I’m Arthur, and I’m currently on a fixed term employment contract making trays and trolleys for the fancier end of the hospitality industry, in a wood and metal workshop. I spent a year training as a joiner, following a design bachelor’s degree. I would like to make things that are useful to people. It is sometimes hard to say whether trays and trolleys for the fancier end of the hospitality industry are useful to people. But they are a piece of material culture.
That is a term I will often return to in my Web Logs: Material culture.
It is first and foremost, all the stuff that surrounds us. But crucially also, the second word ‘culture’ means it encompasses the uses, intentions, ethics, legalities, associations, and the societal structures of production that are not purely material.
In Marxist terms, this can be defined as the Base (the material terms of reproduction) and the Superstructure (the sociological entities constructed upon the Base). This dichotomy, it’s argued, is what societies are composed of and reproduced by.
The term ‘material culture’ allows me to understand an object as a component within the wider base/superstructure framework. As an artefact of material culture, an object becomes a subject worthy of cultural, historical, and material analysis, in a way it might not be as just another thing in the enormous set of things that exist. It becomes really valuable then, to follow the paths of objects, as they travel then from the factories in which they’re produced, into how they shape the superstructure, and then also the reverse of that process, how social relations effect the ever-continuing production of stuff. Through the lens of material culture, objects continually turn up in places that seem only social, or financial, or even mythical, but are in fact at least partly grounded in stuff. There were a lot of physical houses constructed in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
The point of say that is to say, the anchoring point for my analysis and interpretation of history and politics (how I would like the world to change) is for the way stuff is made and used to be changed. This encompasses consumer goods, infrastructure, waste, and all the infinite other categorisations you could make from the scope of our global material culture. I have yet to find that lensing my politics in this way - observing the interrelations of people and stuff - has led to a lack of ethical scope, some dark spot I can’t account for by proposing changes to the dynamics of those interrelations.
Making maps of stuff, making maps of cultures, making maps of politics (power). Making meaning that helps change making. I hope to be writing web logs weekly, and the prior two sentences could be used as the premise for these writings.
I had hoped that by training in making, I would feel some element of a vindication of praxis - the sense that by carefully choosing which medium to acquire skills in, I could help to make the world differently. But that doesn’t work, because I make within and beholden to the wider structure of economic relations of our world. So instead, my praxis must be found for now in directly political and cultural mediums. Even if, one day, in a material culture that operates differently to now, I think making can be wholeheartedly useful.