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1 Introduction
The immaterial
Increasingly the world in which we live is characterized as being immaterial in nature. The internet, cyberspace, the fluidity of markets, and the digitization of most realms of human activity from architecture, to manufacturing, to imaging and tele-commuting all suggest that our activities are becoming less and less material and increasingly immaterial. In fact, as much as there are many kinds of materiality, there are also many forms of immateriality (Miller 2005b). This study attempts to engage with this increasing appreciation of the immaterial and to understand how we have dealt with this question not only in the present but also notably in the past at different times and in different contexts. It is the contention here following Hill (2006) that the immaterial is by no means a unique quality of late capitalism or modernity but a thoroughly ‘un-modern’ aspect of human activity that has a long, if poorly understood, history.
When we consider the immaterial, we must consider the way attachments are made within the material world – and how these attachments are implicated in producing things and people within their surroundings with profound implications for the way sociality is conceived and the varied sensuous attachments we make. However, the question pursued here is not the merely ephemeral in relation to the immaterial, or the much wider sense in which attachments tout court are formed – these go beyond any one study. More specifically, the question addressed here is focused on those aspects of human activity that consciously attempt to intervene within the material world in order to deny it – to actively reject or mortify it – which otherwise might come under the headings of iconoclasm, or asceticism or any other similar conscious act of rejection either at the level of the individual or at the level of the collective or state. This particular perspective is taken to tease out what is at stake in these unstable moments when the material world is actively rejected and how the immaterial, counterintuitively, is actually shaped, formed and materially sustained. The immaterial here, following Bois and Krauss (1997), is proposed as a particular and strategic aspect of the material – a strategic kind of sensuous engagement with the world along with many others. This is also why particular historical periods are examined, because of the access to discourse and materials related to these questions within historical scholarship when the rejection of the material world was a significant cultural issue. For this reason, the perspective taken here is decidedly multi-disciplinary, but is taken from the viewpoint of anthropological concerns within material culture. It attempts to synthesize various approaches to the anthropological study of the immaterial in order to bring together disparate objects produced within specific disciplinary concerns – philosophical, theological, socio-historical, art historical, literary, archaeological and anthropological – that have a direct bearing on our understandings of the immaterial. This is because the objects of analysis created within these disciplinary perspectives are very much themselves ‘artefacts’ of these approaches – the study of material culture itself being very much just such an ‘artefact’ of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and colonial responses (see Buchli 2002a; Schlanger 2006a, b; Strathern 1990). However, as I hope to demonstrate, our understandings of the immaterial are produced within and between these ‘artefacts’ of disciplinary knowledge. It is therefore necessary to arrange them together in order to begin to discern the different valences and dimensions, or what I will refer to as registers, within which the immaterial is understood and seen to function. Within conventional disciplinary boundaries, the significance of these shifting dimensions and valences are lost when it is only the art image, cognitive schema, literary genre, or actual durable ‘artefact’ of material culture that is the focus.
I would like to begin by offering two very different but quite comparable examples to start this discussion off. Both concern things that can be considered to be images, but that are also physical processes and distinctly material things. One is Byzantine, from the late ninth century. The example offered is the surviving commentary of the Patriarch Photios concerning the techniques by which the logos and the divinity of God can be represented (see Figure 1.1). The other is from the twentieth century from the IBM laboratories in Almaden, California (Barad 2007) and the techniques of STM (scanning tunnelling microscope) imaging technology by which the atom and the logo of IBM can be represented (see Figure 1.2). Both are discussions of visual images, but more importantly both are haptic representations that involve a novel reworking of our sensorium and our appreciation of what constitutes the material and the immaterial and the main themes covered by this study.
Barber notes how the Patriarch Photios provides a theological and epistemological discussion of what a devout Byzantine Christian is meant to experience when confronting an icon and what this experience produces – namely the presencing of the divine. The Patriarch Photios delivered this homily in 867 at the unveiling of the apsidal mosaic of the Enthroned Theotokos (Mother of God) in St. Sophia in Constantinople (Barber 2003: 135). He describes how the haptic visuality of the icon functions and the means by which the phenomenon of the co-presence of viewer, icon and divine prototype interact to presence the divine:
(Photios cited in Barber 2003: 136)
As Barber observes (2003: 136), the Patriarch Photios reiterates a long-held understanding of the relation of sight to touch that derives from an Aristotelian understanding of haptic visuality. This is very different from conventional modern understandings, where the rays of the object perceived actually touch and impress themselves on the mind of the perceiver like a seal on a piece of wax – the encounter is more familiar to us as touch rather than disembodied sight.
In turn, I want to offer a recent description of how the imperceptible and the immaterial might be presenced, provided by the philosopher of science Karen Barad (2007). She describes how the atom is visualized through an STM imaging microscope using an updated understanding of haptic visuality (Barad 2007: 358). She describes how a certain current enables the microscope to ‘see’ the atom by actually touching it with the tip of the microscope – seeing here becomes a form of touch. When the current is increased, the tip of the microscope attaches to the atom. It can then be moved, the current decreased and the atom placed and eventually rearranged into the IBM logo – which at the atomic level is not so much inscribed or written upon as literally built up to create a physical arrangement of atoms that form a sign representing the IBM logo. What was visual becomes tactile; in fact the two senses, typically divorced from one another since the Renaissance (see Classen 1993; Howes 2005; Ingold 2000; Ong 1967), are here united into the haptic manipulation and rearrangement of atoms in the universally identifiable logo of IBM in much the same way as we can understand the icon to work in the Patriarch Photios’ Aristotelian description. Word, image, sight and touch are unified in different but comparable ways in relation to the material and the immaterial. They are especially similar in the way they defy the conventional sensorium of the Renaissance of which we are still the inheritors. In both examples, the question of the relation between the material and the immaterial are negotiated in ways that challenge our traditional subject/object distinctions and our dominant hierarchies and asymmetries within the Western sensorium.
Recent work in the anthropology of the senses has had profound implications for the way in which we understand materiality (Howes 2005). Sense-based approaches have been extraordinarily useful in describing the different sensory dimensions in which we can understand materiality – significantly, it offers insights into how we can understand the immaterial as an aspect of these sensuous engagements. Crudely put, the post-Renaissance sensorium disaggregates and then privileges previously related senses such as forms of haptic vision in the example of the Patriarch Photios or the IBM Laboratories. It privileged a disembodied form of vision over other senses with the result that other sensually based forms of knowledge derived from touch and hearing are diminished in significance along with the people and things associated with those realms (e.g. children, foreigners, lower classes, women). Engaging in immaterial practices almost always involves the manipulation of our understandings of our senses in relation to the material. The immaterial is often a radical effect of our manipulation of the sensorium – such as the rendering of sight separate from touch – increasingly disembodied and immaterial at a higher level of social prestige and knowledge. The two examples from the Patriarch Photios in Constantinople and the IBM Laboratories in California offer a profound sense of how radical these effects are and how profoundly our conventional understanding of the sensorium can be reorganized and made to work with rather spectacular results – such as the ability to touch and effect the divine or the atom.
The study here focuses on the particularities of four contexts from different cultural and historical periods to investigate the cultural work performed through differing notions of the immaterial, thereby providing an arc in which one might be able to consider the two examples from the Patriarch Photios and IBM. All four contexts are inter-linked at various levels by their association with shifting and contested Western notions of materiality and immateriality and the conscious attempt to reject and transcend the physical world. And all four are marked by pronounced cultural controversies accessible through the historical record (and later through the ethnographic record) offering insights into the particular cultural contexts in which the relation of the material to the immaterial is formed. These four contexts are: (1) the tradition of early Christian asceticism; (2) the rise of Protestantism and the impact of new technologies such as typography and microscopy within the context of early merchant capitalism; (3) twentieth-century European responses to new industrialized technologies and the social impacts of the industrial revolution and rising capitalism – in particular the European avant-garde’s artistic and social project for the de-artefactualization of the material world under conditions of capitalism and state socialism; and (4) the latest attempts within this Western tradition examining the contemporary immaterial consequences of digitization, cyberspace and virtuality for our understandings of material culture and physical transcendence and its most recent manifestation in a case study of the rise of 3-D printing1 where the material and the immaterial are profoundly reconfigured within what has been heralded by some as a second industrial revolution.
The Christian tradition is arguably the pre-eminent starting point from which to consider the relation of the material to the immaterial, especially when we consider the distinctiveness of the Christian tradition in the wake of the monotheistic Judaic tradition which radically emphasizes the material dimension of the divine. The great apologist for images, St. John of Damascus, is instructive here:
( John of Damascus 2003: 29)
St. John of Damascus’ quote from his Three Treatises on the Divine Images is a spirited defence of icons within the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies. The observation is simple: the Christ figure is a material manifestation of the divinity of the one God. This is the great distinction that St. John of Damascus makes in relation to Judaism where the divine is distinctly apprehended in non-material ways. The figure of Christ suggested a new understanding of the material in the face of the Old Testament, which permits the use of images as material manifestations of the divine without being idolatrous. Idolatry, as it has been traditionally conceived within monotheistic Judaism, cannot be seen to work in the usual ways when Christ appears as a material flesh and blood manifestation of God. The material now takes on a new and controversial dimension that lies at the heart of the iconoclastic controversies during both the Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Protestant Reformation. In short, the availability of the material as the site where a Christian universalism is produced, emerges within this theological innovation that St. John of Damascus so ardently defends and where the relationship of the material to the immaterial as a problematic arguably has remained to this day.
Flows and power
To be able to ‘touch’ God and be moved by God (which is what an icon facilitates) or to be able to ‘touch’ the atom and move the atom (which is what STM imaging facilitates) are acts of power and the regulation of the flows of power that profoundly confound our received understandings of the senses, the visual, the physical, the immaterial and material. Our conventional understandings of these boundaries are irrevocably challenged. More importantly, what is at stake here is how we understand and regulate the flows of power – social, economic, political and divine – that are suggested by these two extreme examples. In particular, what is at stake here, which is what I aim to show in this study, are notions of selfhood and the means by which subjectivity and sociality are effected materially.
Anthropology and the immaterial
These last concerns are very much the terrain of anthropology and in particular the field of material culture studies. What Miller (2005b) terms the tyranny of the ‘subject’ in relation to the material in material culture studies and anthropology can also be seen as the ‘tyranny’ of the word – a tyranny that assumed power with the annus mirabilis that ushered in the ethnographic monograph and British social anthropology (see Strathern 1990; Buchli 2002a). This needs to be understood against the broader historical backdrop of the social sciences, which insisted that the material was what was inscribed or projected upon by the social and cultural – things were literally mere illustrations of the social, to paraphrase Strathern (1990: 38).
Our preoccupation with materiality has made us well attuned to degrees of materiality over degrees of immateriality. Worldly power and relative degrees of materiality – that is, the capacity to be more material than something or someone else – are usually associated with the control of flows of power (in the widest sense of the word, worldly, otherworldly, biologically, materially and politically). I hope to argue that this disposition of the material, though not entirely untrue, is a truth that is more an effect and artefact of the disciplinary frame in which these observations emerged and, more broadly, an artefact of the post-Renaissance sensorium in which we apprehend the world (Classen 1993; Classen and Howes 2006; Howes 2005; Ong 1967) – one that is confounded and challenged by the examples of the Byzantine icon and STM image just mentioned and those discussed within the broader analytical scope of the immaterial of this study.
Traditions of immateriality are often based on discerning the ‘reality’ behind the material (Miller 2005b: 21). What is significant lies beyond the realm of our immediate senses – though consider Classen and Howes (2006) regarding hierarchies of sense and hierarchies of knowledge. This study argues that this is in effect a regulation of how attachments are made, not to a thing, but that which is behind the ‘thing’ (e.g. the divine) – what can be rendered incorrigible (following Rorty 1970) and thereby become a fixed referent to which we commit for the regulation of our affairs. Questions of interiority and exteriority (Keane 2005) are implicated in terms of what one must attach oneself to, the thing (the thing constituted as ‘thingness’ in the tradition of Heidegger) or to something that is behind it (and in a certain way knowable by that thing which can be reworked to create an entirely new network of ethical regulatory flows, attachments and social relations all effected within historically specific sensoria).
Miller (2005b) notes the apparent paradoxicality of the immaterial. Its imputed paradoxicality is part of its ideological and practical efficacy. It is worth considering Miller’s point regarding the emperor having no clothes – that there really is nothing beneath the material that we apprehend: there is no interiority draped in material exteriority. Citing Keane, he argues that clothes and body are inseparable, that what one engages with is the clothed-subject (Miller 2005b). That subject is produced within these sensuous material settings and does not exist in advance to being ‘clothed’ – hence Miller’s call to dethrone the sovereign subject. However, this simile reveals a deeper truth of what is at stake here. What is significant is a particular relationship over conflicting notions of interiority and power related to the immaterial that reconfigure and regulate social relations such as we will see in the various examples discussed in this study, which range from the early Christian to the Marxist and Soviet. As Miller (2005b) astutely observes, our subjects stubbornly insist on the sort of dualisms that would enthrone the ‘subject’, which Miller is keen to dethrone within anthropology. It behoves us to better understand these ‘incorrigible’ reifications and what they do in terms of their ontological and social effects and pay such defunct metaphors their due honour (Miller 2005b, following Rorty 1991).
Anthropology of the senses and the immaterial
The so-called ‘sensual turn’ in response to the ‘linguistic turn’ suggested by Classen and Howes (2006: 161) suggests of course an attempt to unseat the ‘aural’ and the ‘visual’ into a new awareness of an expanded sensorium implicated in various forms of human knowledge in which the material is intimately and sensuously embedded. This emphasis on the most material aspects of materiality – e.g. touch, sound and taste – shifts our emphasis from the more traditionally transcendent immaterial spheres of understanding of the material where the ‘aural’ and ‘visual’ traditionally reigned in Western traditions, suggesting a challenge to established hierarchies of knowledge and the sensual dimensions in which the material is deemed to be most efficacious. This turn towards the sensual r...
