2.1.1 Re-materialising social and cultural geography
This research follows efforts to re-materialise social and cultural geography (Jackson 2000; Lees 2002; Kearnes 2003; Anderson and Tolia-Kelly 2004). The ‘return to matter’
as a reaction to the dematerialising trends of the ‘cultural turn’ was a call for a return to material ‘things’ as opposed to discourse, narrative, semiotics and the visual. These ideas had dominated the academic imagination since the early 1970s when the cultural turn had shifted emphasis away from a positivist epistemology and towards a focus on meaning. What followed, was a revitalisation of geography by the development of a succession of critical perspectives over the 1980s and 1990s, including feminist and post-colonial geographies. Though these trends were welcomed, and are now well integrated into the discipline, they did not escape criticism. Nicky Gregson warned that the over-emphasis on meaning, identity, representation and ideology was in danger of side-lining studies grounded more firmly in material culture (1995, p. 139). Studies of material culture had long been part of traditional readings of cultural geography, and had received their own criticism as ‘object fetishism’ (Duncan 1990, p. 11) and in Gregory and Ley’s words “a celebration of the parochial [and] a contemplation of the bizarre”
(Gregory and Ley 1988, p. 116). However, as Jackson outlines, “there are good reasons for taking material culture seriously” (2000, pp. 10, 13), including the analysis of processes of commodification, social differentiation and the attribution of symbolic value.
Following its revalorisation, materiality has been important in investigations of the everyday, the past and the geographies of ‘becoming’ because it is both “tangible and intangible, visible and absent, decayed and in the process of becoming, evoking sentimentality and mundaneness” (Tolia-Kelly 2009, p. 500). Material cultures represent a focus on the ‘thingyness’ of the ‘bump-into-able’ world (Kearnes 2003), which are central to various forms of human experience and action. Scholarship responding to the material (re)turn has spread to such an extent “that its edges can already barely be glimpsed” (Anderson and Wiley 2009, p. 318). Most recently this work has explored:
spaces such as workplaces (Hurdley 2015), pet cemeteries (Schuurman and Redmalm 2019) and virtual worlds (Kinsely 2013); practices including knitting (Price 2015),
yellow-sticker shopping (Kelsey et al. 2019) and the care of things (Denis and Pontille 2015);
specific types of material culture such as mess (Löfgren 2017) and fashion (Crewe 2017); politics regarding sustainable consumption (Evans 2018) and conservation (DeSilvey 2017); the role of materiality in reflecting and constituting identities including childhood (Horton 2018), families (Holmes 2019), old age (Ranada and Hagberg 2014), and sexuality (Gorman-Murray 2017); the mobilities of motherhood (Boyer and Spinney 2016) and parcels (Burrell 2016); and emotions relating to inherited mementoes (Muzaini 2015), souvenirs (Haldrup 2017) and love objects (Moran and O'Brien 2014).
A particular clustering of consequence for this project has formed around a focus on meaningful practices of use and encounters with domestic objects and spaces. For instance a great deal of work has explored the significance of material culture in the home, from its placement and visibility in identity practices (Rose 2003; Gorman-Murray 2008; Peters 2011) to everyday experiences of ‘living with things’ (Gregson 2007).
Similar concerns are also being addressed in mobilities studies which attempt to understand how the (im)mobility of possessions impact upon experiences of home and belonging (Parrott 2012; Burrell 2016). Material culture has also become a sustained focus within studies of the life course, including research upon childhood and parenthood (Hecht 2001; Boyer and Spinney 2016; Waight and Boyer 2018), marriage and divorce (Löfgren 1997; Goode 2007), and ageing and bereavement (Hallam and Hockey 2001;
Smith and Ekerdt 2011). What this diverse scholarship has in common is a focus on how the biographies, histories and geographies of things and their (inter)connections with people and places really do matter (Miller 2010). This project seeks to locate stored materialities within the webs of meaning which place them as mattering (or not) in the lives of self-storage users.
Assemblage theory, actor-network theory (ANT) and affect theory have been at the forefront of geographers’ revalorisation of the material (or indeed the socio-material).
Given their foregrounding of the material, and the focus on this research on stored materiality it is worth pausing to understand and consider the application of each theory in turn.
Assemblage is a concept which goes back to French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and most notably their refined work A Thousand Plateaus (2013 [1980]).
They define assemblage as a mode of ordering and linking multiple heterogeneous entities so that they form a whole. Assemblage theory draws our attention to how the relations between parts are reformulated by components internal to the assemblage but also by parts exterior to them (Anderson 2017). There are no pre-determined hierarchies and no single organising principle behind assemblages, so all entities – whether humans, animals, things or matters – have the same ontological status to start with (Müller 2015,
p. 28). However, Elizabeth Grosz (1994, p. 167) clarifies that “is it not that world is without strata, totally flattened; rather, the hierarchies are not the result of substances and their nature and value but of modes of organisation of disparate substances”. Scholarship utilising assemblage theory allows for ‘problems’ to be decentred from the ontologically discrete individual or object of study to the agency that emerges between these parts in relation. For example, Allen’s work (2015) which implicates mobile phones as a part of a more-than-human assemblage that creates sexuality, and Renold’s paper (2014) which focusses on how the ‘horse-girl’ assemblage as a means through which young people can experience their power and desire.
There are considerable parallels between assemblage and actor-network theory (ANT).
ANT also conceives all entities as being on equal ontological footing from the outset and focusses on how the associations and relations established between them produce new actors and ways of acting. It is then the relations established between these entities that make the difference whether one becomes more powerful than the other (Müller 2015, 2017). Again, like assemblage, ANT foregrounds the processual nature of the socio-material, with Law specifying that “There is no social order. Rather, there are endless attempts at ordering” (1994, p. 101). Latour calls ANT a ‘sociology of associations’ (2005, p. 9) and it is these attempts to trace associations which underpins the approach.
Geographers have appropriated ideas from ANT to understand how material things (instead of being passive objects) coproduce socio-material realities and have agency (see Sayes 2014). Of particular relevance to this thesis, Epp and Price (2010) take an ANT approach to investigate the biography of a dining table over time as it interacts and transforms a network also comprised of family practices, spaces and other objects.7 ANT has provoked a series of critical assessments, some of which also apply to assemblage thinking. Whilst on the same page with Latour (2005) about the co-construction between humans and non-humans, Haraway (1992) critiques him for failing to acknowledge the importance of a priori power inequalities – gender, race, class, ethnicity – in the shaping of actor-networks. In a similar vein, ANT ignores social context unless it can be traced within networks. Routledge (2008) also argues that ANT neglects how different actants have different capacities to shape networks. Coming down in favour of recognising the importance of a priori power asymmetries and intentionality leads Routledge to give humans greater importance than things. This common critique of ANT and assemblage theory – that they ignore that humans are capable of intentions and pursue interests whereas things are not – is a pertinent criticism for this research.
Another methodological critique of ANT is its focus on “endless[ly describing] chains of
7 Epp and Price question why some cherished objects end up in storage whilst others retain an active role in our lives and found that the family table was still granted agency even while displaced.
associations without ever arriving at an explanation for the reasons and differences in network formation processes” (Müller 2015, p. 30 see also Collins and Yearley 1992).
Following traces wherever they lead was simply not possible in this research which was bound by the infrequency of self-storage users’ visits to their units (see section 3.1).
Furthermore, ANT fails to account for the how the researcher is implicated in fashioning ANT accounts of certain phenomena. As will be discussed in more detail, conducting research interviews imbued with emotion presents problems about researcher positionality, and discounting such an importance methodological issue does not work within this research project (section 3.4.4).
ANT and assemblage thinking have allowed researchers to articulate a sensitivity to the material interventions of matter in how agency and politics are constituted (Whatmore 2006), allowing a place for the ‘force of things’. This latter sentiment is the basis on which another materially-focussed theory – affect theory – is aligned. Affect is a set of dynamic processes which human and non-human bodies undergo as they encounter, experience and perform among other bodies. In this way affect theory prioritises the body as a means for making sense of the world. It seeks to address and examine evoked states which combine when our bodies sense and perceive, and in doing so render affects intelligible.
Essentially affect is temporally prior to its representational translation into a knowable emotion or feeling, “index[ing] a realm beyond talk, words and texts, beyond epistemic regimes, and beyond conscious representations and cognition” (Wetherell 2012, p. 19).
Counter to more anthropocentric, human-focused, accounts, affect theory has been used to address the relations between different material things more generally. For example, Anderson and Tolia-Kelly (2004) explore how material objects are related to and thought through, and Anderson and Wiley (2009) have examined the broader dynamics which underpin engagement and encounters between different material things.
Affectual geography’s drive to conceptualise the world beyond its representation has unsurprisingly been judged as “too abstract, too little touched by how people make sense of their lives, and therefore too ‘inhuman’, ungrounded, distancing, detached and, ironically, disembodied” for feminist and emotional geographers (Bondi 2005, p. 438 see also Nash 2000). I share this criticism as well as Pile’s problematisation of the approaches’ fundamental ‘hypocrisy’. Pile (2010, p. 9) identifies that because affects cannot be grasped, made known or represented this means that affectual geography is flawed, since “its archetypal ‘object of study’ – affect – cannot, by its own account be shown or understood”. Yet affectual geographers, drawing on non-representational theory, constantly evoke moments when affect is evident – be these smiles, laughter, anger, hope etc. – continually doing what they say cannot be done, thereby “re-present[ing] and re“re-present[ing] affect – and in language” (Pile 2010, p. 17 original
emphasis). Giving an example, Pile points to Latham and McCormack (2009) who make use of photographs in their study of Berlin but do not recognise doing so as a fundamentally representational practice. By choosing not to apply affect theory to this research I am not discounting the affective capacities of objects, or indeed that affect can be felt and shared. However, since research participants would only be able to describe any affects they perceived by representing them to me verbally, there was no means for me to personally grasp or understand them without some intermediate translation. I was affected by the combined forces and vitality of the participants, stored objects and self-storage unit but for the purposes of this research my experiences were side-lined in favour of the participants who had first-hand experience and emotional connections to the object of study.
Each of the above approaches (assemblage, ANT and affect) could have been usefully applied to this research project but this thesis argues instead for a return to ‘first generation materialism’. I suggest that the preoccupation of social and cultural geographers with forming new theoretical approaches and turns, has meant we rushed ahead from a crucial disciplinary junction where there is still much to be done and learnt.
So, counter to ‘popular trends’, this thesis will return to the recent past, bringing in older sets of conceptual ideas around the capacities of material things to be affected by and impact upon the social and emotional lives of people, whilst also acknowledging the impact more recent paradigms have had. I emulate the earlier work of Rose (2003), Tolia-Kelly (2004) and Cook (2004) in particular, as well as those geographers (such as Crewe (2011); Peters (2011); Horton and Kraftl (2012)) who have continued to do important research in the style established during the first wave of scholarship following the material turn. In this way, and following Whatmore’s argument (2006, p. 604), I argue that social and cultural geography should not only be influenced and generated by a succession of ‘new’ turns “but by the gathering force of constant re-turns to enduring preoccupations”.
2.1.2 Biographical things
Appadurai’s seminal book The Social Life of Things (1986) reasserted the prominence of the object in social enquiry. Along with other contributions in the volume (notably Kopytoff), Appadurai explores the conditions under which objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time. He concedes that things have no meaning “apart from those that human transactions, attributions and motivations endow them with” but goes on to argue that in order to understand processes of inscription (in their forms, uses and trajectories) it is necessary to follow the objects themselves (Appadurai 1986, p. 5).
Hence, inspired by Appadurai, this project takes the view that biographical objects have the capacity to act upon and inform transactions with human interpreters. Commodities,
as Igor Kopytoff (1986) points out, can be usefully regarded as having biographies, lives or life paths that can be followed and (partially) accounted for through their narration. In this processual view, the commodity phase of the life history of an object is only a fraction of its biography and objects may move in and out of the commodity state (just as they may move in and out of storage). ‘Biographical objects’ – enlivened by the memories and emotions endowed upon them – transgress the perceivable physical boundaries between persons and their things and show that possessions can go a long way in becoming surrogate selves (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Hoskins 1998). Things, therefore, stand in for the self thereby making it solid and knowable. For example, in Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives six women and men narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions, using these objects as “pivots for reflexivity and introspection [that allow for] auto-biography, self-discovery, [and] a way of knowing oneself through things” (Hoskins 1998, p. 198). What are very ordinary domestic objects have the capacity to illustrate intimate connections between people and things (see also Brown 2001; Turkle 2007).
As well as holding on to and portraying identity for knowledge of the self, possessions also act as vessels for memories including, but also beyond, personal histories. Forty (2004, p. 182) states that objects can become analogues of memory, which though
“formed in the mind, can be transferred to solid material objects, which can come to stand for memories and, by virtue of their durability, either prolong or preserve them indefinitely beyond their mental existence”. The objects, then, become “the closest thing to the memory of the moment”, their physicality acting as protection but also as “memory joggers to an emotional state or moment that their owners want to recapture” (Crewe 2011, p. 44). Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s book, The Meaning of Things (1981), derived from a realisation that questions relating to how people use material objects to define themselves had largely been neglected. As part of this, they discuss how psychic energy, or attention, is finite and therefore objects go some way in freeing up a person’s mind whilst still allowing them to excavate and revisit the memory at a later date. However, it is only when engaging with the object that the memory it ‘stands in’ for is ‘sparked’ (Dant 1999). Hallam and Hockey (2001, p. 50) suggest that objects often build up layers of meaning over time and in doing so “form histories of social events, relations and emotions that can be reanimated, denied or otherwise manipulated, depending upon the context of the object’s use”. These ideas come together in Turkle’s edited book, Evocative Objects (2007), in which essays reveal everyday objects as coming to matter through our intimate relations, as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relations and provoke new ideas.
When an object takes on personal significance or value beyond its use value it can be said to have deviated from its expected trajectory (Hoskins 1998, p. 195). Singularisation, sometimes known as appropriation or decommodification, refers to how consumers personalise and integrate objects into their lives (Wallendorf and Arnould 1988; Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Epp and Price 2010). These things are deemed to be representative of their identity – can be viewed as being ‘me’ (Miller 1987). The transformation of an object in becoming a personal effect “superimposes one layer of experience over another so that the original public shared meaning becomes obscured by the personal meaning [a possession] takes on in objectifying individuality” (Attfield 2000, p. 143). The post-commodity object then can mediate social transactions related to identity formation, so, as Komter describes, “things are a way to define who we are to ourselves and to others” (2001, p. 60). Objects are gathered for their ability to portray the identity traits the person wants to display and this development of self, extended through things, “can serve as means of individual differentiation… that make him or her stand out from others” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, p. 33, original emphasis). Objects also relate an individual to a group at a larger scale, for example Tolia-Kelly (2004, p. 315) found that whilst objects relate to individual biographies, they
“are simultaneously significant in stories of identity on national scales”. When objects are no longer portraying the identity a person wishes to display they may be disposed of, but many are hidden in storage spaces (perhaps including self-storage) where they are kept as personal records of who the person once was (see 2.4.1).
Objects are also decommodified when they are representative of significant relationships. Kopytoff (1986) contends that objects can be defined as non-human active social entities whose accumulated histories come about from the social interactions they are caught up in. Even when a person is removed from a situation his/her identity can be projected by the objects that, to a degree, contain his/her essence. Goffman (1971, p.
194) describes how some things are ‘tie-signs’, signifying social bonds even when neither end of the relationship is present (such as family photographs in the attic) or where only one end is present (like a tattooed name on an arm). Dant, extending Goffman’s work, conceptualises these objects as ‘mediators’, which carry “information, emotions, ideas and impressions that could have been communicated by speech, gesture, touch or expression” without relying on people being present (Dant 1999, p.
153). These material mediators, then, do not just contain evidence of relationships but also communicate them. Their communicative potential can be controlled by putting the objects out of sight, which may be desired following the loss of the person or relationship they materialise.
Since it is the non-physical elements of objects, the meanings “stored, layered and deposited within them” (Crewe 2011, p. 29), that makes them truly valuable and
‘biographical’ (Hoskins 1998), it follows then that their value as significant possessions can be seen as irrational to all but the possessor (what Benjamin (1999, p. 19) calls
‘connoisseur’s value’). Value can be seen to reside in unlikely places and is shaped by routine interactions with our objects (Gregson and Crewe 2003; Gregson 2007; Gregson et al. 2007b). The value of a thing “is irreducible to monetary worth, but rather rests in its social history and geography, in the traces of wear and use embedded within it, and in the particular category of good” (Crewe 2011, p. 29). The social, cultural, temporal and spatial specificity of an object is important because what something means depends on when, where, why and how we see it. By centralising those objects which have been pushed to the margins this research hopes to bring light to the everyday politics and practices of self-storage. Much of the work that has developed from Appadurai (1986)
‘connoisseur’s value’). Value can be seen to reside in unlikely places and is shaped by routine interactions with our objects (Gregson and Crewe 2003; Gregson 2007; Gregson et al. 2007b). The value of a thing “is irreducible to monetary worth, but rather rests in its social history and geography, in the traces of wear and use embedded within it, and in the particular category of good” (Crewe 2011, p. 29). The social, cultural, temporal and spatial specificity of an object is important because what something means depends on when, where, why and how we see it. By centralising those objects which have been pushed to the margins this research hopes to bring light to the everyday politics and practices of self-storage. Much of the work that has developed from Appadurai (1986)