Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T11:48:07.402Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Insignificance: On the Unobtrusiveness of Material Things

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2020

Julian Thomas
Julian Thomas*
Affiliation:
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, ManchesterM13 9PL, UK Email: julian.thomas@manchester.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In their introduction to the discussion of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumstances under which we operate, conditioning our expectations of how to proceed. Things are often not conspicuously meaningful, but unobtrusive or ‘hiding in plain sight’ and bringing about unacknowledged effects (Alvis 2017, 212). This state of affairs has been recognized by both the phenomenological tradition and the more recent ‘new materialisms’, but what I want to suggest in this contribution is that these perspectives implicitly indicate that things can be ‘incidental’ in a variety of subtly different ways.

Type
Special Section
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 149 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alvis, J.W., 2017. Making sense of Heidegger's ‘phenomenology of the inconspicuous’ or inapparent. Continental Philosophy Review 51, 211–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bennett, J., 2005. The North American blackout and the agency of assemblages. Public Culture 17, 445–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlin, I., 2013. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Braver, L., 2014. Heidegger: Thinking of being. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
DeLanda, M., 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, H., 1991. Being-In-The-World: A commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gabriel, M., 2014. Is Heidegger's turn a realist project? Meta 2014, 44–73.Google Scholar
Harman, G., 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.Google Scholar
Harman, G., 2010. Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and lectures. Winchester: Zero Books.Google Scholar
Harman, G., 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A new theory of everything. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M., 1962. Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie, J. & Robinson, E.). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M., 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York (NY): Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M., 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York (NY): Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Hintikka, J., 1995. The phenomenological dimension, in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, eds Smith, B. & Smith, D.W.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 78–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodder, I., 2011. Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 154–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, T., 2012. Toward an ecology of materials. Annual Reviews of Anthropology 41, 427–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, M., 2011. On the nature of empiricism in archaeology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 764–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, A.M. & Boivin, N., 2010. The malice of inanimate objects: material agency, in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, eds Hicks, D. & Beaudry, M.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 333–51.Google Scholar
Käufer, S., 2013. Temporality as the ontological sense of care, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, ed. Wrathall, M.A.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 338–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B., 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, D., 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Plymouth: AltaMira.Google Scholar
Protevi, J., 2012. Deleuze and life, in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, eds Smith, D.W. & Somers-Hall, H.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 239–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rae, G., 2013. Heidegger's influence on posthumanism: the destruction of metaphysics, technology and the overcoming of anthropocentrism. History of the Human Sciences 26, 1–19.Google Scholar
Williams, J., 2009. Ageing, perpetual perishing and the event as pure novelty: Péguy, Whitehead and Deleuze on time and history, in Deleuze and History, eds Bell, J.A. & Colebrook, C.. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 142–60.Google Scholar