ABSTRACT
Sociologists have not normally concerned themselves with objects-except in the Durkheimian sense that social facts be treated as such. Material culture was for a long time left mainly to anthropologists; physical artefacts were typically treated as part of that domain of anthropology that merges with archaeology and ethnology. But the agenda has shifted in recent years, particularly as studies of popular culture, design and consumer culture have come to the fore (for example, Forty, 1986; Norman, 1988; Hebdige, 1988; Miller, 1997; Featherstone, 1991; du Gay et al., 1997; Dant, 1999; Attfield, 2000; Molotch, 2003). There has, moreover, been considerable interest in the materiality of culture and its mediation in the culture industries (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1982; Adorno, 1991; Appadurai, 1986, 1996; Kopytoff, 1986; Thomas, 1991; Lury, 1993; Lash and Urry, 1994, forthcoming; McRobbie, 1998, 1999; Poster, 2001; Manovich, 2001; Lash, 2002). Alongside this, there is a renewed interest in materialism, especially in Italian political thought (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Perhaps most insistently, however, there have been writings within the sociology of science and technology and elsewhere which problematise the roles of objects, quasi-objects, factishes and hybrids (Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 1987; Knorr Cetina, 1997, 2000; Law, 1984, 2002; Feenberg, 1991, 1999; Michael, 2000; Barry, 2001). In addition, a number of feminist theorists have sought to address the question of ontological politics through a reconsideration of matter in science and technology (Haraway, 1997, 2000; Mol, 1999, 2002; Kerin, 1999; Wilson, 1998; Vitellone, 2003a, b; Fraser, 2002, 2003). These developments can be seen in the context of a move within contemporary sociology to reconsider the social in such a way as to include the natural and the artificial or technological (Urry, 2000). And the aim
here-as part of what might be called a sociology of objects or things (Frow, 2001; Slater, 2002a, b)—is also to open up the domain of the social, to move beyond discussions of the social exclusively in terms of the (human) subject. Thus, this book started from the premise that objects matter; that they orient communication, frame time and space, and co-ordinate social action (Goffman, 1961, 1971; Appadurai, 1986; Miller, 1987; Latour, 1996; Knorr Cetina, 2000); in short, that objects (co-) produce the social.
