Objects of the material self — companion objects and/or little monsters 🤿👾
About my PhD project on digital media and ‘material selfhood’
I’m working on a research project that starts from the analytical distinction between the “social self” (human-to-human relations) and the “material self” (human-to-object relations) as I try to better understand the relationship between digital media (📱), a person (👤) and objects (🔨) — that is some kind of assemblage that constitutes the “digital-material self”. More specifically, I’m looking at the role digital media plays in the constitution of what philosopher and psychologist William James called the ‘material self’; that is, the relationship between a person’s understanding of self — his/her material belongings/possessions — or, according to James, all that a man/woman calls his/hers (1890).
In the context of our digital age, we have seen the extension of the human self into the realm of digital assets — including music, photo collections, video game artefacts and non fungible tokens (NFTs). Yet, the digitally mediated ‘narration’, ‘representation’ and ‘maintenance’ of the relationship between self and physical possessions is less studied and warrants further examination (Couldry and Hepp 2017).
Beginning from this perspective, my PhD project takes inspiration from and builds on studies of the digital dimension of the ‘social self’ (human-to-human relations) and the ‘material self’ (human-object relations) — see e.g. Bucher 2012, 2018; Harcourt 2015; Cheney-Lippold 2017; Couldry and Hepp 2017; Koopman 2019. So, my overarching objective is to shed new light on another dimension of the human self today; that is, the digital fabric or tissue of material selfhood — between self and physical objects.
Further, and to repeat a basic assumption behind everything I’m writing here and in my research: I think Reid Hoffman (the founder of Linkedin) is right in that “the fabric of people is people” (2020), but I want to underscore that it is also “things”. As Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan noted in a research paper from 1980 titled ‘The significance of the artifact’:
“Our fragile sense of self needs support, and this we get by having and possessing things because, to a large degree, we are what we have and possess”. (1980)
Based on this core assumption, that things and other people help to maintain a person’s sense of self, I turn my attention to digital media based on a another assumption, articulated here by media studies scholar, Kate O’Riordan:
“as the mediation of objects become more important in deciding the reality of things […] The underlying political question is about the constitution of things […] how and why some things come into the orbit of attention, investment and care, while others are shut out” (2016)
Following O’Riordan, I’m interested in understanding the role of digital media in shaping the direction of attention and care towards things. From this perspective, I want to enhance our understanding of how and to what extent digital formats shape people’s relationship to physical possessions in today’s digital age. What mediates our relationship with personal possessions once we have freighted an object from the marketplace, where it is recognized as a ‘commodity’, into the home where it is recognised — at least for a while — as ‘mine’ and ‘possession’?As you can see above, I think Jerry Seinfeld does a pretty awesome joke about what happens:
“This is the problem. There is too many things [… ]All things on earth, only exist in different stages of becoming garbage […] Your home is a garbage processing centre where you buy new things, bring them into your house, and, slowly crapify them over time [… ] Objects start at the highest level, visible in a living area. From there, it goes down to a closet, cupboard, or drawer. From the closet, it goes to the garage — one of the longest phases in trashification, but the most definite […] Really, eBay is the only thing that can save the object at this point”. (Seinfeld 2020).
In other words, as I have written in a previous essay, I think Seinfeld alludes to the notion that we are currently living in what philosopher Tristan Garcia has referred to as the “time of an epidemic of things”, which is to say that we are struggling with negative side effects of resource intensive consumption.
As Seinfeld notes about eBay, online marketplaces is the thing, and this point is underscored by notable venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) and NfX. Today, we have access to massive online marketplaces, including second-hand marketplaces like 1stdips, Depop, eBay, GOAT, Facebook Marketplace, Poshmark, TheReal, and Vestiare Collective to name a few. However, the growing number of second-hand marketplaces does not change the fact that a lot of consumer goods, especially textiles (EPA 2018; EU 2020), are turned into waste while the material footprint of global consumption continues to increase:
“Globally, domestic material consumption per capita, the total amount of materials directly used by an economy to meet its consumption needs, rose by more than 40 per cent from 2000 to 2017 — from 8.7 to 12.2 metric tons” (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021).
Here we get a different perspective on the material self — a quantified ‘material self’, that is on average 12.2 metric tons of ‘materials’, and this number brings the material self into conversation with issues of resource politics and environmental change. Multiple publications highlight the issue of waste and the need for a circular economy that produces less waste, so as to ensure resource efficiency and mitigation of negative impacts of waste on social and environmental well-being. Importantly, then, I want to reiterate Kate O’Riordan’s point, that:
“The underlying political question is about the constitution of things […] how and why some things come into the orbit of attention, investment and care, while others are shut out” (2015).
Still following O’Riordan, I wonder how and to what extent digital media decide how and why some physical possessions come into the orbit of attention, investment and care of the material self. That is, a material self which is situated amidst a political economy where digitisation can render materials reusable, worthy of attention, investment and care, or obsolete — devoid of care and bound for a landfill site or a waste incineration plant [1].
Monsters and/or companion objects?
In the context briefly described above, material possessions appear as contentious objects intertwined with two defining features of our current historical juncture:
(a) digitalization, meaning the multiplication of linkages between material things (atoms) and computational formats (bits) (Mitchell 2003; Shaviro 2003; Fuller 2003 and Dourish 2017).
(b) socio-environmental risk, meaning climate change and significant environmental degradation spurred by an unprecedented production and distribution of mutable material things-turned-waste, almost fait accompli (see e.g. Tischleder and Wasserman 2015; Kama 2015).
On one hand, material and digital quotidian objects appear in this context as instrumental resources endowed with capacities to generate socio-economic value as commodities, and support and improve the quality and meaning of everyday human life as companionesque nonhuman social entities (Knorr-Cetina 1997; Suchman 2004:19–20). In this view ‘humans depend on things’ (Hodder 2011:155) to support and maintain a sense of self.
On the other hand, consumer objects can also be framed as a fractious bunch of mis-treated(/-guided) monstrous nonhuman (human) artefacts with a disturbing capacity to wreak havoc on socio-ecological milieux and dissipate socio-economic value through stages of manufacturing, distribution, innovation, waste production, and waste treatment. From this perspective, things depend on humans and other things (like digital representation) to mediate and enact more caring, ‘convivial’ and less harmful modes of being and making in the world (Hodder 2011, 2014). As philosopher and art historian Soetsu Yanagi said about Japanese folk craft in the Beauty of Everyday Things:
“It is, in fact, our most trustworthy and reliable companion throughout our daily lives”(Yanagi 2018).
Or building on philosopher Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, and extending the concept to everyday objects such as a bicycle, media studies scholar Marcel O’Gorman writes:
“In When Species Meet, Haraway (2007) notes the common misconception that “when people hear the term companion species, they tend to start thinking about ‘companion animals,’ such as dogs, cats, horses, miniature donkeys, tropical fish, fancy bunnies, dying baby turtles, ant farms, parrots, tarantulas in harness and potbellied pigs” (17). This list, despite its heterogeneity, is too delimiting in Haraway’s view, which posits that the term companion species should be considered less “a category than a pointer to an ongoing ‘becoming with,’ . . . ”. It takes very little imagination, then, to add a bicycle to Haraway’s list of companions.” (O’Gorman 2015)
Here, I find O’Gorman’s provocation and echo of Yanagi’s point compelling: things (like a bicycle) are nonhuman human companions and an integral part of the more-than-human [2] meshwork or fabric that makes up human sociality and selfhood. What if we think about the material things we buy and live with as companion objects ? On a larger scale, what kinds of care and attention towards things could this sentiment enable? How do digital inventories like Strava’s My Gear for bikes and shoes, or Kallax for boardgames, re-configure human-object relations, including how we understand and care for companion objects?
Looking closer at this overall duality in the ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai 1986) — between the companionesque and monstrous — I’m fascinated by the role of digital media in shaping the shifting status of personal nonorganic companions and co-constituents of the ‘material self’ (James 1890), from categories of conviviality; like objects of ‘desire’, ‘resource’, ‘sentimentality’, ‘care’ to categories of ‘recalcitrance’, ‘monsters’, ’neglect’, and ’waste-cum-socio-ecological risk’ [3]. Indeed, as I’ve outlined in another essays, I’m inspired by the intersection of digital and material culture and the various scales at which the virtual and the physical continues to blend and co-evolve.
[1] Here it’s important to note that while waste-to-energy waste incineration is neither carbon neutral nor based entirely on non-recyclable resources. On the contrary. While waste-to-energy might be laudable for avoiding the vagaries of waste to landfill and providing much needed electricity and heat, CO2 emissions from waste-to-energy production is climbing in Europe and includes a large portion of recyclable materials that make up the slew of municipal solid waste (ZeroWasteEurope 2020).
[2] Using the term more-than-human in the sense of what Sarah J. Whatmore has referred to as a relational notion of a more-than-human, rather than posthuman, materially situated self (Whatmore 2002 see also Braun and Whatmore 2010).
[3] Beyond taking inspiration from Donna Haraway and O’Gorman in thinking about companion nonhuman artefacts, my perspective on “monsters” is very much inspired by Bruno Latour’s Frankenstein-inspired essay from 2014. In this essay, Latour argues that we must love our technologies or potential “monsters” that can turn against our own self interest like a rogue missile, AI, garbage or chemical debris bearing down on the well-being of people and other living species on planet Earth. Comparing our modern predicament of human-induced environmental degradation and climate change to the tragedy of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Latour proposes a political ecology for "hopeful monsters”; that is, in the words of Nicolas Mosley “things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them” (Mosley in A Sociology of Monsters. Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. J. Law 1991). Or in Latour’s own words: “What, then, should be the work of political ecology? It is, I believe, to modernize modernization, to borrow an expression proposed by Ulrich Beck. This challenge demands more of us than simply embracing technology and innovation. It requires exchanging the modernist notion of modernity for what I have called a “compositionist” one that sees the process of human development as neither liberation from Nature nor as a fall from it, but rather as a process of becoming ever-more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of nonhuman natures.”
