Two characters, Researcher Maartje Hoogsteyns (M1 + M2) and Sher Doruff (S1 and S2) , sit in the laboratory canteen on their tea break. They sit with three dimensional questions as they attempt to make sense of their world of work – their Object Research.

Researcher M1: So, what is a thing? What is the essence of things?
Or perhaps I should ask: what does it take to be a thing?

Researcher M2: I think its best if we approach these questions in two ways:
In the broad sense: What are things versus non-things, such as animals and humans
And in a narrower sense: How do we distinguish a specific thing, such as a coffee cup, from another thing or non-thing?
M2 continues: We might consider these two questions as our starting point for addressing the core questions and subjects of the ‘Object Research Lab’. Let us start with addressing the second question, as it is the most concrete. How do we distinguish this thing from other things?

Researcher M1: Relationality?

Researcher S1: That’s a good start. Perhaps we could be more specific and say relationality as propositions in the sense of mutual relations that fully articulate each other? Say, between the cup and the teaspoon?

M2: A search for the essence of a specific phenomenon, such as the teaspoon in front of us, is in fact a search for its relationships.
The characteristics of this spoon arise out of its relations (of resemblance and difference) with other phenomena. The spoon resembles a knife in the sense that we can both hold them in our hands -instead of a car or a house- and are meant to deal with food -instead of clothes or dirt-, yet they also differ as the spoon is used for scooping and a knife for cutting food. We only know what the properties of a spoon are because of the way it relates to other things and practices.

M1: But that also means, that a thing differs from another thing, as soon as it is related to different phenomena. For example, the role, properties and function of a knife used in the dining room, are very different from those of a knife that is used in a bank robbery. The range of relationships change and therefore the object itself. But how far should we take this line of thinking?
Anyway, it is clear that the essence of things is not fixed, but determined by relationships.

S1: It brings into question whether there is an ‘essence’ to speak of or not since an object’s relationships are in continuous flux.

M2: This, however, is not to say that things, in turn, do not exert any influence on their relational environment.
Things invite (affordances) and sometimes compel

S1: Yes they provoke, exert provocations. Whitehead calls these provocations ‘prehensions’. Even a stone, or an inorganic object, prehends its relations as it provokes an activity. So the cup may prehend the spoon may prehend the hand, etc….

M2: You see, both coffee cups, salad bowls and septic tanks function as containers. The hollow form of their design invites us to put something in them. In this, cups, bowls and tanks differ, for example, from spherical things. We are not forced to use a cup as a container. We could do all kinds of things with it, but in the cup resides a certain tendency or preference for a specific kind of use. It anticipates certain relationships with its environment, both its material environment and its human user.

[insert drawing of cups with signs]

Some things are by nature even compelling.

S2: Perhaps all things are compelling or provocative in small ways, at atomic levels as well as behavioral levels.

M2: As soon as we disturb a revolving door, we are forced to go along with its resolute, revolving motion (after an example of Latour 1997). The door has an influence on the speed with which we are able to walk, on the direction in which we move and the course of our conversation with a colleague, for example, and sometimes causes doubts about whether we should or should not go through the door together, in the same section.
In other words, objects can mobilize things and people (for their optimal functionality).
Moreover, in this way, things generate bonds between phenomena. A revolving door unites the desire of receptionists and cashiers not to be disturbed by drafts and cold with an opposite desire of large groups of people to enter the public building without continually having to close the door behind them. The revolving door thus consistently avoids a conflict situation and ensures stability.
In our Lab we could try to categorize objects (and their contexts) according to the degree to which they invite or compel us to do something or to which they bind phenomena.
The humility of things: in search of a critical moment

S1: Ah, humility. And often vulnerability. It’s intriguing to imagine things ‘searching’ … that might anticipate a degree of consciousness or panpsychism we should be a bit careful of. But certainly, things structurally couple with their environment or umwelt, as the stone or one of Yvonne Dröge Wendell’s ‘blobs’ couples some part of its surface to a ground through its relation to gravity.

M1: It is, however, often difficult to properly see what an object is, or indeed, with which phenomena it has relationships and how it exerts influence on its environment. For us, a revolving door is taken for granted, and as long as it functions properly, we are only barely aware that it ensures a convergence of conflicting desires.

S2: … or ‘feelings’/prehensions as Whitehead has speculated (Whitehead,1933/1967).
M2: Bruno Latour lists a number of situations in which we can see the many relations that are involved in the functionality of a thing (Latour 1999, Latour 2005). For example:
When something breaks, the revolving door, for example, a great deal becomes clear. Suddenly, it appears that the functioning of the door not only results from the interests of receptionists and customers (and binds them), but also depends on the expertise of the technical services, the availability of the materials from which the door was made, the costs of the repair and, for example the financial reserves of the door-owning-company.
In the design phase: designers, clients, users, materials and technology are all still debating what the object must be able to do and how that is to be realized. Everything is still open and exposed.
A change in the (relational) environment: in confrontation with new relationships, it suddenly becomes clear what a thing requires in order to function.
Thought experiments: how would the world look without that thing? What kind of work would we suddenly have to carry out? In the absence of a revolving door: all customers would have to think about closing the door after their entrance, or gender roles would arise where there would be the standard scuffle over who holds the door open for whom?

M1: But, taking something for granted can also be countered by designing an object that does not satisfy the expectations of the user. It sets them out on the wrong foot, or anticipates the opposite of what is usual or expected.

S1: Contingency, what can always be otherwise …

M1: The unexpected reveals the relations we normally presume and that therefore tend to escape our attention. Here, I think of Yvonne Droge Wendel's idea of designing pubic art that attracts criminality, instead of keeping it away.

S2: Objects can imperceptibly enable and perceptibly startle through disenabling or dysfunctional resistance.

But to expand a bit here on contingency. Since Whitehead is a hero of Latour’s I hope it’s ok to reference him again … he has this wonderful concept of ‘negative prehensions’ – the unfelt that is necessarily excluded from the felt event. They are a kind of contingent impress of what might have been but is not, that nonetheless effect the perceived relational activity. As a thought experiment we can imagine being compelled or provoked by one of Yvonne Dröge Wendell’s blob/things to pick it up. Our immediate experience is haptic and visual, we feel the texture of the fabric, see the stitching on the blue green form, feel its weight. We may not have heard the traffic outside or smelled the coffee brewing at that moment but they are part of the affective tonality of the experienced event.

Breeding autonomy/resistance

M2: I have another thought experiment for you.
On the one hand, a thing becomes more influential to the degree to which it is more embedded in our lives and in our relations with other things and people. The introduction of a new product, such as the mobile phone, is considered successful when people feel they need the product to function properly. The object is entwined with peoples’ daily practices and routines. Also, we notice that the more something is interwoven with the world, the more taken for granted and natural it becomes to us, and the more difficult it becomes to perceive its impact (think of the revolving door). Things are influential exactly because their humility (Daniel Miller 1987).
On the other hand, Latour points out that the more an object can escape our expectations, the more it can offer resistance to our interpretations, the more autonomous it becomes. Medical scientists spend all their time on experiments in which they anticipate deviant behaviour that can clarify (and reinforce) the contours of a bacteria or virus. Here, one provokes, develops resistance, so that the exterior can become an isolated, autonomous phenomenon. In short, when an object generates disorder, when it frustrates, brings about the unexpected, it becomes stronger, more essential and more independent. So what can we do with this strange tension, or with these contradictory forms of ‘activity’ of things?

S1: It tends to stimulate the discourse!

M1: Maybe this is a good moment to turn to the second question:
What are the differences between things and non-things such as people?

M1 continues: There is no division between people and things: we are hybrids.
In our daily lives, it does not seem difficult to distinguish between people and things. People live, feel, have obligations, desires and plans. Things do not live. They either function or not.
But if we pause to take a closer look, it quickly becomes more complicated. All that people are capable of changes when they involve things. When someone with poor eyesight has eyeglasses or contact lenses, he or she can move through the world differently, develop different ambitions, different desires and do different things (drive a car, read), which would all be impossible without these things. It is not simply the case that these people with eyeglasses or lenses are better able to exploit his or her (pre-existing) potential. In combination with these objects, he or she develops new possibilities entirely. The same is true for the automobile driver, the wine expert, the computer user, in short, for everyone who has relationships with things: there is a new actor, a hybrid. This actor can change at all levels, in terms of potential behaviour, perception, experience, social impact and morality.
From this perspective, there is no such thing as pure people (or human attributes) or pure things. They are always in relationship to one another, and as a result, they change into something completely new.

S2: from a philosophical perspective this hybridity is sometimes called the ‘quasi-‘ - quasi-object, quasi-subject. Though Latour is quite critical of the concept of ‘potential’, the ‘quasi-‘ allows for
a contingent potential I’m not willing to give up on just yet with the Latourian approach to the actant and the network.

Symmetry

M1 continues: It is often said in social science debates that we should observe people and things as symmetrical. You can interpret this statement in all kinds of ways. You can say that both people and things exert influence on the world, and in so doing, neither is subservient to the other. Both are active. With this, one is not saying that people and things are the same, but that we should consider them equally.

S1: reciprocity might be another way of approaching these relations that doesn’t normalise value across all situations.
M2: We can however, also play with the thought that things can assume human characteristics. This allows one to look at things even as living beings with souls. This is already done to a great degree, in anthropological studies of exceptional objects, such as religious relics, totems or influential works of art, for example the research tradition related to the work of Marcel Mauss.
A more unexpected way of playing with this idea is to attribute a human-like role to everyday things, such as that of disrupter, user, content provider, victim, researcher or co-producer.1)

M2: But what do these kinds of thought experiments reveal about your own perception of things and the influence they have on you and the world?

S1: Attributing anthropomorphic qualities to things is nearly unavoidable but it’s a very tricky area.
We cannot sidestep human consciousness even though we may choose to resist its hegemony; disavow an approach to the world of things as one of human access and perception alone. We do so through our thoughts. But the anthropomorphic danger is one of attributing value through a human measure. It would be more ethical, If I can say that, to attribute a doingness to things rather than a human quality: so disrupting rather than disrupter for example. Enabling may be the preferred description.

Hybrids versus animated things

M1: We have just described two ways in which the border between people and things becomes indistinct. In both cases, it results in the thing no longer being seen as a passive extension of (the wishes and objectives of) people. Instead, they change the world (and people).

M2: In the first case, the distinction separating people from things becomes blurred by the relationships that they have with one another, such as the person wearing eye-glasses (both are relational in nature). There are no pure people or pure things, hence there exist no pure human or non-human characteristics.

M1: In the second case, we consistently presume a difference between ‘human characteristics’ and ‘thing-like characteristics’, but we recognize that things can sometimes present themselves and behave as if they were people (such as totems or relics). These are two very different perspectives. Do we feel they are mutually exclusive?

S2: Do people have thing-like characteristics? Obviously. (“I am a rock. I am an island”) So there is reciprocity or symmetry in the second case but filtered through peopled perspectives which tends to subvert the conclusion. Are the two categories of people-thing relations mutually exclusive? Hmmm. I was struck in our conversation by Yvonne’s consistent use of the English term ‘blurb’ when she was speaking of a ‘blob’ thing. This is an easy translation mistake to make. But blurb, although a misnomer, presents a really intriguing naming tactic. A blurb, rather than a blob, is language-based – technically a short promotional description. It is the tag she places on her objects. The thing and its description have merged. I love thinking of these particular objects as blurbs. So the question remains. Are all actants blurbs?

Skills and techniques

M2: The most literal way that the barrier between person and thing can be removed is during the process of learning a technique or skill to interact with a thing. Here people and things literally touch one another and have to become a kind of flexible single unit. The distinctions have to be blurred.3) The more these skills of people and things grow, the more they irrevocably change and get to know one another in a new way. The wine expert learns to taste and smell nuances that others do not perceive. The wine becomes accessible to the expert in a different way. Each is changed by the other.

M2: But we always seem to focus on the process of acquiring skills. How do people actually unlearn? Can you liberate yourself from these intimate relationships with things? What happens in the case of a child soldier or a retiring dancer? And how is it done?

S2: Well, for example, unlearning the body’s acquired skills and styles in contemporary dance practice is very common. Young choreographers are interested in stripping the skilled body of its learned techniques to produce a body more receptive to creating new gestures rather than perfecting old patterns. A generation ago, typists needed to unlearn the typewriter keyboard to learn the computer keyboard. New technological objects often present unlearning situations.
There is no general recipe for its done. It’s always a situated process.

Normativity

M1: Many of these interactive skills were developed when we were very small: we learned how to relate to things. Do not sit on the table. Do not break glasses, etc. We acquire, as it were, a bodily vocabulary in regards to the material world. We get to know the outside world, our body and our inner world at the same time.4) We have to have some skills in order to survive, in both the practical and the social sense (such as eating, as well as driving a car). Everyone learns skills, but there are often hierarchies. One group had access to learning certain skills, while another does not. Herein lies a moral and cultural dimension which Pierre Bourdieu writes about.

[The researchers sigh, finish their tea, drunk from porcelain cups. They sit staring at each other and then get up and go through a door marked, ‘Object Research Lab’]
Starting text by Maartje Hoogsteyns (M1 + M2), adapted as a dialogue for the lab by collaborators of the lab.
And Sher Doruff (S1 and S2) adapted and extrapolated from lab conversations.

*Please note that parts of this text rely entirely on ideas associated with the so-called Actor Network Theory (ANT), an academic research method used by a small group of social scientists and philosophers, and especially on the work of sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour. This particular approach is enlightening for thinking about things. What is interesting here is how it might work outside its specific academic context (mainly Science and Technology Studies), in our wide group of artists, objects, curators, general public and diverse academic scholars.

Latour, B., 1997, De Berlijnse sleutel en andere lessen van een liefhebber van wetenschap en techniek, vert. door R.H. Dick Pels, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Van Gennep
Latour , B., 1999, Pandorah’s Hope. Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Latour, B., 2005, Re-assembling the social. An introduction to Actor Network-Theory (ANT), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North, 1967, Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press