© ephemera 2010

ephemera editorial ISSN 1473-2866

www.ephemeraweb.org
theory & politics in organization volume 10(2): 90-94

The state of things

Steven D. Brown, Simon Lilley, Ming Lim and Stevphen Shukaitis

We delight in special requests and challenging commissions; our in-house designers and craftsmen
are experts at realising a client’s specific needs and desires. Whether the idea is ambitious or
whimsical, Asprey’s bespoke services have no limits. (Asprey’s of London)1

The social psychologist Mick Billig was once commissioned by the British
Psychological Society to write one of several short pieces by eminent figures in the field
responding to the public outcry that marked the days after the death of Princess Diana in
1997. Whilst the other responses dealt with such weighty matters as stereotyping,
emotional literacy and conspiracy theory, Billig pointed to one small, almost
insignificant detail. Found amongst the wreckage of the crash in Paris was a
personalised gold cigar cutter from Asprey’s of London. Billig ponders the significance
of this object. What does it tell us about the life of the ‘People’s Princess’ that she
would have considered this to be a meaningful gift? What does it tell us about the life of
an individual for whom trimming the ends of uncut cigars is such a chore that it requires
him to carry a special implement for the task, and one made of gold, no less? Billig then
uses an orthodox, but nevertheless apposite reading of Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ to
peel away the layers of meaning built up on the ill-fated cigar cutter. He points to the
process whereby this object came to circulate as a symbol in a social circle so very far
removed from the labour and lives of the people who extracted the gold from which it
was made.

Billig’s piece is a classic instance of finely honed critique. But it is also interesting for
another reason. It shares in the now common conceptual move of placing artefacts at the
heart of analysis. In this case the cigar trimmer ‘speaks’ to us directly, it cuts through
the mystifications involved in the post-hoc positioning of Diana as in any way close to
the hearts of ‘her’ people. What the analyst might need a great many words to
accomplish, the cigar trimmer does directly by saying what it is: a truly obscene
symbol, an absolutely tainted commodity. This kind of analysis demonstrates the extent
to which studies of material culture have, in the past two decades, created a space where
both classical and post-Marxian analysis can be rearticulated. The focus on artefacts
serves as the lynchpin which holds a revivified notion of political economy close to its
partner (and rival) category of cultural economy. At stake here is what artefacts actually
__________
1 This is taken directly from Asprey’s of London’s website – see http://www.asprey.com/bespoke-
services/.
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say when we allow them to speak to us. Do they tell of the various traumas of their
exploitative and violent birthing? Do they scream to us the real history of their
production that has been systematically repressed by the artifice of their
commodification? Or perhaps they are already a little more knowing, rather more
sophisticated in their appreciation of the network of relations which allow them to
perform themselves as ‘market objects’? Perhaps, when we give it voice in our analysis,
the cigar trimmer will perform its own auto-ironic deconstruction of cultural logic of the
market which ultimately placed at the scene of the Paris crash?

To some, it is, of course, the very height of theoretical over-exuberance to suggest that
artefacts ‘speak’ in any kind of way at all. We are on safer ground with the more modest
observation that social relations are highly mediated by the use of artefacts. As Michel
Serres has described at length, human relations considered in themselves are lacking in
the necessary ballast to hold together social order:
Our relationships, social bonds, would be as airy as clouds were there only contracts between
subjects. In fact, the object, specific to Hominidae, stabilizes our relationships, it slows down the
time of our revolutions. For an unstable band of baboons, social changes are flaring up every
minute. One could characterize their history as unbound, insanely so. The object, for us, makes our
history slow. (Serres, 1998: 87)

We delegate to objects the work of forming and maintaining the social bond. Describing
the process of this delegation – which is the task that Actor-Network Theory has set
itself – is simultaneously the recounting of a history that is made possible by our
relationship to artefacts. Whether it be sharing a dinner, parking restrictions, financial
transactions or mass communication, our capacity to speak and be heard by others in a
meaningful way passes through objects. They grant us the power to do the very things
we feel make us human. They give our speech its meaning, since it is through them that
we communicate. Some things can indeed only really be said with the gift of a solid
gold cigar cutter.

The rather limited powers of the human body and the reach of our otherwise narrowly
bounded cognition is vastly expanded when they are augmented by arrays of objects.
We can think and do things that are otherwise unimaginable through the affordances of
the object-world. How else could we be touched by the deaths of persons in places (and
times) that are otherwise remote to us? Artefacts enable a restructuring of the human.
They remake us as very different kinds of beings. Anthropologists and psychologists
have demonstrated this empirically for some time. To point to one specific body of
work, the concept of ‘situated cognition’ (Lave, 1988) deals with the transformation of
our powers of reasoning when different kinds of artefacts are made available. Mundane
tasks such as monitoring how much we eat are transformed when something as simple
as having the tools to measure the amounts of food stuffs we cook with are provided.
Once again, Serres’ (1995) work is instructive. He argues that the things we consider to
be great scientific-technical advances are underpinned by the constitution of a new
object-mediated relationship. The sun dial or ‘gnomon’, for instance, is revolutionary
not because of its role as a measure of time, but rather because it brings the heavens to
the earth. It makes the sun and the positions of the stars a calculable part of social
relations.

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Human history might then be told from the perspective of how artefacts have enabled
social, cultural and practical transformation. But is there not also a history of things to
be recounted? For they too have been busy. Today we live surrounded by
communication technologies, from RFIDs to Bluetooth devices, which are constantly
exchanging information and building new relations all around us and through us.
Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious
ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of
governance. That fateful car ride in Paris, for example, could be told equally well from
the perspective of networked information flows – from CCTV images, swipe cards,
short-wave radio transmissions and digital photographs. Whilst there is ample material
here to keep the most avid conspiracy theorist going, the real scandal is that these vast
networks of relations between things are no longer shocking. We are well aware that
artefacts track, record, calculate and anticipate our every action. From automated credit
ratings, biometrics and behavioural profiling through to the mundane recording of our
mobile phone signal or ATM transactions, our ‘bare life’ is wrapped in a digital cushion
that makes it available for as-yet scarcely imaginable kinds of relations and
transactions. Of late, things have been very busy indeed.

The more secure judgement, however, is to say that there is a kind of co-evolution of
people and things, where each lends its capacities to the other. The return of dialectical
reasoning, or indeed of a classical Marxian analysis of technology, is always possible
here. Marxists have long appreciated what can be done by adding electrification to
human relations, after all. But the conceptual language which seems best suited to the
task would appear to be that developed by Foucault and Deleuze with their twinned
notions of ‘dispositif’ and ‘agencement’. Both terms explicitly seek to fold together
people and things, codes and relations into arrangements following their own particular
logics and inhering in fields of power. An interesting conjunction can be found in the
uptake of Foucault and Deleuze in the work of Actor-Network Theory and some forms
of Autonomist thought. Hardt and Negri’s Deleuze is of course not the same as Latour’s
Deleuze, not least with respect to the role played by affective labour, but neither do they
inhabit entirely different conceptual universes.

Hardt and Negri’s (2000) work also suggests, through the notion of ‘anthropological
exodus’, that the co-evolution of people and things may well have reached some form
of critical moment. In some oft cited passages they allow themselves to speculate that
what may be required of the human body in the face of the dense thing-networks of
power may be nothing short of revolutionary:
In the dark world of cyberpunk fiction, for example, the freedom of self-fashioning is often
indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control. We certainly do need to change
our bodies and ourselves, and in perhaps a much more radical way than the cyberpunk authors
imagine… The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to
command. It needs a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the
regulations of a traditional sex life and so on. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 216)

Hardt and Negri are not the first to have seen the human body as ill-suited or ‘badly
designed’, as Antonin Artaud put it, to cope with the demands of a grand refusal of
codified life. Neither are they the first to point to the ‘modern-primitivism’ of ‘piercings
and tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 216) as
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forming the vanguard of social-corporeal transgression. But they do make a crucial link
between the state of things and the state of humans. If subjectivity is rendered into a
loose cloud of thoughts, memories and dispositions when it is articulated through
networks of technical relations, then there is no return possible to a version of
humanism that could catch and bottle the subjective, like a child clapping their hands to
trap smoke. A transhumanism that takes bodies and subjectivities as sites for
augmentation and experimentation – whether literally in the form of body modification,
or practically through affective labour – appears to be the escape route to follow.

Transhumanism has its own history, which often makes for disappointing reading. A
cursory engagement with the thought of the Extropian movement, for instance, is
enough to convince that the revolution will not transhumanised (see Terranova, 1996).
Body modification, or rather, the overcoming of the supposed limitations of the flesh,
such that subjectivity might be ‘uploaded’ into new material/informational modalities,
seems to be the hallucination of those dosed on capital in its purest forms. Put in more
mundane terms, the drive to remake the body, to render it more flexible, more creative
and hence better suited to the flows and mutations in capital itself is scarcely an act of
transgression. It will take a hell of a lot of piercings before the factory cannot find a use
for you. And the telos of many transhumanist arguments is to discover that the body has
always been the site where this movement of transgression and subsumption has been
played out. We have never been human, we have always been
transhumanist/cyborg/posthuman. Donna Haraway (1991) had cogently established that
point some years before Diana successfully transformed from corporeal being to pure
hallucinatory media-borg.

Haraway’s work in recent years has pointed to a different kind of transformation. The
shifts in the industrialization and commercialisation of the contemporary bio-sciences
do represent an epoch defining movement. When eating and drinking constitutes a
political act (e.g. GMO’s, bottled water), when sociality is electively defined through
association with others who share similar genetic or biological impairments or
enhancements (what Rabinow, 1992, called ‘biosociality’), and when we arrive at the
curious proposition that ‘mobilised bio-science’ may be able to create an ecological
utopia out of seeming disaster by altering the very terms of life (at a price), then the
riddle of the relation between the cultural and the economic no longer seems to suffice.
We are faced with a ‘biologization of political economy’. Here the difference between
people and things, bodies and commodities, seems very moot indeed. What ontological
categories can we conceivably drawn upon to make sense of such a monstrous
situation?

These special requests and challenging commissions were debated at the conference
The State of Things: Towards a political economy of artifice and artefacts organised by
the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) at the University of Leicester,
UK in Spring 2009. In this special issue we present a selection of papers from that
conference. In our call for papers, we asked contributors to consider potential links
between Actor-Network Theory and Autonomist thought, between these two varied
approaches to engaging with artefacts. It became apparent that such an approach
necessitated passing through the question of post- and trans-humanism. The five papers
collected here display a range of responses. Johan Söderberg and Adam Netzén offer a
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provocative juxtaposition of ANT and post-Marxism which they find equally lacking in
historicity. Anna Feigenbaum focuses on a specific artefact – the ‘global fence’ that
provides the technical support for a range of common exclusionary practices – to draw
out the value of ANT informed analysis of political struggle. Dimitris Papadopoulos
engages with Hardt and Negri’s anthropological exodus and sketches out an embodied
alter-ontology of ‘insurgent posthumanism’. Norah Campbell and Mike Saren approach
posthumanism from the direction of capital, and demonstrate that the ‘monstrous’
language of flow and becoming may not have the liberatory potential we often imagine.
Finally Elizabeth R. Johnson goes straight to the ‘belly of beast’ by exploring the
contradictions and possibilities offered by innovations in contemporary bio-science.

references Billig, M. (1997) ‘The princess and the paupers’, The psychologist, 10(11): 505-506.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Routledge.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rabinow, P. (1992) ‘Artificiality and enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality’, in J. Crary and S.
Kwinter (eds) Incorporations. New York: Zone.
Serres, M. (1995) ‘Gnomon: the beginnings of geometry in Greece’, in M. Serres (ed.) A history of
scientific thought. Oxford: Blackwell.
Serres, M. (1998) Genesis. Michigan: Michigan University Press.
Terranova, T. (1996) ‘Posthuman unbounded: artificial evolution and high-tech subcultures’, in G.
Robinson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds) FutureNatural: Nature,
science, culture. London: Routledge.

the editors Steve Brown is Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Leicester School
of Management and a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. His research interests
include studies of social remembering and forgetting.
Email: [email protected]

Simon Lilley is Professor of Information and Organisation at the University of Leicester School of
Management and a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. His research interests
turn around the relationships between agency, technology and performance, particularly the ways in
which such relationships can be understood through post-structural approaches to organisation.
E-mail: [email protected]

Ming Lim is Lecturer in Critical Marketing at the University of Leicester School of Management and a
member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. Her research is an ongoing project based on
the study of brands and consumption experiences at the edge of human experience, which draws upon
continental philosophy, comparative literature, critical and literary theory and the sociology of
information and communications technology.
Email: [email protected]

Stevphen Shukaitis is a member of the ephemera editorial collective.

Email: [email protected]

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