On Assemblages and Machines

The animated figures stand
Adorning every public street
And seem to breathe in stone, or
Move their marble feet.

(Pindar O.7: 95–97)

The series of mythic tales surrounding the titan Prometheus has become a wellspring for theoretical reflection on the articulation of things and humans, an Iron Age urtext for today's material turn (e.g., Bredekamp 1995; Kaufman-Osborn 1997; Sennett 2008). Aeschylus's version of the story, based on the account in Hesiod's Theogony, centers on the punishment of humanity's savior. Zeus, unimpressed by "witless" mortals, had resolved to destroy humanity (Aesch. PB: ln. 444; trans. Smyth). In order to save them, wily Prometheus instructed humans in the workings of the object world, teaching them how to use wood and brick to build homes, how to yoke animals to bear burdens and plow fields, how to harness horses and build boats to travel great distances, how to devise medicines to heal the sick, how to read the sun and stars to understand the seasons, how to discern portents in the flights of birds and other auguries, how to represent the world in numbers, and how to preserve the memory of these arts in letters (Aesch. PB: ln. 450–70). But it was the defiant titan's theft of fire from Olympus that doomed Prometheus. Zeus ordered that he be bound to the bare mountain rock of the distant Caucasus for his transgression. Humanity was saved, but we too were bound, chained ever after to labor and its instruments, an object world without which the species that Hannah Arendt (1958) described as "animal laborans" (cf. Sennett 2008: 6) would surely perish.

In Works and Days, Hesiod attended less to Prometheus's woes than to the consequences of humanity's transgression against Zeus. In retaliation for Prometheus's intervention, Zeus commanded Hephaestus to fashion Pandora "[to] mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face ... And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature" (Hes. WD: ln. 60–70; trans. Evelyn-White). Zeus bequeathed this unfortunate golem — a product of craft (Sennett 2008: 11) — on Epimetheus, Prometheus's brother, along with a jar containing all the ills, plagues, and miseries of the earth. Epimetheus was captivated by this gift of Olympus, misrecognizing Pandora's anthropomorphism for humanity, her "endowments" for gifts. Driven by curiosity, Pandora opened the jar and let out the evils therein, allowing "countless plagues" to "wander amongst men" (Hes. WD: ln. 100).

As the philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998: 186ff) has persuasively argued, the story of Prometheus alone makes little sense without the doubled figure of Epimetheus, who links the survival of humanity to its fall into the world of animal laborans. However, the mediating role in the story that ties together its key components — Prometheus's theft and Epimetheus's scourge — is played not by humans but by material things. In the first half of the story, objects serve as instructors to humankind, elevating the species from its rude state by teaching us crafts that are simultaneously material (e.g., how to build) and social (e.g., how to dwell). In the second half of the story, anthropomorphized material — a sentient compound of earth and water in human form — brings evil into the world. The caution in the Promethean cycle is not against the terrors of things acting per se but rather against things conscripted to act like, and appear like, humans, a la Pandora. This Promethean recognition is an archaeological insight, an acute awareness of the workings of things in human society (for Aeschylus, Prometheus's legacy) and a caution against conflating the operation of objects with the actions of humans (the mistake of Epimetheus when he welcomed Pandora).

Posthumanist philosophy has waged a powerful assault on the traditional hierarchy of things, arguing for a project of ontological leveling by pointing out how things from electrical grids (Bennett 2010) to Amazonian worms (Latour 1999) act agentively "like" humans. "A touch of anthropomorphism," Jane Bennett argues, "can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations" (Bennett 2010: 99). I am in sympathy with the political agenda that animates Bennett's intervention, an effort to check the "earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption" (Bennett 2010: ix) that have been fed by representations of a passive material world, ready for exploitation. But anthropomorphism inevitably leads directly back to anthropocentrism, reinscribing the categories of human action as the only conceivable form of action in the world. As the Promethean cycle makes clear, objects interact with us, but they act like us only at our peril. Instead of forcing things to behave like we do, our focus should instead be on understanding their forms of action. But if objects do not act like us, how do they operate?

THINGS AND OBJECTS

It is difficult to define the operation of the things that surround us when we have only a vague sense of what they are. Despite our aesthetic captivation by commodity forms from the ridiculous (e.g., the catalog of things advertised on late-night American television) to the sublime (e.g., the inventory of Gary Hustwit's 2009 documentary Objectified), despite the dependence of the global economy on colossal migrations of raw materials and finished products, and despite our dedication to negotiating social distinction through material diacritics, we lack even a basic census of the world of things. A recent study conducted in Seoul found that the average South Korean household contained more than 10,000 individual objects (Nojima 2005). To roughly generalize from these data would suggest that there are between 8 and 17 trillion objects in households around the world, to say nothing of the factories, government offices, military bases, museums, archaeological sites, and, of course, landfills, where generations of past things now pile up in a purgatory between disposal and decay (Rathje and Murphy 1992; Reno 2008). And this population of things continues to grow ineluctably. It is difficult to imagine a theorization of the material world that does not also chart what for lack of a better term we might call not demography or biography, but resography, an account of material composition and distribution, formation and decay, topology and technology.

More concerning than the absence of even basic resographies is the lack of...