Paper short abstract:

Arguing against humanist and posthumanist strategies for 'emancipating' the thing in recent years (by analogy to earlier attempts to emancipate the colonial subject), this paper proposes a manifesto for allowing things to speak in their own voice - what I shall call their 'conceptual affordances'.

Paper long abstract:

A cogent take on the past decade's effervescence in the study of 'materiality' in the social sciences draws an analogy with post-colonial studies, and particularly the politically responsive concern with subaltern subjectivities (Fowles 2008, 2010). If much scholarship in the 1980s and '90s was directed towards theorising the 'agency' of colonial and post-colonial subjects, then the 2000s have been partly about making a similar move with respect to 'things'. In this paper I explore these 'emancipatory' moves in the recent literature on 'the rise of the thing', and argue that at most they manage to emancipate things by associating them with humans. Revisiting earlier arguments of my own in this vein (Henare et al 2007, Holbraad 2009), the latter half of the paper seeks to develop an analytical perspective that would allow things to be emancipated 'as such' - a manifesto for allowing things to speak to us in their own voice. Such an analytic, I argue, places the focus on things' conceptual affordances: the difference that things' material characteristics make to attempts to 'think' them. Among other examples, I make the case with reference to archaeological debates about skeuomorphism.