1. 1
Personality objects
Paolo Volonté
In search of the missing masses
For some decades the social sciences have raised, albeit obliquely, a new problem.
They have begun to inquire as to the role that material objects should be attributed in
a thoroughgoing explanation of social dynamics. The social sciences previously
constructed their development in its entirety on the opposition between the world of
humans and the world of nature. They cultivated the notion that the former was so
distinct from the latter as to justify the founding of an autonomous disciplinary
approach: indeed, for a certain period they even called themselves the ‘human
sciences’. Although this assumption never dominated in the protracted disputes on
method typical of the historical-social sciences, it was nevertheless taken for granted
in their theoretical approaches and in their routine scientific practices – so much so
that the social sciences appropriated the philosophical terms of ‘individual’ and
‘subject’ to denote the focus of their inquiry.
A science of subjects, as sociology has conceived itself to be for more than a
century, refuses to acknowledge that objects can perform an active role. The latter
have been reduced to merely passive spectators of the events enacted on the stage of
history, where subjects (whether individual or collective makes no difference) are
always the protagonists. In the best of circumstances, objects have been reduced to
facts, that is, to products of human activity or of nature. In other cases they have
been conceived as instruments: for example, as means of production or as media,
that is, docile servants to the subject their master (individual or institutional, again it
makes no difference). In yet other cases they have been simply ignored, conceived
as mere objects, the frame of a picture, the stage set for the human drama, or again
as objects of value, and therefore respectfully left to economics to deal with.
For reasons that I cannot elaborate upon here, but which certainly have to do with
the transformations which have taken place in the everyday use of artifacts since the

2. 2
advent of mass production, and therefore with the change in the functions performed
by things in people’s lives and their interactions, today the attitude of many
sociologists towards the social role of objects has changed. In various quarters, it is
now being asked how inanimate things, and more generally non-humans, may
determine the social phenomena which we observe. Not only is it wondered where
the “missing masses” of the social structure are, as Bruno Latour (1992) enquired in
a well-known essay, but attempts are being made to understand how these non-
human masses are able to exert influence on the lives of humans, through what
mechanisms, and with what results. Analysis in this regard is highly diversified,
both in the hypotheses that it seeks to corroborate, and in the rhetorical devices that
it uses. Flanking the many followers of Latour and actor-network theory are
anthropologists inspired by the work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (1979),
sociologists of consumption imbued with the theories of Jean Baudrillard (1968 and
1972), Colin Campbell (1987) or Daniel Miller (1987), and then historians,
philosophers of science, and theorists of design, each with their own approach and
point of view.
The aim of this book is to make a new contribution to the debate. It is ‘new’ in its
theoretical approach, because conceptualizing the biography of objects brings to
light, it is argued, otherwise obscure aspects of social life. It is ‘new’ in its
methodological choice of combining scientific reflections with the histories of things
viewed from the standpoint of designers of objects. Here objects are not only
thought but also presented [?]. However, it is not my intention to introduce this book
of multiform content by various minds as if it were possible to confine within a
single container a multiplicity of stimuli and reflections, which instead move in
numerous unexpected directions. Rather, I shall put forward some general
considerations of general character that show the usefulness for the understanding of
society of an approach which conceives objects as the subjects of biographical
trajectories.
The ‘life’ of objects?

3. 3
Objects, or inanimate things, have histories which can be gathered and recounted.
Moreover – and this is the explicit thesis of the book – they have biographies. This
claim may be perplexing. How is it possible to narrate the lives of lifeless things? A
biography is the narrative ((γραφια) of someone’s life (βιοσ). So how can an
inanimate object have a life to narrate? To be sure, every object is born and every
object dies: all of them exist for a limited (though sometimes long) period of time,
during which they undergo transformations wrought by the surrounding world.
Hence they have ‘histories’ This consideration is, at bottom, extremely banal. Yet
the expression ‘biography’ should only be used in a metaphorical sense, by pure
analogy with the existential trajectory of every living being. It is essentially
expressionless/vacuous/?.
It is not by chance, in fact (and this will be seen when reading the essays in this
volume), that the life of objects used to be treated almost exclusively through the
artistic forms of discourse: literature, drama, the figurative arts. It entered Western
culture and our understanding of the world as a useful rhetorical device with which
to create a connection between human existence and that of things, the purpose
being usually to recount something new about human existence, rather than about
the life of things. The analogy created by this device with objects expands
perception of the lives of subjects. Things are treated as being mouthpieces for
people.
Analysing the biographies of objects within the social sciences means something
different. It is an invitation to take seriously the idea that things have lives of their
own. Not, of course, in the animistic sense of the expression, but rather in the
sociological one. We must take seriously the idea that material objects have their
own social lives. Hence they should be considered, in explanation of the workings of
society and of individual social phenomena, as subjects able to contribute to
collective processes of reality-production. And taking this idea seriously entails
being prepared to use scientific methods to gather empirical evidence on this social
life of things.

4. 4
In what follows I shall address two tasks in particular: firstly, I shall seek to
describe (very briefly) how the notion of the biography of objects first arose and
how it has been treated since then; secondly, I shall discuss what I consider to be the
main features of the biographies of objects, and which I shall propose as possible
topics for further analysis.
Going beyond the anthropocentric view
The interest of social scientists in objects understood as subjects with their own lives
dates back to the 1970s. By this I mean an interest in objects not only as entities that
pass through conception, birth, various life-phases, death and decomposition, but
also as social subjects able to modify the system of human interactions with their
presence. Previously – probably also because of the scant consideration made of the
design disciplines – objects entered the domain of the human and social sciences
along access routes of another kind.
There was first the high road of Marxism, which regarded objects as essentially the
fruits of human labour, and therefore as products ready for either use or exchange.
The Marxian theory that distinguishes and opposes use value and exchange value –
at least as it is set out in Capital (1867, It. transl. 67-115) – was based on the
relationship between the object and the work necessary to produce it. An object is
essentially a product, and what happens to it after its input into the world is
important only insofar as whether it is used to satisfy the need for which it has been
created, or whether its unexpected destiny is to become a commodity. The ‘original
sin’ of the transformation of objects into commodities – that is, into goods available
for exchange – was the fact that workers in early industrial society were unable to
consume the goods that they had helped produce. The important issue, therefore,
was not objects and their transformations but the presence or absence of a
correlation between the producer and the consumer. It was the asymmetry between
these two subjects that turned commodities into devices enabling some social classes
to dominate others.

5. 5
There was then the entry route of semiology and its sociological reinterpretation.
This gave rise to the ambitious project of describing the system of objects as a
particular type of semiotic system – as a language parallel and analogous to the
system of natural language. Roland Barthes (1964) first developed this idea,
applying it in some of his essays to concrete cases (fashion, automobiles). His
approach was that of a semiologist, so that he privileged meanings and their
structural laws over human behaviour and the effects produced by the use of things
on the collectivity using them. Jean Baudrillard (1972) then examined this latter
aspect more thoroughly, showing that actors in the society contemporaneous to him
– at the beginning of what thereafter came to be called late modernity (or
postmodern society) – used objects as status symbols with which to achieve upward
social mobility,. This conferred a particular value on objects which Baudrillard
called “sign value” and therefore gave them a role in social interactions.
Finally, a third route was followed by anthropology and archaeology. These for long
considered the products of material culture to be testimonies to social structures and
cultural processes no longer visible (archaeology) or not yet understandable
(anthropology). As Bonnot points out in his contribution to this book, this approach
mainly treated objects in positivist terms as affording reliable evidence or
manifestations of a culture and its institutions – that is, of humans’ lives in societies
not amenable to our cognition (see also Gabus 1965). The term most overtly
evincing this conception of objects is ‘fetish’. For long after its introduction into
proto-anthropological studies by de Brosses (1760), the notion of ‘fetish’ was used
by Western science to explain the claim by certain objects that they possessed lives
of their own. Such objects were artifices, fictitious gods, or enchanted objects
because they had been made such by humans. They were therefore devices and
inventions of the subjects whose imprint they bore (Apter and Pietz 1993; see also
Latour 1996 and 2002, as well as Dant 1999, 40-59). To the eyes of civilized
Westerners, fetishes were not the animate objects that they claimed to be, but clues
to the mind, and therefore to the culture, of the subjects who had produced them.

6. 6
These various views on material things share underlying anthropocentric
assumption: things are raw materials to which someone (a human subject) has given
a specific form to satisfy some sort of need. In and of themselves they are
uninteresting, because they exist in the world of humans only as furniture, as frames
for social interactions. For instance, a dining table prevents me from getting closer
to, or further away from [in che modo?], the person opposite me, but it neither
creates nor determines my relationship with him, which is independent of it. The
table merely influences that relationship, favouring or obstructing it. What makes
things interesting, therefore, is human beings: the fact that they assume material
things in their world and use them in some way. They use them, for example, as
commodities of exchange to produce and exchange wealth, thereby preserving
privileges and inequalities. Or they use them as status symbols to produce and
communicate class membership, thus reproducing power relations constituted and
massified by consumption goods (for example, by employing objects to signal
differentiation by their marginal differences from the corresponding model: see
Baudrillard 1968 and 1974, It. transl. 89-104). Or, finally, people use objects as
artifacts of material culture in order to engage in quotidian activities and celebrate
the rituals which structure everyday life by ordering social relationships, the use of
space and time, food consumption, etc. All three of these approaches are interested
in objects only as expressions of the thoughts, actions, and human relationships
which have given life to them. On the one side stands the human world, namely the
world of values, ethics, art, religion and, in general, the spirit able to produce goods
with no practical purpose but inestimable spiritual value. This is the world of wilful
action and meaning production. On the other side stands the world of things, of
matter, and therefore of the signs left by the passage of humans; the world of the
objects which people use to engage in communal life and employ in the difficult
work of stabilizing social relations, collective beliefs, and common institutions. The
former is the world of life; the latter is an inanimate and arid world.
But the world of objects is not like this. A table does more than merely influence a
human relationship from outside; it can also create that relationship and shape it.

7. 7
Tables – horizontal and stable flat surfaces – enable human beings to place objects
on a support surface without having to bend to the ground. They perform the second
and equally important function of making themselves immediately recognizable
from a distance as support surfaces. There is no need to state this with a notice, nor
to accompany it with an instructions booklet. Thanks to these characteristics, a table
also functions as a pole of attraction, an object which captures, if not people’s
attention, then certainly their bodies. A table placed in any setting soon becomes the
prime focus for interaction among human beings in the vicinity. A table attracts
bodies, it contains them within a circumscribed space defined not by an external
border but by a central hub. It thus creates relations among the subjects who sit
down at it or gather around it. A table in a factory canteen, in a hotel lobby, or in a
woodland clearing creates acquaintance and even friendship among people who
have not deliberately sought each other out, but have been attracted and set in
relation solely by the table’s presence. The table acts socially, not in representation
of the person who has put it in that place, but by virtue of its personality. Its
presence in the world, the social role that it performs, do not have the sense of mere
testimony to already-existing human actions or relationships. On the contrary, tables
are part of the human drama as characters in a certain sense enfranchised.
The same applies when objects incorporate an appreciable technological content,
as Bruno Latour showed in masterly manner when describing the automatic door
closer (Latour 1992). Objects of this kind do not merely incorporate a series of
functions and behaviours that humans delegate to them because they cannot perform
them by themselves, or cannot delegate them to other humans. Conversely,
technological objects prescribe (Akrich 1992, It. trans., 58) particular patterns of
behaviour for humans; and such behavioural prescriptions are not always those
anticipated, desired, or inscribed in objects by their producers. Objects, in short, act
as autonomous subjects. Of course, an automatic door closer incorporates part of the
work of an usher. But, as already happens with an usher, the door-closer also
imposes particular forms of behaviour on the person passing through the door; it
expresses “role expectations” which must be fulfilled (Latour himself underlines the

8. 8
analogy between the two concepts: see Latour 1992, It. transl., 121): a certain
trajectory in space, a certain speed of passage through the doorway, certain
movements of the hands or other parts of the body. But the most important aspect is
that the prescriptions which an object enjoins on its human interlocutors are not
usually referable to the situation that its designer and producer originally envisaged
and inscribed in the object. The object is not a mere extension of the body and the
will of one or more humans; rather, like a puppet, it possesses its own personality
liable to surprise the puppeteer and induce him or her to make unexpected and even
unwanted choices. Social actors are taken over by the things which they themselves
have fabricated (Latour 2002, 220).
An object, therefore, and not only one with an appreciable technological content,
is endowed with a personality – with a specific character – and this objectual
personality interacts with those of humans to create a close-knit network of social
relationships in which objects are protagonists. Thoroughly understanding any social
phenomenon, whether microsocial (interaction at a post office counter) or
macrosocial (the national liberation movements of the 1970s), requires examination
of the role performed in it by material objects (the glass screen at the counter, the
Kalashnikov in the hands of the revolutionary). But the position occupied by an
object in a social situation, and therefore the role that it performs, is not defined a
priori; nor does it depend solely on the contingent context. It also depends on the
history of the events in which the object has participated, and which have left an
indelible impression on it. At times, these are physical imprints on the material
substratum (the right breast of the statue of Juliet facing the entrance to the Capulet
house in Verona bears the imprint, as shown by Figure 1, of the odd customs of
tourists). At other times they are accretions of sense on the object’s immaterial
meaning (Yasser Arafat’s particular use of the kefiah has made it into something
more that a simple kind of headgear, especially if worn in Europe). The personality
of objects, therefore, does not depend on the choices and intentions of those who
have produced them. It depends above all on the succession of ‘experiences’ (in the
metaphorical sense) which objects have accumulated during their lifetimes: a table

9. 9
may have been created as a sacrificial altar to a god; but it may thereafter have been
used as a work block by a blacksmith, or as a landmark by hunters: once considered
a testimony by an archaeologist, it is now a curio for museum visitors. These ideas
are not far-fetched. In around 580 BC, the giant Kouros of Samos (Figure 2) was
originally created, it is presumed, as a votive image and therefore served the twofold
purpose of representation (still highly schematic) and intercession. But we cannot
know what the statue really signified for the artisans who sculpted it from stone.
Certainly something different from the meaning attributed to it by the Romans, who
used pieces from the statue (the head and a leg) to construct a villa and a cistern on
the outskirts of the ancient sanctuary. And still very different from the meaning
given it by the archaeologists who discovered and excavated the remains of that
cistern, or by the tourists who today observe the statue, thoughtfully and from a
respectful distance, when visiting the Archaeological Museum of Vathi.
The social life of things
From this perspective, the invitation to consider the biographies of objects as
furnishing useful and original insights into the social world is backed by the promise
that they yield new categories of analysis. This springs from the intuition that
speaking of the “lives” of things is not simply a rhetorical device or a metaphor, but
something serious and very real. It is a concept which better than others can describe
what happens within human collectivities.
Historically, the expression “cultural biography of things” became current
following the publication of The Social Life of Things, in 1986. Edited by Arjun
Appadurai, this book contained a short essay by Igor Kopytoff entitled “The
Cultural Biography of Things”. Kopytoff drew attention to the fact that the
attribution to objects of use value or exchange value (we may add, with reference to
Baudrillard, symbolic value) is an altogether arbitrary operation. And anyway it
explains little unless the dynamic and mutable character of the existence of things
over time is not borne in mind. Few commodities remain the same from their

10. 10
conception to their destruction. And in any case an object’s nature as a commodity is
not ascribed. On the contrary, Kopytoff observes, it can always be revoked, and
during their lifetimes things usually go through moments when they are reduced to
mere exchange value, and moments when, in relation to the world of humans, they
perform other functions and acquire other values. This is particularly evident, by
way of example, at the time of an object’s agony when it becomes rubbish to be
thrown away or recycled. Being ‘rubbish’, in fact, is a wholly specific condition, as
Michael Thompson pointed out in his Rubbish Theory (1979). It suspends and
radically modifies the everyday existence of things, depriving them of their
customary social role. In this sense, it involves a qualitative shift in their biography,
and not just a quantitative one (as the various transitions in the history of an object’s
commodification, i.e. its trade, might otherwise lead one to suppose). But, above all,
the agony of an object does not equate with its destruction. From being rubbish it
may gradually or suddenly be reborn as a durable object when it enters the sphere of
vintage or antique collecting, art, historical testimony, or archaeology. The same
object just previously discarded has now been singularized as a collectible, or in any
case been protected against destruction (see also Engeström and Blackler 2005,
313-5).
Kopytoff instead analyses the processes of economic exchange. He observes that
our perception of things when we treat them as mere commodities of exchange
standardizes and homogenizes them. When things are exchanged, a value is restored
to them which is “objective” in the sense of being measurable, comparable with that
of other commodities, and expressed, obviously, by money. This reduction to a
common denominator – or better to a common metric – enables us to acquire or to
get rid of objects with great facility, thanks to the expedient of money-mediated
exchange. But this is not possible with people qua individuals or subjects. As such,
people are irreplaceable, and therefore cannot be exchanged for other people. This
makes their purchase and their sale impossible – with the obvious exception of
human beings whose dignity as persons is not recognized, such as slaves and very
often – as Francesca Rigotti points out in this book – women.

11. 11
The interesting aspect is that this removal from the sphere of exchange frequently
concerns, Kopytoff stresses, things as well. Not for the world would I give away the
old pocket watch that my grandfather bequeathed to me on his deathbed. Or the
spectacles which I like because give me a touch of class. Whilst numerous
“common” objects are exchangeable, equally many of them are non-commodifiable,
“uncommon”, or singular. Kopytoff cites the examples of sacred objects, public
monuments, and collectable objects (which are not at all unique, as demonstrated by
multiples in art or stamp collecting, but also by the histories of industrially
manufactured objects, or certain design products, whose owners are likely to place
them where they can be displayed rather than used – on the mantelpiece in the living
room instead of on a shelf in the kitchen). But any common and quotidian object
may, at a given moment in its life, be singularized by someone and thus become
uncommon: even, for example, the bolt which I carry in my pocket and use as a key
ring.
According to Kopytoff, the succession of singularizations undergone by an object
constitute its biography. And it is a “cultural biography” in that its turning-points are
determined, not so much by economic or technical factors (sale, a mechanism which
breaks), as by changes in the meaning that the object embodies for the humans with
which it interacts (the object that lay forgotten in my grandmother’s closet and is
now my dearest memento of her but for my son will only be an interesting antique to
sell at a flea market). Reconstructing the cultural biographies of objects means
wondering where they originated and who produced them, but also how they have
been used, what status has been attributed to them, what their careers have been,
compared with the career deemed “ideal” for that kind of object, and what effect has
been produced by their presence in interactions among humans (Kopytoff 1986, It.
transl. 79-82).
After its publication, Kopytoff’s essay was widely cited and much used in the
sociology of culture to give efficacious interpretation to the central role increasingly
assumed by material culture in what many have called the consumption society: a
society in which the presence of goods in people’s everyday settings (and,

12. 12
consequently – but only consequently – the possession of material goods) performs
the crucial functions of establishing social equilibria and constructing personal
identities. The expression coined by Kopytoff was used to give more precise
specification to what was a still hazy intuition, but when many attempts had been
made to show that the notion of consumerism alone is not sufficient to interpret
contemporary society, and that the meanings of people’s lives are determined
increasingly less by what they “are” (social affiliation) and increasingly more by
what they “do” (consumption): from Baudrillard’s (1968) system of objects to
Douglas and Isherwood’s (1979) world of things, to Luisa Leonini’s (1988) lost
identity. Consumption is studied today as a source of identity, of social inclusion,
and of personal fulfilment. This shifts the focus in analysis of material things from
their status as products (and therefore as usable materials) to that of tools for the
social construction of reality, and therefore to meanings intrinsically provisional and
negotiable.
False friends
This last aspect requires further exploration. As I explained at the outset, the notion
of the biography of objects is useful for the study of society because it furnishes
greater explanatory completeness: depth is given to the variables at work behind
social phenomena. But this can only come about if the biographies of objects are
taken seriously, and not in a metaphorical sense. It is not easy for this to happen
because of the ingrained habit of treating things as the simple mouthpieces of
humans. I am not referring here to the approaches still widespread in common sense
– for example that of designers – which instead acknowledge that material things
have a non-material, semantic content able to transmit meanings to the people that
encounter them. These approaches believe that such meanings are imprinted within
objects by their producers, by those who have created them and given them shape.
They are consequently objectified, materialized, given once and for all in the
experience of the recipient (or recipients). To my mind, conceptions of this type – of

13. 13
which a leading example is the attempt by Gianfranco Marrone to develop a theory
of interobjectivity (see especially Marrone 2002, 17) – still regard objects as
instruments in the hands of human beings, and do not grant them any social
autonomy. The semantic content is exclusively the work of a human subject, and the
physical object is nothing but its material vehicle, the messenger (the mouthpiece). I
am referring instead of the recent sociological theories of cultural processes which,
following Baudrillard, have revealed the importance of the consumption of things
for definition of their social meaning.
Baudrillard recommends “superseding a spontaneous vision of objects in terms of
needs, the hypothesis of the priority of their use value” (Baudrillard 1972, It. transl.,
7), because the primary status of an object is not given by its pragmatic use, nor by
its material function, but by the social acts which allow it to acquire a sign function.
Michel de Certeau proposes that consumption should be conceived as a second
production – as an activity which, if neglected, prevents correct description of the
constellation of meanings that material culture assumes in a given society. Of
course, the producers of artifacts, particularly industrial ones, conceive them as
bearers of distinct semantic content and usually surround them with discourses
designed to support this representation (advertising, packaging, marketing strategies,
etc.). But de Certeau’s thesis, with which I fully agree, is that this representation
imposed “from above” tells us nothing about what it [che cosa?] signifies for its
users. It is first necessary to analyse how it is manipulated by those who have not
created it; only then can one gauge “the difference or similarity between the
production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its
utilization” (de Certeau 1990, It. transl. 8; see also Miller 1987, 190). It is clear that
this shift from an economic conception of consumption to one which highlights its
cultural and communicative function is essential for granting social protagonism to
things, in that it frees them from subservience to their creators. But this is not
enough. Freeing things from enslavement to their creators does not restore dignity
and autonomy to them if it means ‘democratically’ subjugating them to the
consumer. The reference to objects would not add much to our understanding of the

14. 14
social world if objects were solely the inert weapons with which social actors fight
their battles for better status. The anthropocentrism of the producer, or of the
transmitter, is replaced by the anthropocentrism of the consumer, or the recipient.
Once again, things are reduced to being the mouthpieces of people, to being
communication media. This also emerges from de Certeau’s conception: just as
words are appropriated by those who utter them, and make arbitrary use of them for
their own purposes and interests, so too, according to de Certeau, are the products of
the cultural economy appropriated by consumers to implement their social tactics.
This demonstrates that there are “false friends” – to use an expression from
linguistics – in the theory of the social life of things. These “false friends” are
studies and publications which apparently try to innovate how we consider objects,
but in fact adhere to the traditional conception, or say something else. Consider for
example the admirable collection assembled by Vladimir Archipov, and illustrated
in a recent compendium (Archipov 2006), of more than one thousand home-made
objects crafted by simple Russian citizens in the difficult period of transition from
the Soviet Union to a Western-style system of consumption. The objects consist
largely of simple artifacts expressing the inventiveness of people suffering numerous
hardships. They were not intended for sale, only for self-consumption, and yet they
pertain iconographically to late-industrial consumerism. Archipov states (2006, It.
transl.. 9) that “they all have three characteristics in common: functionality,
uniqueness, and the testimony of the author, who is also the user”. Yet these
characteristics express an approach that does not conceive objects as able to interact
with personalities in the network of social relationships. What interests Archipov is
solely the design and creation process, the generation of things as testimonies to the
social environment whence they have sprung and of which, once again, they are
mouthpieces. “I consider as true design”, Archipov said in an interview published by
Abitare (no. 483, June 2008, p. 48), “the simple and spontaneous objects, almost
archaic, self-produced by ordinary people”; objects which do not belong to the
universal commerce of sense and are therefore do not have occasion to express their

15. 15
personalities in the system of collective relationships [non capisco il testo in
italiano].
There are other works more or less at variance with the arguments put forward in
this book. Sherry Turkle (2007) has collected 34 biographies of objects written by
scientists, humanists, artists and designers. Her book considers objects in terms of
their evocative capacity, their power to influence many aspects of everyday life
(play, desire, meditation, etc.). But the stories reported are, in truth, autobiographies
of the subjects who have written them; and objects appear mainly as witnesses to
events which have taken place in the lives of people. Their evocative capacity is
treated more as an ability to represent effects than to produce them in social
contexts. More attentive to this latter theme is perhaps Lorraine Daston, not so much
in her book Biographies of Scientific Objects (Daston 2000) – which only studies the
processes by which particular entities, at a particular time, acquire the prerogative of
being considered scientific facts, using an approach typical of recent studies on
science and the technology – as in her collection Things That Talk (Daston 2004).
Although the latter book does not take a biographical approach, it attributes to things
– at least by hypothesis – the gift of eloquence, and thus a capacity to impose
themselves on social subjects regardless of their will. This is the case of
photographs, for example, which – whether veridical or deceptive – impose
themselves on the person who looks at them (and who has taken them) as
independent entities.
A personality in transformation
Pointing out that things possess biographies which can be more or less completely
reconstructed and recounted serves not only to aid understanding of their role in
determining social phenomena regardless of the projects that have brought them into
being. It also serves to emphasise the mutable character of their social presence. The
personality of objects is by principle a changing personality. The missing masses of
society are not static, or substantially static, masses as geographical or climatic

16. 16
features are understood to be in certain traditional sociological theories. They are
dynamic masses, nuclei of energy which evolve over time; and as they evolve, they
contribute crucially to social change. Latour implicitly pointed this out when he
dwelt on the example of the automatic door-closer which went “on strike” at La
Villette (Latour 1992, It. transl., 94). It is clear that strike action, or interrupted
operation, by a technological mechanism is a novelty compared with its previous
social presence, a change in the role which it performs in the collectivity. The most
evident dimension of the biographies of objects is therefore the succession of
functions (or dysfunctions) that they incorporates in regard to the collectivity by
which they are used. Latour calls this debrayage: particular collective actions or
functions are delegated to a material object, and are therefore repositioned or
translated in it. The object thus incorporates a social role which it then interprets and
performs autonomously and “creatively” with respect to the original action
programme. Moreover, during their lifetimes, objects receive multiple, sometimes
simultaneous, delegations which transform their social role. The biographies of such
objects are hence the histories of these various delegations, among which we may
certainly include the particular action programmes of commodificiation and
singularization to which Kopytoff drew attention.
But the biographies of objects, like those of humans, are more complex than this,
and they depend on a set of factors. They have other dimensions besides that of
debrayage. Clarifying this aspect requires drawing another distinction, this time
analytical, which can be expressed thus: objects have biographies, types of object
have histories, in the same way as individuals have biographies whilst nations and
institutions have histories. Many objects of contemporary industrial production
belong to a family (the series), to a clan (the brand), to a category (the type), and this
largely determines their destiny and social role. But the biography of a material
thing cannot be reduced to the history of the type to which it belongs, because this
would hide its individual life-events, which instead are impressed upon it and
contribute to producing its meaning for us. It is one thing to describe the vicissitudes
of the watch inherited from my grandfather, quite another the vicissitudes of the

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object “watch” in the history of humanity. Examining the biographies of objects
therefore requires one to recognize that as individuals objects are important in
determination of the social world. Of course, the social history of objects has a long
and authoritative tradition, and it has been of great help in understanding historical
epochs and civilizations. But as a rule it has not affected the conventional view of
things as mere sedimentations of human activities; nor has it served understanding
of the wholly special role assumed by things in determining social phenomena in the
contemporary world. The reverse applies to the biographies of unusual objects.
These deliver to us “living things”, social subjects – “actants” Latour would say
(1987, tr. it. 109-120) – able to interact with other social subjects and determine
their trajectories. Objects are endowed with personality to the extent that the status
deriving to them from the type to which they belong (for example, watch) sums with
a specificity due to their individual history (for example, my grandfather’s watch).
This specificity often manifests itself, as said, through the physical imprints that
biographical events have on a thing. The chipped cups with somewhat faded colours
in which I serve coffee to my guests “speak” to them by virtue of that chipping and
that fading. It is not necessary to point out that they are antiques. Likewise, many of
the objects collected by Archipov testify through their dilapidation to the use that
has been made of them. Conversely, a new coffeepot never used before testifies,
through the absence of visible imprints of use, to its inability to produce good
coffee. The performative force that these traces left by use confer on objects is such
that at times the productive system anticipates in an object, in a family or in a
category of objects the physical imprint of the use that will be made of them.
Fontanille (1995), cited and commented on by Marrone (2002, 23-27), gives the
example of ergonomic objects, like whisky flasks shaped to resemble the curve of a
breast or a buttock. Such objects already incorporate the form that they would
acquire after a long period of use. Perhaps more convincing is the example by the
jeans faded, and perhaps even deliberately ripped, during their manufacture. This
indirectly testifies to the importance that an object’s biography may have in
determining its meaning for the collectivity and, therefore, its ability to perform an

18. 18
autonomous role in the definition of social phenomena. A pair of jeans faded
because of the use made of them cannot produce, in the social world to which they
belong, the same reactions as produced by jeans of the same kind fresh from the
factory. The biographical signs that usage (“consumption” in the proper sense)
imprints upon a material object alters its personality, usually enriching it as time
passes. Hence, the custom of purchasing pre-faded jeans springs from the need, or
the opportunity, to exploit to one’s advantage the particular personality which faded
jeans project when they are worn in a social gathering. The events that punctuate the
life of an object leave imprints on it, on its material substratum, and these imprints
modify the perceptive characteristics of that object, and therefore its social presence.
Immaterial biographies
There is finally a third fundamental dimension of the biography of objects. This
extends beyond those incorporated in the material thing and therefore warrants
discussion (all too cursorily here, given the complex issues involved). Consider what
happens to humans as well. Biographical events imprint themselves on our bodies,
modifying them over time: we lose our hair, we get wrinkles, our facial expressions
change. These transformations modify our social presence in collective situations,
for example inducing others to offer us their seat on the bus. Nevertheless, on their
own, these changes are not enough to explain the particular social status accorded a
human body (prior to any communicative interaction). The transformations of the
material appearance of the human body do not always produce the same social
consequences: in some societies the elderly are more respected, sought-after,
desired?, by the young, in other societies less so. The meaning of a certain state of
affairs in a particular society always derives from the encounter between that state of
affairs and the cultural tradition in which it is embedded.
The biography of an object, like that of a human, is therefore inflected not only by
the events that materially imprint themselves upon it, but also by the meanings
which interlocutors attribute to it; meanings which do not depend solely on its

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physical appearance. An object’s biography is inflected by changes in its material as
well as immaterial constitution. And this is what makes the biography of a social
subject – whether human or non-human – extremely volatile. The immaterial content
of objects in the human world depends structurally on the experiences of humans as
beings capable of signification. Individuals never have experience of things, but
always of “things composed of their qualities” – to adapt Husserl’s expression. A
table is never just a table for us, it is always also something more, a table in its
givenness: an executive table, a support surface, a barrier, a point of attraction, a
routine desk, ugly clutter to be thrown away, firewood to be burned to keep warm.
In short, we do not live in a world of things, we live in a world of meanings. Hence,
possessing immaterial content is not a prerogative of some things rather than others.
Not only works of art, design objects, fashion items, museum exhibits possess a
symbolic dimension in addition to the material one. If human beings live in a world
of meanings, all objects enter their experiential world solely in the form of
meanings.
To be added is that meaning is always, by definition, meaning-for-me – individual
meaning. It springs from the interaction between the actual experience of a person
and the stock of his or her previous experiences. It is therefore closely bound up
with his or her individual biography. Meanings can be collective only in a general
sense, by analogy, and only to the extent that a history of common (i.e. similar)
experiences unifies a certain collectivity and makes the biographies of its members
in certain respects kindred. But if meanings are by definition individual meanings,
the immaterial content of any object of experience is relative to whoever experiences
it; it is essentially subjective. This means that the immaterial content of objects is
never given once and for all; it is always the volatile, momentary product of their
encounter with a human, or of the encounter and negotiation among several human
around them. The meaning of things varies as the people who experience them vary.
The Gioconda that I contemplate in the room of an art gallery is not the same
Gioconda that the person next to me is contemplating. Objects are “living things”,
subjects of an individual biography, also to the extent that they possess an

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immaterial dimension (a semantic content) that is never fixed, defined, or stable, but
constantly fluctuating in relation to the flow of everyday “encounters” between the
object and humans. Of course, nor is the material content of an object ever really
fixed: the cup may be chipped, fabric wears out, things lose colour. But these are
changes immeasurably slower than the volatility of meaning, so much so that is
often the resistance and durability of matter that enables us to protect constellations
meaning (a poem, a piece of music) against their natural perishability (we preserve
them on paper, on tape, in bytes).
Conclusions
Sociological theory on the biography of objects is still only embryonic. But it seems
to open numerous directions for inquiry whose developments are at present
unpredictable. Thorough theoretical treatment of the topic does not yet exist –
except, perhaps for Latour’s, which, however, does not enjoy broad consensus
among sociologists because of its bold and paradoxical character. Nor has empirical
reseach been conducted to verify the real impact of objects, and of the biographical
histories imprinted in them, on social dynamics in real situations. This area of
analysis is therefore open to every attempt to verify its potential and limits – as well
testified by the essays collected in this book, even to the extent of substantially
denying that objects are dynamic, as argued by Francesca Rigotti.
My observations in this article certainly require more detailed discussion which
encompasses a series of lateral issues without which they risk appearing arbitrary. I
propose them nevertheless as the basis for analysis to improve our understanding of
a society in which the consumption of material things has reached levels unthinkable
even a century ago, and which are entirely inexplicable by simply citing the human
drive to satisfy material needs. Implicit in them [che cosa?] has been dissatisfaction
with the various versions of a critical theory of society. Moreover, behind the
critique against the dominant power system – the system of mass production that
standardizes the world of objects, the consumerism apparently induced by

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advertising, the (alleged) homogenization of opinions by the media, the
globalization or McDonaldization of Western consumption – lies a conservative
nostalgia for a disappearing world and an evident difficulty to adapt to the new one.
Such dissatisfaction must induce us to look anew at consumption practices. We must
understand that these are social practices as forms of interaction, without too hastily
assigning them to the category of degenerate social bonds. Recognizing the social
role of objects and its biographical basis, I submit, offers ample possibilities in this
regard.