ABSTRACT
To acknowledge the problems faced by such a proposal, however, is liable to produce a rather uneasy feeling that we live in a world that has gone beyond our capacities of ordering. As Simmel (1968: 43-4) argued at the turn of the century, to be continually faced with objects which we cannot assimilate is one of the key problems of the modern age. We constantly strive for such assimilation. That is, artefacts appear as given concrete forms, but human societies have always striven – through their construction, alteration, consumption and application of meaning – to make them internal to, and in part definitional of, themselves. In many ways it is the very physical nature of artefacts, at once the product of human desires, yet in themselves inanimate, which will always render them ambiguous as regards the dualism between persons and non-persons. It is intrinsic to their nature as social things.
