Miller, Daniel (ed). Home Possessions.

Miller, Daniel (ed). Home Possessions. Material Culture behind Closed Doors. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001.  

An attempt to overcome what Miller calls structuralist theory of material culture embodied for him in Bourdieu’s writing. Suggests to move “deeper,” into a micro-ethnological analysis of material culture. This allows him to argue a structuralist argument is in many cases simplistic. While there’s a widely shared assumption that people take care of their house in order to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, actually “the home itself carried the burden of the discrepancies between its actual state at a given time and a wide range of aspirational ‘ideal homes’ that are generated out of much wider ideals that a household might have for itself.” (7) This ethnographic study of detailed strategies of home improvement lets home ‘speak’ for itself. Theories of home improvement from a simple perspective that the home “expresses” identities, relations, etc., are, thus, interpreted by Miller (quite correctly) as simplistic. He moves further on to argue that it’s more productive to regard the house as a dynamic process rather than a static backdrop,” that is, “the actual movement of people, the tension between the change in the home itself and the movement of the material culture.” (8)

So, against the grain of commonplace assumption in which the home is regarded as an expressive genre, Miller moves to examine the home as possessing  agency of its own. His own contribution looks at how these ideas become identify in stories of haunted houses. “Although we may seek to overthrow these, more often we develop a kind of negotiated compromise between that which is expressed by the house and that which we seek to express through the medium of the house.” (11)

Miller then moves to examine the relationship between the home and reproduction of social relations. He emphasizes the important of materiality of the home and material culture inside of it. Basically, the idea is that rather than being simply a form for embodying social relations, the home is “both a reflection of and a medium for the construction” of different social relations (in that case, of marriage) (13).

Alison J. Clarke in “The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration” considers “’home’ as a process, as opposed to an act of individual expressivity, in which past and future trajectories (inseparable from external abstractions such as ‘class’) are negotiated through fantasy and action, projection and interiorization.” (25) Examines the role of “ideal homes” in home improvements: “’ideal homes’ are not just escapist fantasy spaces conjured up to deal with the limitations of the materiality of ‘real’ homes, but rather are used as measures or as proactive forces that intermittently meld with or mock the reality of lived experience.” (27) How existing things acquire their own agency and are able to shutter or at least modify dreams. In the end, “the ideal home, as used to influence the construction of the actual home becomes an internalized vision of what othe people might think of one Far from being a site of crude emulation, the house itself actually becomes the ‘others’. The house objectifies the vision the occupants have of themselves in the eyes of others and as such it becomes an entity and process to live up, give time to, show off to.” (42)

Daniel Miller in his “Possessions” starts with addressing English ghost stories as a myth, in Levi-Stross’s sense, which objectifies social contradictions, only in this cast the social contradiction is not between people and people, but between people and things, as “the ghost may be said to be a partial anthropomorphism of the longer history of the house and of housing relative to its present inhabitants.” (109) He then explores how the house in which he lives haunts him, for “the house intimidates me [as] it represents precisely an aesthetic ability that I might aspire to but cannot achieve...” (110), while on the other hand the renovations that the previous owner had made are totally dissatisfactory to Miller’s taste, yet he doesn’t have time/finances to remake them. Miller then explores different ways in which people establish one’s relationship to the temporality of things, including of those that are much older than people are and can hope to be. His conclusion is that while people tend to use their homes “as a means of agency and the expression of social relations, my concern is to remind ourselves of the other side to this coin that quite often we are not the agents that create the material environment that becomes the medium of representation.” (112)

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology

Žižek, Slavoj.  The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008.

Starts with reviving Althusser, whose teaching, as Žižek argues, has been repressed in the intellectual circles, because (at least partly) of “his insistence on the fact that a certain cleft, a certain fissure, misrecognition characterizes the human condition as such.” (xxiv) Human culture is made of “structural mechanism(s) which is (are) producing the effect of subject as ideological misregcognition”; in other words, to become subject means to misrecognize ideology (for oneself). “In this perspective, the subject as such is constituted through a certain misrecognition: the process of ideological interprellation through which the subject ‘recognizes’ itself as the addressee in the calling up of the ideological cause implies necessarily a certain short circuit, an illusion of the type ‘I was already there’.” (xxv) Without these clefts, fissures and misrecognitions no culture is possible: “All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize – to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism...” (xxviii). Attempts to overcome this antagonism would only lead to totalitarianism, hence Žižek follows Laclau and Mouffe’s seemingly paradoxical argument that democracy can be pursued only by exploiting exactly these social antagonisms, on top of multiple cultural fissures and clefts. Argues that Hegel, who in his opinion is totally misinterpreted and his philosophy is not about total knowledge, provides a powerful criticism of totalizing ideas, while Lacan provides language and approaches to reveal ideological disguises of social antagonisms. Hence suggests a mutual reinterpretation of Hegel and Lacan in order to revive Marxist criticism of ideology.

Žižek starts the first chapter by arguing that “there is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedures of Marx and Freud – more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and of dreams.” (3) Both shift the focus on the form (of commodities and dreams): why certain processes occupy a specific form of a dream; why labour needs to assume the form of the value of a commodity – or, to reformulate this, why its social character can only be affirmed in the commodity form of its product. So, the form: Žižek returns to Freud to show that dreams as “forms” (the form of a dream) disguises not its “secret content” (there’s nothing interesting in it), but a third element, something which cannot be expressed in normal language—the unconscious desire articulated in the dream. Marx revealed the same mechanism in regard to the commodity as the commodity-form: it is, of course, important that it is labour that is the true source (read: content) of wealth, but it doesn’t explain why labour expresses its value in the commodity-form. There is the unconscious of the commodity-form which emanates from the form itself, not from its “labour-content.” The commodity implies abstraction (from the nature and from specific qualities of the commodity itself, as it enters relations of exchange), so it was the commodity which made abstract thinking (a-la Newtonian science of nature) possible. So, the very transcendental subject—a foundation of modern philosophy—is indebted to the commodity-form, without which it would not emerge. This pure abstraction, abstraction per se, is that unconscious of the commodity which makes Marxist analysis so important to critical theory.

In reality, this abstraction looks like the forms of thought which invade our subjective world from the outside and break the dualism of people’s “actual” thoughts and their objective experience: “the form of thought external to the thought itself – in short, some Other Scene external to the thought whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance.” (13) It is the symbolic order that provides these forms of thought. As the result, any activity – starting with trade up to philosophy – is based on blindness to this “third” element which is revealed through the form and offers “ready-to-use” solutions: “a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants.” (15)

As the result, Žižek offers a reinterpretation of ideology, which “is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’.” (15-16) Argues that it’s wrong to speak of our society as post-ideological: although people might recognize that their attitude to reality is structured by ideological illusions, the illusion is actually double: the “overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy.” (30) Therefore, “cynical distance is ust one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” (30)

Marxist analysis of commodity brings a new perspective on the opposition of persons and things: while people become disillusioned in many medieval beliefs, “the things (commodities) themselves believe in their place, instead of subjects: it is as if all their beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications, supposedly surmounted by the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the ‘social relations between things’.” (31) As the result, “the lesson... is above all that belief, far from being an ‘intimate’, purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality.” (33)

Here, Žižek returns to Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses to explore its link with forms and mechanisms of ideological interpellation: Ideological State Apparatuses internalize themselves in subject, producing “the effect of ideological belief in a Cause and the interconnecting effect of subjectivation.” (43) The problem is that ISA never fully internalize themselves into subjects: “there is always a residue, a leftover, a strain of traumatic irrationality and senseless sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority...” (43) – fits perfectly with late soviet experience of a seeming alienation of ideology from its population, which however brought no attacks on its legitimacy. Cf. also with Eric Santner’s My Own Private Germany where Daniel Paul Schreber’s mental illness is represented exactly as emanating from this “senseless traumatism” which is an unavoidable excess of the authority of the modern Law (or, more broadly, symbolic order).

Žižek develops this idea to argue that “ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernosto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.” (45) Ideological fantasy is, therefore, a necessary support of reality. Here’s the difference between Marxism (not Marx) and Lacan: “in the predominant Marxist perspective the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility.” (50)

The ideological field works and is able to secure the success of its appeals for obedience and sacrifice for their own sake (90) by linking numerous “floating signifiers” (proto-ideological elements) “into a unified field through the intervention of a certain “nodal point’ which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning.” (95) Ideological elements are floating (racists can be “elitist” and “outclassed”), but ‘quilting’ makes them part of the structured network of meaning which is ideology.

Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986

Two interesting ideas: that contemporary social and political forms do not simply construct myths, but rather the relationship between them is more complex, with certain mythical elements influencing social and political forms now, in a direct chronological order (history => present, not vice versa as social constructivists would argue). He also discusses, in his The Inquisitor as Anthropologist, of the inherently dialogical nature of even texts of inquisitors' investigations and interrogations, as the latter had to incorporate and translate semantic codes of suspects. 

Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Agenda: to explore “how emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies.” (1) Starts by examining the discourse of Britain as too emotional, to soft a nation which works as a mobilization instrument for nationalist groups. “Soft national body is a feminised body, which is ‘penetrated’ or ‘invaded’ by others.” (2) Emotions perform multiple social roles, including securing social hierarchies. (4)

Theoretical discussion of what emotions are: “Emotions are both about objects, which they hence shape, and are also shaped by contact with objects.” (7) These makes emotions (a) social and (b) affective, where “feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation.” (8) “Emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices.” (9)

“Affective economies” – an excellent metaphor describing how the circulation of emotions in any given society involves its own logic independent of the primary referents of emotions; affective economies provide symbolic resources to organize social reality (thus becoming, in Zizek’s terms, parts of the ideology) – Ahmed is drawing on different examples of hate in the British society to demonstrate how certain political groups use the discourse of hate to mobilize the society against immigration or to reinforce the institute of private property. Hate becomes an important social phenomenon, as different forms of hate form alliances. In “economies of hate,” the very existence of certain selves and communities depends on hate, as “hate is involved in the very negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, and between communities, where ‘others’ are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat.” (51) This relationship is somewhat more complex, actually, as “an ‘I’ that declares itself as hating an other... comes into existence by also declaring its love for that which is threatened by this imagined other (the nation, the community and so on).” (51)

A perfect quotation explaining the Soviet affection to imported commodities or affection of former prisoners of Finnish camps to their traumatic experience: “It is through affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the subject an identity that is apart from others (for example, as the real victim or as the threatened nation).” (52-53)

Affective politics of fear: “fear works to secure the relationship between... bodies.” (63) Like other forms of discourse, fear works as by referring to past “histories of association” (cf. Western construction of the Soviet Union as oriental and associated with disease during the Cold War).

Sheffer, Edith. Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain

Sheffer, Edith. Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Sheffer uses a geographic metaphor and object, Burned Bridge between Sonneberg and Neustadt, two towns in East and West Germany, respectively, to study how the Cold War border between two blocks, which divided Germany, became embodied in the German culture in general and local communities in particular, not simply like a dividing line, but as a kind of crooked mirror, a place of contrast, but also contact, a site which objectified relationships, alliances, sympathies and antipathies on both sides of the border. As Sheffer argues, “Burned Bridge offers a critical vantage point on the Cold War and Germany’s division,” (7) which allows to see how the East-West border became negotiated in social structures, political decisions and on the level of identities and how the East-West divide was created not just by decision makers in Moscow, New York, Bonn and Berlin, but also by ordinary people living on both sides of the border and internalizing the border in themselves.

The first chapter starts with an account of how two border towns of Sonneberg and Neustadt were occupied by Soviet and American forces, respectively, leading to the criminalization (including wide-spread rape) in both towns, but also to the use of occupying forces as suppliers of resources by the local populations (implying a certain accommodation and compromise) and consequent enforcement of measures to somehow supress this situation on behalf of military authorities on both sides, which included a stricter control over the border between American and Soviet sectors. Different measures (say, different ‘level’ of de-Nazification) also contributed to growing differences between the neighbouring towns.

The second chapter starts with an examination of large-scale population movement between Soviet and Western sectors (1.6 million people between October 1945 and June 1946), which led to official measures aimed to curb this flight from East Germany. A numerical increase of border guard, however, only increased problems, as American and German border guards either were arrogant or integrated very fast into local communities, so smuggling and people movement continued. The Soviet army regarded the border as transparent and violated it on numerous occasions; in general, without political decisions as to what to do with the border, keeping it and border communities safe was beyond control. Absence of legal regulations just increased illegality in the region. Local populations had to adapt to this situation, which changed the patterns of life & communication and reshaped the landscape in both communities. New ways of imagining and constructing the border also appeared, which marginalized and othered everything behind it.

Chapter three addresses the economic inequality between the two neighbouring regions, resulting from differing access to resources in Sonneberg and Neustadt. Local communities became actively engaged in these activities, which furthered the East-West division by stigmatizing Sonnebergers, who made up 90 to 95% of smugglers, as well as introducing new social tensions inside the communities (use of the language of moral economy to stigmatize border-crossers). This created a popular demand on both sides to introduce stricter measures of border control, especially in the East (Neustadters generally benefitted from the illegal trade, as well as from influx of qualified labor). The problem of illegal immigration was, however, pressing for both sides. Western media and public opinion marginalized and victimized them, fearing their burden for the economic and social system of West Germany. This contributed to the strengthening of the divide.

Chapter four starts with an examination of a football game in which the border became the midfield line. This triggered a chain of events (or, rather, objectified a trend), as American forces and Neustadters proved suspicious of this cross-border cooperation as staged and orchestrated by East German secret policy and threatening to their established order of things. Eastern inhabitants throughout the course of the 1949 summer organized several mass crossings of the border, undermining its status of a frontier and defying the efforts of both American and Soviet border guard to control their flow. At the same time, starting with 1949, the border became a site of increasing propaganda warfare, as Western and Soviet zones consolidated into states.

Chapter 5 looks at how East German regime attempted to seal the border between Neustadt and Sonneberg as early as 1952. It starts with the general political context, which led to the 1952 fortification of the border. She then discusses the forced deportations from border areas, especially focusing on how the lists of deportees changed to reflect local authorities’ and population’s views of whom to consider ‘unreliable’ elements. News or fears of deportation leading to suicides, flights to the West, open rebellions, but most commonly with scared submission. This also had an impact on those who stayed, by returning or petitioning or through them and their deportations being remembered in local communities. West German press reacted by describing these events as barbarity, furthering the divide by arguing that East Germans now live in an authoritarian state. During 1952 and 1953, almost 90 Sonnebergers defected a week, more than 2,000 in total.

Chapter 6 starts with the burning of Burned Bridge by neo-Nazies, assisted by East German border guards; Sheffer argues that the harsh reaction of authorities to this attempt at breaking the border marked their accommodation and decisiveness to enforce the East-West demand, not constitutive for their own statehood. It when explores changes following Stalin’s death, including a relative lack of any events during the uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Germany, as well as the introduction of a new form of cross-border communication, meetings across the barbed wire on Sundays. On the other side of the border, the growth of welfare contributed to the reinforcement of the border in people’s attitudes and discourse. New state regulations, especially on the Western side, hamper local initiatives to promote cross-border cooperation.

Chapter 7 explores East German techniques of surveillance and control over its citizens, as between 1952 and 1961 the country lost 2.5 million citizens (every seventh), usually young, educated and skilled. To prevent a demographic collapse, East German authorities started to address people’s needs, which opened the doors for manipulating the regime, pouring resources into people. Re-defining of fleeing compatriots as ‘problem’ one. Restriction of travel permits for West Germany (customizing travel), which allowed citizens for bargaining, as well as strained local administrative resources. Winning populations back (Rueckkehrers)-ca. 1 out of 1 refugees. Introduction of Stasi and techniques of self-surveillance, building of a panoptic society.

Chapter 8 addresses life in the Prohibited Zone, a rather privileged according to East German standards (a 15% bonus to salaries). Border’s permeation into nearby citizens life as a factor of its stability. Increased daily participation in border-defence practices. A certain militarization of East German borderland population. Cynical conformity. Increased Stasi activities. In sum, a new normalcy emerged out of this situation, to which people were perfectly adapted and which adapted people to itself.

Chapter 9 approaches the 1980s and argues that despite all this, the border remained a dynamic, uncertain space. She focuses on the ways people were crossing the border, arguing that often it was an impulsive act, a sign of a new subculture emerging here. Soldiers as another dynamic component of the borderland. The border itself as a volatile object, with moving mines, waste flowing across the border, etc.

Chapter 10 explores different ways in which the border was imagined; Sheffer here argues that the ways of imagining the border led to a further estrangement. Bourder tourism as a way to almost orientalise and certainly exoticise East Germany as a land behind the barbed wire. Stasi infiltration in the West. Relaxation of Eastern travel to the West as another source of tensions in East Germany. In the end, Sheffer argues that the border regime held stronger than elsewhere in East Germany and fell not as a result of cross-border contacts, but due to strains in other areas.

Conclusion: opening of the border in 1989 lead not only to the reunification of two Germanies, but to realization of decades-old prejudices, esp. those of West Germans about their Eastern compatriots.