HARRE - Material Objects...

Material Objects in Social Worlds

Rom Harré

Introduction: Substances: Bits of Stuff and Material Things

PHILOSOPHERS USE the word ‘substance’ for two kinds of beings.Individual substances or just plain individuals are those beings whichare identifiable and re-identifiable in a domain of other beings of the

same sort. Individuals are semipermanent bearers of at least some group ofpermanent properties. But philosophers and lay people alike also use theword for stuff, for solids, liquids and gases. What is a ‘controlled substance’but a kind of stuff that people are not supposed to make, possess or ‘use’?The category to which this article is devoted is the common material object,a non-living individual that occupies space and time, and is capable ofinteracting with human beings. Some material things are passive in relationto people, other things are active. Whether something is passive or activeis largely story-relative. Stuff figures in this article only in so far as it comesin bits, chunks, droplets, samples and so on.

Social RealityThere are two presuppositions defining the conception of ‘the social’ thatanimate the analysis to follow.

1. A social world is an ephemeral attribute of a flow of symbolic interac-tions among active people competent in the conventions of a certaincultural milieu. The major mode of symbolic interaction for modernpeople is discursive, involving the performance of meaningful actions,such as making gestures, moving material stuff around and shaping it,using linguistic forms, and so on. Taken jointly the flow of individualactions constitutes social acts such as promising, pleading, entertaining,buying and selling, and so on. A social world just is a relatively coherentand enduring pattern of clusters of acts conforming to a certain looselybounded and unstable typology.

� Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 19(5/6): 23–33[0263-2764(200210)19:5/6;23–33;028404]

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2. Vygotsky’s (1986) insight, that no higher-order mental function exists forindividual cognition unless it has first existed in the public activities ofa social group to which that individual belongs, animates everything inthis article. Individual acts of recollection as remembering are possibleonly because an individual has been part of a family, say, and been drawninto conversations in which people have talked about the past. It is inthis way that such important distinctions as that between rememberingand fantasizing become established. Our abilities to categorize have thesame source, namely other people categorizing with us and for us.

1 and 2 together are close to Giddens’s principle of double structure,a socio-psychological pattern that is brought about through cyclicalprocesses of structuration. Competent people produce social worlds, fromwhich new members of a society acquire the competence to recreate them,more or less. The flow of social acts may have attributes unknown to andunintended by individual social actors.

There may be other notions of ‘the social’ that can play a useful partin coming to understand how people live in groups but the ones justsketched will suffice for the analysis of social objects to follow.

What Could be Meant by a Social Substance?By a ‘social substance’ I will mean a material stuff that belongs to a categorythat is defined in terms of the properties of some social world understoodin the ways just outlined. Thus the category ‘alcohol’ does not define a socialsubstance, while the category ‘communion wine’ does.

The latter category belongs in a system of categories including thosedefining certain social acts the totality of which is the complex and ever-changing social phenomenon ‘the Christian Church’.

Grammatical ModelsHow do we get the idea that there are any ‘social substances’? The charac-teristic grammatical mark of the existence of a substance is the use of a noun(substantive) in discourses about the domain in question. However, Wittgen-stein has warned us against taking superficial grammatical forms as authen-tic models of what there is. Everyday social talk, let alone social theory, isfull of grammatical substantives, but I will try to show that only those whichrefer to discursive acts are what they seem. Nouns like ‘flag’ or ‘dollar’ or‘shop’ are different from nouns like ‘water’, ‘sand’, ‘arm’ and the like. Thelatter do not require any particular social setting to complete their sense,while those in the former list do. They are indexicals. Social substances arepicked out by expressions the senses of which are incomplete unless relatedto a particular flow of social acts, a particular social world.

The Principle of Genesis by ConstructionNothing exists in the social world unless it has been introduced into thatworld by a human social and constructive act. By that I mean an act which

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fixes the category of the being in question, for instance a certain gesture asa greeting, the utterance of a certain form of words as a death sentence, andso on. The point of this article is to try to show that the same is true of howa piece of coloured cloth can serve as a national flag, a small metal disc asa coin, and so on. As Marx pointed out it is not technology that shapes asocial world, but the social arrangements that are required or adopted toimplement it. But contrary to what I think Marx thought there are indefi-nitely many social arrangements by which a technology, defined in physicalterms, can be implemented as an industrial or agricultural process by realhuman beings, with a history and traditions.

First Characterization of a Constructive ProcessThe discussion to follow depends on the following principle:

An object is transformed from a piece of stuff definable independently of anystory-line into a social object by its embedment in a narrative.

Fairy tales are full of such objects. It is not frivolous to draw on fairyand folk tales for useful material and for model cases. These tales repre-sent a kind of distillation of narrative conventions that have survived trans-lations and transformation, partly, of course, because we all know those ofour own cultures. It would be a very isolated child who had never heard ofSnow White or Little Red Riding Hood. Indians know the stories ofKrishna’s adventures, Maoris knew about Maui though they probably knowmore about Goldilocks these days, and so on. There is an important mirrorin Snow White, and Maui had a magic fish hook. In my wallet I have a magicpiece of plastic. Reflecting on these stories leads to another principle:

Material things have magic powers only in the contexts of the narratives inwhich they are embedded.

By a ‘magic power’ I mean a power that is not an effect of the physicalproperties of the thing in question, such as its shape, texture, chemicalcomposition and so on. The power of a form of words to set a war going isa ‘magic power’. So is the power of a set of numbers of a slip of plastic anda piece of writing as a signature to produce a Maserati Quattroporte in mygarage.

I turn now to exemplify the application of these principles in theseveral ways a material thing can be embedded in a narrative, taking myexamples from fairy tales.

Narrative-relative Categories1. Material things can serve as carriers of meaning, for the moment and in

the context of a story; for example, the porridge in Goldilocks and theThree Bears.

2. Material things may be potent in a special way in the context of the story;for example, the needle in Sleeping Beauty.

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3. Material things may have practical roles not, as it were, included in theiroriginal specification; for example, Rapunzel’s hair.

4. Material things can change categories within the story; for example, thestraw in Rumpelstiltskin changes from organic to metallic.

5. Material things can be impediments to the actions that are presented asproper in the story; for example, the tower in Rapunzel.

Note that the same kind of material thing can have a great many rolesopen to it; e.g. a needle can be related to sewing, a haystack, directionfinding, removing a splinter, pricking a finger, and so on. Any one of thesecould be given a magic force. Food is generally pretty dangerous in thesestories, a convention made much of by Lewis Caroll.

Narrative BindingHow are things bound into narratives? The three ways in which this couldhappen that are described in what follows seem quite obvious and there areno doubt others.

1. There are many cases of the Task/Tool Format. The narrative specifiesthe task and this predetermines the category of whatever is to serve as atool. This format allows the parts of someone’s body to be incorporatedin a narrative. Hands for warding off the evil eye (the Hand of Fatima inIslamic countries), the genitals for entertainment (as in Lady Chatterley’sLover), the sense organs for finding things (as in King Solomon’s Mines),the brain for doing sums (as in Pickwick Papers’s Mr Micawber), and soon. These tend to be story-relative. The very same organ of the very sameperson could be used for something else in another story or anotherepisode in the same story.

2. There are many cases of Established Conventions. For instance bits ofcoloured cloth become flags, clothes becomes uniforms, and so on. Thebits of coloured cloth that go to make a Union Jack may have different‘valencies’ from those they would have to make a Tricolour, but in orderto have different story-roles the construct must be The British Flag. Forexample if a group of protesters are going to burn some pieces of colouredcloth they had better be arranged in accordance with the convention thatmakes them this symbol rather than that.

3. There are also many cases of Informal Customs. For instance the role ofchocolates in gender relationship stories (remember the Black Magicadvertisements) is part of British male folk wisdom about women’s tastesand susceptibilities.

Not only are the choices of these modes of binding story-relative. Thatthey are modes of binding at all tends to be culture-relative. There arecultures without flags, others in which the evil eye is not a recognized dangerand so on. There are yet others in which chocolate figures only as a sauce(mole) for turkey (pavo).


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What is ‘An Object’?All this leads me to challenge the very idea of An Object, and the common-sense assumption of a Single Narrative determined by the overt characterof an episode. To develop this point further a new concept is required, theaffordance. This will allow for a material thing identified by its materialattributes to exist as more than one social object, each identified by its rolein a narrative.

A Drop of GrammarThere are several possibilities left open by logic for choice of concept todescribe the properties that material things have, in so far as they can enterinto narratives as social objects. The most useful seems to be a special kindof disposition the concept of which was developed by the psychologist, J.J.Gibson (1979). This is the concept of an affordance.

AffordancesIn Gibson’s original sense an affordance is a material disposition, the conse-quent of which is specified in human terms. The same material thing mayhave a great many different possible ways in which it can be used. Each isan affordance. Affordances are spatio-temporally located relative to wellidentified material things and states of affairs. Thus a floor affords walking,dancing, placing furniture; a window affords a view of the lake, an escapefrom a threat, a view for a peeping Tom; a knife affords cutting, threaten-ing, opening a window catch, and lots more.

Returning to social objects, it is important to remark that they usuallyhave multiple affordances, thus allowing for their multiple roles in a narra-tive. For instance a needle affords sewing, so a princess may pick it up, butit also affords finger pricking, so a princess may be magically put to sleep.The practical affordances enable the plot to get under way, making a placefor the magical or potent one. Cakes afford eating, but also in Alice inWonderland, shrinking and enlarging.

Multiple Context-relative AffordancesSince there is usually more than one narrative unfolding in any familiarstory with multiple story-lines, material things as potentially social objects,are Bohrian, that is have multiple context-bound affordances. I call themBohrian because like the affordances of subatomic set-ups they may havecontradictory manifestations or displays, for example a set-up can afford adisplay of particles or a display of waves, but not both at the same time andplace. In each case there is a common description, wholly mathematical forthe sub-atomic realm, and wholly physical for social objects.


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Types of Double Narrative

Type 1Both narratives use the same grammar, that is the same conventions forconstructing story lines.The material object involved in the paired narra-tives in the example is a metal band with some pieces of mineral insertedinto it. Once very common, objects of this type are still found quitefrequently. The folk designation used in the stores that sell these objects is‘engagement ring’.

a. His narrative: This will keep the other lads off. I’ve got the money, at leastit’s less than my Visa card credit limit. It will confirm what she said last night.And so on.

b. Her narrative: This will show the other girls in the office that I can get aman, and it will show some of my relatives too. It’s expensive so he must betaking all this seriously. And so on.

I know perfectly well that the story-lines I have used in these narra-tives sketches would be regarded by many among the readers of this articleas old-fashioned, out of touch and even sexist. I also know that this‘grammar’ is still very much alive for a great many people. The grammarprovides a common repertoire for both the characters in the vignette. Eachcan understand perfectly well what the other is thinking, whether or not thethoughts are explicitly voiced.

The relationships could be expressed diagrammatically as follows inFigure 1:

This set-up is not Bohrian since his narrative and her narrative, thoughdrawing on different social affordances of the metal object in question, arenot mutually contradictory.

Type 2Each narrative is based in a different ‘grammar’, the pairing being due tothe common material stuff, of which there exists a possible common descrip-tion intelligible to both authors. The common designation of the stuff is as‘medicine’. But that may conceal a world of differences as the concepts of‘medicine’ or ‘the pills’ are embedded in lay or professional discourses. Herewe come close to a Bohrian complementarity of affordances.

His narrative: Nm ç Grammar è Her narrative Nf

Common Material Description


Figure 1 Multiple Meanings of Metal Bands

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a. Medical narrative: This polyphase inhibitor will inhibit the production ofserotonin and reduce the overall anxiety level.

b. Lay narrative: These pills will probably stop me feeling so anxious all thetime, bursting into tears and so on.

It is not at all obvious what the relation between the two narratives ison any given occasion. They may be incompatible when combined into asingle story. Thus the occurrences of ‘anxious’ and ‘anxiety’ may be contra-dictory in that there may be no bodily feeling implicated in its use in themedical narrative.

In studies of the relation between sufferers, experts and support groupsin the context of Tourette’s Syndrome, Hamilton (personal communication)has shown how the grammar of the medical narrative has penetrated thegrammars of the lay narratives. This has been a two-stage process. It beganwith the two lay groups picking up a neuro-physiological account of thecauses of displays of tics and coprolalia, displacing lay descriptions. Morerecently the seeming heritability of a tendency to develop the condition hasled the lay groups still further away from the original lay descriptions onwhich Giles de Tourette based his diagnostic criteria. The gap has widenedto such an extent that someone can claim ‘Tourette’s’ on heritability groundsalone, even when he or she has never displayed any of the standardsymptoms. So the third party in this structure, so to say, the materia medica,is linked in quite complex and different ways to the dual narrative, as thegrammars have changed. Serotonin, let us say, is the stuff involved, but asit is drawn up into a social world as a social substance its grammar takesover the ordering of the entire narrative context for making sense of tics ascases of Tourette’s Syndrome.

This structure can be summed up diagrammatically in Figure 2.

Hamilton’s studies show that as ‘Tics’ have faded from their oncecentral role in the semantics of ‘Tourette’s’ so the grammar of the MedicalStory begins to be used more and more by all concerned, sufferers, supportgroups and medical professionals.1

Narrative PrioritiesIn the case of Tourette’s Syndrome we have an example of the power of thetechnical grammar to displace the lay grammar. It also illustrates how

Grammar 1 ç Lay Story _ Medical Story è Grammar 2

Pills Inhibitor

Tics: Grammar 1

é é


Figure 2 Contrary Meanings of Little Round Things

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unstable the everyday categorization of out-of-the-ordinary materialphenomena is. In cases where the entities are not material but discursive,such as Alzheimer’s Condition, the order of priority between lay and tech-nical grammars has recently been reversed by some authors (Sabat, 1994).But in most contexts in which things get drawn up into narratives, techni-cal grammars tend to have priority. We can see this in gardening and cookingprogrammes on the TV.

The Identity Criteria for NarrativesThere are always two identity questions tied up with each other when wereflect on the meanings of ‘same’. By what criteria do we decide that oneand the same something has survived over time? By what criteria do wedecide when two somethings are the same and when they are different?Where English has two senses of ‘same’, Spanish has two: ‘igual’ and‘mismo’. The two languages share ‘identical’ (‘identico’).

When are we hearing the continuation or next episode of the samestory? When does a story begin and when does it end? Is a sequel anotherstory or just more of the original tale? Is Return of the Jedi the same storyas Star Wars? A criterion could be adapted from Propp’s functions, by whichthe plot of any folk tale can be analysed (Propp, 1968 [1925]). When the30-odd Propp functions have been passed through that is the end of thattale, and, even if it is the same cast of characters, a new tale begins, withthe reappearance of Propp function I (a family member is absent).

When are two stories, distinct according to some criterion, neverthe-less the same story? Is Anna Karenina more or less the same story asMadame Bovary? Lévi-Strauss used binary oppositions and formal trans-formations of patterns of opposition to try to show that superficially differentstories were, in some essential way, the same story. In this sense Anna’s andEmma’s stories are the same. And they differ from the story of Pride andPrejudice, while all three differ from that of Romeo and Juliet.

Why this digression? If material things become social objects in so faras they are embedded in narratives then the question of whether this thesame or a different social object depends on whether and how this is thesame or a different story. If someone were to ask ‘What is the meaning of abridge as a social object?’ one would want to know whether it spanned theSeine or the River Kwai.

These points can be related back to the important concept of an affor-dance. Suppose one said that a material thing as a social object just is thetotality of those of its affordances that the embedding narrative makes avail-able to the protagonists. This would provide a general methodologicalformula for incorporating material things and structures into micro-sociology.

To take another example: how do we understand the retaining walls ofa prison sociologically? The above considerations suggest that there is nogeneral answer to the question. It depends on the story-line. For one whoconsiders himself or herself unjustly incarcerated the walls are barriers


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preventing entry into the world outside. For one who feels the prison is arefuge the materially identical walls hold back the encroaching world. Thisis a pretty banal observation but it is surprising how often it is overlooked.Even Foucault (1986) never quite makes this point. The windows of thePanopticon always afford surveillance, never a glimpse for the prisoner offellow human beings.

Limits on TransformationsSo far in this discussion the question of intrinsic limits on the take-up of amaterial thing into a symbolic system has been passed over. Can anythingbecome anything? Mount Everest and Olympus became the abode of theGods in the respective world pictures of Tibet and of the Homeric Greeks.Would the market place at Lhasa or the beach at Piraeus have done as well?Neither has the inaccessibility and scenic prominence that fitted the moun-tains for their symbolic role. There are material attributes of these entitiesthat open up and limit their use as social objects. In Bourdieu’s famous(1973) study of the Berber house, the proverbs that drew on the sexual signi-fier of the ridge pole resting in the fork of the vertical columns of the frame-work, once remarked on, seem entirely appropriate. The material propertiesof things constrain the uses to which such things can be put in the localsocial narratives.

This point needs rather careful qualification. It is true that whichbeings are picked out as individuals and which properties are regarded asimportant in the pursuit of the natural sciences are the products of beliefsystems. Goodman (1978) makes the point that it is a convention that theheavenly bodies are bounded in such a way that we see a universe of indi-vidual stars. However, it is also true that such a convention only serves todifferentiate classes of beings if the material reality so demarcated will allowit. The ocean affords currents but not individuals like stars. Once one seesthe heavens in terms of constellations, and that requires stars, further narra-tive transformations can occur. Arab star gazers were able to discern somedifferent constellations from those discerned by the Greeks, embedded indifferent narratives, but they also discerned some which involved the samegestalts but having a different narrative significance. Even now Orion tosome of the inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere is the Iron Pot to someof the peoples of the lands below the equator.

There is another line of argument that seems to offer counter examplesto the general thesis of this article. I have been arguing for the priority ofthe symbolic order over the material in the genesis of social things. It hasbeen claimed that the physical, chemical and biological attributes of thematerial environment constrain the possibilities of the social arrangementsrequired to effectively transform it for human needs. The tenor of myargument has been that what is taken as salient from the indefinitely openset of material features of an environment depends on the narrativesdominant at a certain time and place. To the contrary it might be claimed,for example, that the role of the priests in predicting the annual flooding of


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the Nile could be argued to be the source of the way the social arrange-ments for agricultural production in ancient Egypt were structured. Thegeography of the Nile valley is the indirect source of Pharaonic social order.

Social Motivations Around Material ThingsAs I argued in my study of social rule systems (Harré, 1993), it is never assimple as that. Human beings have always, so it seems, lived in a doublesocial order. One component consists of the social arrangements for main-taining life in such and such an environment. This is the practical orderand people have their locally proper places in such an order. The othercomponent consists of the social arrangements for creating hierarchies ofhonour and status. This is the expressive order. Material things can beunderstood in their full human significance only if their roles in both theseorders are identified. A Maserati Biturbo Quattroporte is a useful device forbringing the weekly groceries home from the supermarket. It is also a visibleexpression of wealth, style and so on. Almost everything material that hasa necessary place in the practical order of a culture also has a possible placein the expressive order. The narratives with which these orders are main-tained are very different, it goes almost without saying. It is worth notingthat something that was hard to make and so valuable in the practical ordermay be almost worthless in the complementary expressive order because itis thought vulgar or gross.

This distinction was the great insight of Thorstein Veblen (1899). It isto be seen in the narrative conventions of such publications as Hello! It isalso true that not everything that has a place in the expressive order has aplace in the associated practical order. As Veblen noted, breeds of dogs,once upon a time established for hunting, can become detached from thatrole and come to serve as accoutrements of style. As to social motivationsaround material things, I believe an overwhelming case can be made outfor the priority of the expressive order over the practical (Harré, 1993:192–203). I shall not argue that further in this discussion.

There is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and thejoint construction and management of meaning, including the meaning ofbits of stuff. To become relevant to human life material beings must be inter-preted for them to play a part in a human narrative. Interpretations requiregrammars that are historically and culturally local. Vygotsky (1986) hasshown how grammars are maintained through the generations, and so howinterpretations can remain stable for centuries. This gives the illusion ofsomething being real in the way that a mountain chain constraining terri-tories is real. Money is a case in point. Issuing and using a bank note isjust a performative act, a promise. So too is communion wine, the Stop sign,and so on. These things are social objects only within the dynamic framesof story-lines. It is the most ephemeral and ‘invisible’ product of humanaction that is really real, the narratives that are realized in some social order.Champagne is fermented grape juice, according to a vinicultural narrative.


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Served with caviar it is an expression of grandiloquence, but served withshepherd’s pie it is an expression of pretentiousness.

Note

1. Folk wisdom has it that analgesics, taken in large quantities, can be lethal. Ihave heard that Tylenol does not afford suicide since there is a tiny quantity of anemetic in each capsule. If a lethal dose is swallowed there is then enough emeticto induce vomiting.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1973) ‘The Berber House’, ch. 18 in M. Douglas (ed.) Rules andMeanings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Foucault, M. (1986) Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Gibson, J.J. (1979) An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA:Houghton Mifflin.Goodman, N. (1978) Ways of World Making. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.Harré, R. (1993) Social Being, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Propp, V. (1968 [1925]) The Morphology of the Folk Tale. Austin, TX: Universityof Texas Press.Sabat, R. (1994) ‘Excess Disability and Malignant Social Psychology: A Case Studyof Alzheimer’s Disease’, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 4:157–66.Veblen, T. (1899) A Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan.Vygotsky, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rom Harré is Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, Professor ofPsychology at Georgetown University, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophyat American University, Washington, DC. His published work includesstudies in the philosophy of the natural sciences such as Varieties of Realismand Great Scientific Experiments. He has been among the pioneers of the‘discursive’ approach in the human sciences. In Social Being, PersonalBeing and Physical Being he explored the role of rules and conventions invarious aspects of human cognition, while in Pronouns and People, withPeter Mühlhäusler and in The Singular Self he developed the thesis thatgrammar and the sense of self are intimately related.


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