Snodgrass 1985).

Our ontogenetic ties to objects, which begin at birth if not before, are largely unexplored and yet do point to the profundity of our mutual engagement. A provocative recent study conducted in Japan sought to quantify infant interactions with objects versus interactions with their own and their parents' bodies (Shingaki and Nojima 2006). At four months of age, roughly half of child interactions were with things and half with other organic bodies — parents, siblings, other caregivers, and so on. By ten months, that ratio had soared as three-quarters of all child interactions were with objects. Similarly, a developmental pediatrician at Johns Hopkins recently estimated that as many as 25 percent of young American women go to college accompanied by a childhood transitional object, such as a teddy bear or blanket (Klass 2013). Parents might reasonably ask who, or rather, what, is raising our kids?

The suspicion that things are actively shaping our lives is by no means new. It is the anxiety that lies behind asceticism (both religious and secular) and the desire that drives commodity consumption. In a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, Internet entrepreneur Graham Hill wrote: "I had a giant house crammed with stuff... Somehow this stuff ended up running my life ... the things I consumed ended up consuming me" (Hill 2013). Tellingly, in order to free himself from things, Hill designed a 420-square- foot New York apartment that used folding tables, hideaway furniture, and moveable walls to allow a single space to serve as bedroom, living room, and dining room. Liberation from our things, it seems, requires the help of a great many other things.

Recent studies of human "materiality"' a critical conceptual force within the wider material turn, have argued persuasively for the co-constituted nature of things and social practices, ranging from colonialism (Thomas 1991) to Christianity (Bynum 2011) to capitalism (Maurer 2005). The materiality movement has succeeded admirably in resuscitating the object world as an analytical concern beyond the disciplinary confines of archaeology (e.g., Bennett and Joyce 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010a; Brown 2001; Coole and Frost 2010; Daston 2004; Miller 1987, 2005a; Myers 2001). And within archaeology, materiality studies (e.g., Boivin 2008; Knappett 2005; Meskell 2004; Olsen 2010; Tilley 2004) have worked to extend an earlier concern with the social power of landscape to embrace a wider sense of material instrumentality (e.g., Alcock 1993, 2002; Harmansah 2007; Johnson 2007; Khatchadourian 2008b; McGuire 1991; Smith 2003). Yet they have not produced a conceptual apparatus for detailing the operation of things sufficiently robust to match the rich lexicon for detailing the actions of human individuals, collectivities, and institutions. As a result, the things themselves rather quickly disappear from view (Hodder 2012: 1), overwhelmed by the myriad forces of psychological, cultural, and institutional determination grounded in the singularly powerful figure of the modern human subject.

One response to our anemic conceptual repertoire for detailing the operation of things has been to destabilize the distinction between human subject and material object, thus appropriating the traditional terms of human activity to do new work in the world of things. Things are then open to description in distinctly anthropomorphic terms as having lives (Appadurai 1986) and thus biographies (Gosden and Marshall 1999; Kopytoff 1986); they are vibrant (Bennett 2010) and unruly (Hodder 2012: 85–87). Although highly productive as both a "methodological philistinism" (Gell 1992: 42) and a critical stance, the extension of human qualities to things is, in ontological terms, a violation of the Promethean recognition, an imposition of our logics upon theirs. Ironically, dismantling the traditional divide between knowing subject and known object, rather than empowering things, entails a real danger of anthropomorphizing everything, leaving the human figure as the sole point of reference for imagining causation, agency, or determination.

If we seek to understand the object world in terms that more closely approximate its own, then we must heed the Promethean recognition and accord things an epistemological presumption of difference. The object world must be given the opportunity to operate differently than humans do, much as archaeologists and ethnographers must presume that distinct epochs and communities operate in ways native to their own histories and understandings (Meskell 2004: 3). An anthropology of the object world necessarily entails a rejection of what Meillassoux (2008: 5) calls "correlationism" the post-Kantian conceit that we can never gain knowledge of a thing outside us "in itself" but only as an appearance to an observing subject. As Meillassoux (10) keenly observes, correlationism excludes the possibility of understanding a world outside of — or "ancestral" to — human subjectivity. And yet the co-constitution of objects and subjects necessarily entails a world forged by relations established among objects, a "great outdoors" (7; italics in original) exterior to, and partially autonomous from, human consciousness. As Meillassoux's analysis clearly implies, the epistemological task that faces contemporary material thought is not how we can collapse humans and objects into equivalent social forces but rather how their distinctive capacities articulate with one another to forge, reproduce, and undermine specific sociopolitical formations.

The central preoccupation of much philosophical reflection on the material world has traditionally been the object. However, the object is merely a conceptual abstraction. There is no empirically demonstrable thing that is not first and foremost something else before it is an object. Phones, computers, mugs, and paper, for example, are only objects insofar as we seek to impose homogeneity and singularity upon a field defined by heterogeneity and multiplicity. That is, there is no such thing as an object, there are only a myriad of distinct material forms. This is not to say that objects are defined solely by particularity but rather to argue that what holds material forms together is not their status as objects but their mutual participation in assemblages (see below). The particular assemblage of computer, coffee mug, pen, and paper now on my desk is fundamental to the writing of this book, but it is inseparable from an array of other things — manufacturing equipment, global transport technologies, digital networks, pulp mills, coffee plantations — that it implicates. To focus on the object would be to ignore not only the particularity of material forms but also the extensive ties that link forms into assemblages.

Assemblages, as I will use the term here, are arrays of material forms that, to use Nicholas Thomas's (1991) evocative term, "entangle" Assemblages make our practices social, by mediating links between humans and material forms that are at once spatial — generating relationships of position and movement — and historical — demanding continual investment and attention. I will use the terms "object" and "thing" interchangeably throughout this book to refer to the heterogeneous components of assemblages. This is not to suggest that elsewhere distinctions between the terms might not be of consequence — a prominent thread in contemporary theory worries exactly this conceptual difference to productive ends (Bennett 2010: 5; Brown 2001: 4) — only that these arguments are not at stake here. What is at the center of concern instead is the assemblage.

Assemblages can embrace the organic and inorganic, the durable and ephemeral, and may envelop human bodies in forms such as mortal remains, chattel slaves, and transplanted organs. The assemblage thus flows into the assembly — the community of persons — across blurred rather than sharply drawn borders. The Promethean recognition requires carving out theoretical terrain where things can operate in ways that are uniquely their own, irreducible to anthropomorphic metaphors, but the edges of this conceptual space must necessarily be porous, allowing for the kinds of movement back and forth that generate complex relations. Assemblages are not simply congeries of materials but rather are constituted by material forms linked by distinctly social relationships with assemblies of humans that are likewise defined by the engagement. A person not defined by the assemblages that surround — both their presence and their absence — is, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle (Pol. 1253a1), either too bad or too good, either an exile from the real or a decorporealized divinity.