The Spirit of Matter: Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects

By Peter Pels

A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their ‘life’. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of ‘mind over matter’. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jul 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805390152

Peter Pels

Peter Pels is a Professor of Anthropology of Africa at the University of Leiden. He edited the journal Social Anthropology (2003-2007) and advised the Çatalhöyük excavation project led by Ian Hodder (2005-14). His most recent publication is Museum Temporalities: Time, History and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (Routledge, 2023) which is co-edited with Wayne Modest.

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THE SPIRIT OF MATTER

Methodology and History in Anthropology

Series Editors:

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Volume 45

The Spirit of Matter: Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects

Peter Pels

Volume 44

Chicanery: Senior Academic Appointmets in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

Geoffey Gray, Doug Mumro, and Christine Winter

Volume 43

The Social Origins of Thought: Durkheim, Mauss, and the Category Project

Edited by Johannes F. M. Schick, Mario Schmidt, and Martin Zillinger

Volume 42

Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World

Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

Volume 41

Anthropology and Ethnography Are NOT Equivalent: Reorienting Anthropology for the Future

Edited by Irfan Ahmad

Volume 40

Search After Method: Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork

Edited by Julie Laplante, Ari Gandsman, and Willow Scobie

Volume 39

After Society: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford

Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

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Total Atheism: Secular Activism and Politics of Difference in South India

Stefan Binder

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Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

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Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology

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THE SPIRIT OF MATTER

Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects

Peter Pels

First published in 2023 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Peter Pels

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pels, Peter, author.

Title: The spirit of matter : religion, modernity, and the power of objects / Peter Pels.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Methodology and history in anthropology ; Volume 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023004601 (print) | LCCN 2023004602 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390145 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390152 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Material culture--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Classification: LCC BR115.C8 P36 2023 (print) | LCC BR115.C8 (ebook) | DDC 261--dc23/eng/20230509

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004601

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004602

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-014-5 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80539-015-2 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390145

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I. Introductions

Chapter 1. The Auto-Icon: or, What a Secularist Relic Says about Modern Dematerializations

Chapter 2. Toward a Methodology of the Concrete: or, Rematerializing Material Culture Studies

Part II. Fetish and the Fear of Matter

Introduction

Chapter 3. The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy

Chapter 4. The Modern Fear of Matter: Reflections on the Protestantism of Victorian Science

Part III. Do Catholics See Things Differently?

Introduction

Chapter 5. Trophy and Wonder: or, Bodies at the Exhibition

Chapter 6. Africa Christo!: The Materiality of Photographs in Dutch Catholic Mission Propaganda, 1946–1960

Chapter 7. I Am Black, but Comely: Mission, Modernity, and the Power of Objects in the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal

Chapter 8. Seeing Things as Different: The Powers of Miming Africa

Part IV. The Time of Things

Introduction. Fetishizing the Commodity, in Real Time

Chapter 9. Things in Time: Commodity Fetishism before Advertising

Chapter 10. False Consciousness?: The Rise of Advertising

In Lieu of a Conclusion. The Future of Things

References

Index

FIGURES

1.1. A 1980s photograph of the Auto-Icon in its cabinet, with the desiccated head set between the feet. © UCL Educational Media, used with permission.

1.2. The Auto-Icon in the South Cloisters of University College London in 2011. © Peter Pels.

P3.1. Article advertising the Afrika Museum in a local journal, St. Jansklokken, 10 July 1959.

6.1. A Holy Ghost Fathers’ stand at a Dutch mission exhibition in the 1940s. Photo by Fotografie Fictoor.

6.2. A so-called féticheur. Bode van de Heilige Geest 47/12 (1951): 166. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.3. A South African fortune teller. Africa Christo! 52/6 (1956): 20. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.4. A smartly dressed gentleman. Bode van de Heilige Geest 38–42/4 (1946): 48. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.5. Handa-woman made up for puberty feast. Bode van de Heilige Geest 46/1 (1950): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.6. A Maasai woman. Africa Christo! 48/3 (1952): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.7. An African salute. Africa Christo! 49/2 (1953): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.8. An early example of a photograph of African Christianity. Africa Christo! 56/1 (1960): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.9. African Christian sculpture, Africa Christo! 58/4 (1962): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

6.10. Photograph of a part of the African section of the AMATE mission exhibition, 1960. © Archive of the Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, used with permission.

7.1. Article announcing the documentary I am black, but comely about the new Afrika Museum. Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids 31 (14 September 1958): 60.

7.2. Announcing the Vademecum broadcast on the new Afrika Museum. Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids 31 (14 September 1958), cover.

7.3. Cover of a printed guide detailing the permanent exhibition of the Afrika Museum around 1958. © Archive of the Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, used with permission.

7.4. Two boys in blackface on the Feast of the Holy Childhood, 1954. © Missio, used with permission.

10.1. The Bubbles poster for the 1886 Pears’ Soap campaign by John Everett Millais. Wikimedia Commons.

10.2. The Pears’ Soap advertisement featuring US Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila (1898) during the US colonization of the Philippines. Wikimedia Commons.

10.3. The Guinness toucan painted by John Gilroy after Dorothy Sayers coined the Guinness is good for you slogan in 1935. Photo by Jibi44; Wikimedia Commons.

PREFACE

The title of this book was first conceived for an essay written in 1995 (Pels 1998; now Chapter 3). At the time of writing, I was not completely sure what it meant, and this book tries to spell out what in 1995 may have been an educated hunch. Pressed to sum it up, I would now say that the spirit of matter haunts a modern set of cultural patterns that have tried to assert the sovereignty of mind over matter, in a kind of manifest destiny—the North American political reference is intended— that subjected nature, human bodies and relationships, and all other raw materials of planet Earth to what it regarded as rational designs for a better future for all. The subtitle of this book, equally oxymoronic, brings dominant items of this haunting together: modernity and modernist self-representation manifested themselves in discourses and practices that claimed to achieve universality because of the secular and natural foundations of knowledge by which mind could conquer matter. Yet it ubiquitously and ceaselessly employed metaphors of religion in an attempt to exorcize the powers of objects as survivals of so-called traditional and past beliefs. Modern people thereby performed tradition, but such wishful uses of religious metaphors indicated deeply rooted modern anxieties instead—a kind of double consciousness: the near-conscious suspicion that these performances and designs were insufficient and unsuccessful in keeping at bay (human) nature and the vagaries of how the planet materially responded to these designs.

My main target in this book, therefore, is modernity: how its self-conceptualizations try to subordinate, yet are haunted by, material manifestations of its own making (cf. Pels 2003a). My career has been largely devoted to the anthropology of modernity, contributing to the effort to decolonize a discipline that has too often focused on others, and failed to cross boundaries with other social sciences that focused more exclusively on modern selves. Neighboring disciplines like sociology have neglected those others, not least by preferring to ignore that colonialism was integral to modernity’s constitution. Such a focus rarely addressed the cultural patterns by which modern people (re)invented the traditions that their self-images required, traditions usually evoked by something modern people call religion or magic. As the chapters in this book testify, there is no secular modernity without religion or magic, just as there is no social life without (excessively) religious things. But religion and magic have been, at least since the second half of the nineteenth century, provincial and Indigenous North Atlantic concepts (cf. Chakrabarty 2000). Not only was religion since that time transformed to support modern claims to universality (Masuzawa 2005), but the concept may also not (yet?) be sufficiently valid to apply to other parts of the world (Engelke 2015; Meyer 2020). The simultaneous denial and reinvention of magic in modernity shows how it expresses modern desires and contradictions more than it describes what other people, presumed to be racially or ethnically different, do (Pels 2003a, 2014b). While this book does claim to say sensible things about what modernity is, it is not meant to define or explain religion or magic—although its arguments cannot be made without magico-religious things taking central stage.

This is because its core topic is the power of objects—and yet, the spirit of matter indicates that this is a topic that can be approached only indirectly, by a kind of circumlocution, as a presence that cannot be fully represented by words. (Indeed, the seeds for this project were sown in a book on material culture that focused on objects in unstable spaces [Spyer 1998].) Put differently, people can usually feel they are affected by certain objects’ thing-power coming at them from an outside—to use Jane Bennett’s (2010: 2) felicitous phrases—but they find it far more difficult to give a transparent explanation of why these objects do so. Such powers are literally occult: difficult to see, because, as the chapters that follow will document, their power arises from a contingent dialectic of objectification and embodiment in which the performance of the object calls up multiple times and places in the affective subject: pasts, futures, and hyperreal elsewheres that these objects make materially present by their performance, yet that depend on how the objects move their subject’s (sub)consciousness. However, I will argue in Chapter 2 that I am not happy with the dichotomy of subject and object: instead, I use an analytic stressing the dialectic of objectification and embodiment that confronts material bodies with equally material things. Even more, this involves things that are also produced by nonhuman beings (that grow by themselves, for example). Material culture studies has far too long taken artifacts as its point of departure, feeding an implicit hubris about manufacture that may call forth the wrath of present-day equivalents of the Greek Gods.

This last reference to a European future past (cf. Koselleck 2004) indicates the specific role that my interest in the anthropology of modern time came to play in this project. If this book is not intended to discuss (or, if you want, define) the real of religion, magic, or fetish—I may still attempt to do so, but not in the following pages—the presence in modernity of the kind of pasts that these concepts evoke is necessary for my arguments. Moreover, these pasts call up their own futures—as Parts I and III show, often negatively, and as especially Part IV shows, in a kind of future positive mode in the case of techno- and commodity fetishism. My focus on time and temporality is crucial to my arguments because of several reasons: firstly, modern claims to universality are based on a classical Enlightenment model of knowledge that stresses its timelessness, rooted in objective nature and its unchanging laws—a conceit of having arrived at and consecrating history’s telos that betrays that modernity’s attempts at secularization of humans and history are still partial at best. Secondly, this book tries to rehabilitate the methodological necessity for the humanities as well as social sciences and field sciences of contingency: the ways in which time constitutes rather than inhibits social knowledge (see especially the end of Chapter 2). Thirdly, I would not be faithful to the preceding point if I would conceal that these chapters were written at different times, for different purposes, and that more than half of them were (largely) written before the idea of writing a book about materiality and modernity crossed my mind. The decision to republish certain chapters (especially in Part II) is meant to give readers access to such historical contingencies. More importantly, as especially Part IV brings out, an awareness of the contingencies of human-thing entanglements—of putting back time in things—may help to solve some of the conundrums that social theory faced due to essentialization, both folk and academic.

Time is also important because this book has been long in gestation, and much has happened in the field of material culture studies in the meantime. An important publication like Rosalind Morris’s masterly After de Brosses (2017) appeared well after most of these chapters were written, and while it proves useful in the following pages it addresses discourses of fetishism rather than fetishes or excessive objects as such—as the contrast between her focus on Karl Marx’s texts and my focus on Karl Marx as suffering fetishization himself (in Chapter 8) brings out. I already enlisted the support of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) in this preface, also published after many of my chapters were finished, but her philosophical and political-ecological interest is far more general, and less concerned with the specific insights we can gain from studying excessive objects. I did not learn about Jean-Pierre Warnier’s older discussions of praxeology (2001) until recently, but his emphasis on the shifting material boundaries between bodies and objects supports my use of Bourdieu’s dialectic of objectification and embodiment, and how it should lead to a critique of the distinction between subjects and objects, or meanings and things. I have more difficulties with the ethnographic theorizing of artifacts by certain self-confessed proponents of an ontological turn: it seems to me that to treat meaning and thing as an identity so as to arrive at a more radical essentialism (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007: 3) in fact imports modern cultural presuppositions (such as the early nineteenth-century notion of essentialized identity employed by Jeremy Bentham—see Chapter 1) through a methodological back door.¹ The turn to ontology may be more complex than that, but this particular gesture strongly resembles the kind of double consciousness that also characterizes Arjun Appadurai’s methodological fetishism, criticized in Chapter 3 (Paolo Heywood similarly criticizes the ontologists’ claim to develop just a method [2017]). In any case, I employ an older and more social conception of ethnography throughout this book, which—rather than putting the difference of indigenous meanings center stage—draws on exploring the gap between native points of view and how they are realized in social practice (a seminal statement being Bronislaw Malinowski’s discussion of the Ideal in its actualization [(1926) 1972: 119]). I also apply it to modern selves rather than reinforcing anthropology’s classic obsession with others.

However, this book does try to make a contribution to the theory of materiality, especially in Chapters 2 and 4. Chapter 4 was originally a contribution to a symposium that led to Daniel Miller’s edited volume (2005), but he wanted me to revise the essay in a way that disagreed with my conception of it (see the Introduction to Part II). In the meantime, much has happened in Material Culture Studies at University College London, as a recent edited collection shows. While its researchers mostly continue to focus on artifacts, many have come to trouble the subject-object dyad that was still prominent in Miller’s 2005 volume (Carroll, Walford and Walton 2021: 8). Issues of time and scale (see Chapters 9, 10, and the Conclusion) have become more central to material culture research, and a suspicion of linguistic models of representation that was at the basis of my 1998 essay has also become more common (Carroll et al. 2021: 14). I am not aware, however, that the Material Culture Studies unit at UCL has ever studied the Auto-Icon in the UCL South Cloisters, by which I introduce the main topic of this book.

Finally, time was crucial because delays in finding a publisher for this book crucially affected my perspective on it by the occurrence, in the meantime, of three major social upheavals outside of academia: climate activism such as Extinction Rebellion, the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. Climate activism, in particular, made me realize that my students no longer faced the kind of open future that seemed available when I started my academic career, and the pain of witnessing their anxieties made me lose some of the motivation for working on a pursuit that seemed esoteric at times (but it does so no longer). The pandemic, on the one hand, affected my motivation to work on the book in a similar manner, but, on the other, modified our dialectics of objectification and embodiment so drastically in 2020 that it confirmed the analytic focus of this book, and reinforced my suspicions about the antisocial effects of digitization (see the Conclusion)—as the collective sense of relief among a majority of teachers and students on being allowed back into a real classroom in 2021 demonstrated. In contrast, the response of Black Lives Matter to the public resurgence of white racism (especially in the guise of a president of the United States), not least when reinforced by the decolonial agitation of Rhodes Must Fall spreading from Cape Town, gave me a different sense of engagement, with immediate effects on my academic activities (see Pels 2022). In revising the book, I repeatedly confronted, but also resisted, the temptation to update my thoughts about human bodies and possessive individualism in response to people’s growing awareness of the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in the present. Such an awareness is crucial to the effort of desacralizing and decolonizing the forms of humanism that this book so often targets. Moreover, Igor Kopytoff (1986) demonstrated early on that the relationship between humans and things is brought into sharp relief by rethinking chattel slavery, and I do touch on the topic obliquely by discussing how human bodies have been treated as things (see Chapter 2). However, it would be more honest to say that my thoughts about materiality and the spirit of matter allowed me better purchase on the complex problem of understanding racism and race, than that it happened the other way around. (That may be white privilege speaking.) Moreover, addressing such burning topics by adding parentheses and footnotes to texts that I had already written would be disrespectful toward a topic that should receive undivided attention. I therefore decided to explicitly address racism and race only where the ramifications of my approach for understanding them might raise misunderstanding (as in my use of W. E. B. du Bois’s double consciousness), or where its relevance to such issues should be made apparent (as in my discussion of ethnic labels like Africa in Part III). I have become increasingly interested in researching transatlantic African heritage recently and hope to give the topic of racism the attention it deserves in forthcoming publications that derive from it.

This book does not give an exhaustive overview of excessive objects. In fact, such a project of surveillance seems somewhat foreign to the book’s topic, since it would replace the contingent surprises of excessive objects with the pretense to neutralize them in a universally rational and encompassing scheme. Excess leads to understanding, but, almost by definition, inhibits the realization of the desire to make that understanding all-encompassing. It might be better to say that the book claims to illuminate and understand certain crucial modern paradoxes: that modern people aspire to be free from materialism yet constructed a consumerist and materialistic society; or that consumers usually strive for possession, but equally often concede that possession does not lead to fulfillment (the first global pop song was, after all, Can’t Buy Me Love). Excess and paradox are joined by a further imbalance resulting from the fact that the chapters in this book reflect the contingent development of my own research interests—a development that, like collecting objects, may pretend to be coherent, but in fact shifts register in the course of its own unfolding, adding counterpoints to earlier statements. In fact, that is where the book started in the first place, deriving, in particular, from William Pietz’s pioneering work on the fetish (1985, 1987, 1988; see also Apter and Pietz 1993 and Spyer 1998), in a kind of counterpoint to the simultaneously developing interest in more mundane material culture (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Thomas 1991). I hope it shows that such thinking by counterpoint is an endeavor worth our while.

Note

1. Vigh and Sausdal (2014) in fact make the ontological turn into a far more Eurocentric endeavor than I do here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is no author without counterpoints, and I want to thank those people without whom this book would not have come about. Without Lynn Meskell’s invitation to consider turning my writing on materiality into a book, this would never have gelled into a project, and I would never have had to pose the question whether there was any coherence to my interests. Lynn was also, together with Ian Hodder, responsible for broadening my views in the direction of archaeology, although too little of what they taught me has found its way into this book. Patricia Spyer stood, without both of us realizing it, at the beginning of this project when she invited me to contribute what is now Chapter 3 of Border Fetishisms (1998); her friendship and collegiality over the years have been a constant source of intellectual comfort and excitement. Webb Keane, too, was a regular interlocutor in the context of different projects over the years, and I am grateful for his inspiration and fundamental insights. Bill Pietz has been a constant object of admiration and source of insight since we first met in 1995. Johannes Fabian triggered my interests in material culture in the first place and taught me more about my profession than I can ever acknowledge. Anke Kamerman has probably made me understand material culture more than anyone else, and will, I hope, continue to do so in the years to come.

Several colleagues have contributed to different chapters in this volume. I thank those who helped with individual chapters in the footnotes to those chapters themselves, but some of them also influenced this book as a whole. Nicholas Dirks and the late Fernando Coronil commented on an early draft of Chapter 3 and thereby helped set the stage. Daniel Miller was responsible for the invitation that led to the writing of Chapter 4, and I have been in (sometimes unilateral) conversation with him since. Birgit Meyer invited me to the EASA panel that led to Chapter 7, stimulated the publication of Chapter 4, and continues to be an important interlocutor ever since we started our PhD research at more or less the same time on a very similar topic (and with the same supervisor). Pieter ter Keurs, Michael Rowlands, Oscar Salemink, Wayne Modest, Rogier Bedaux, and Harrie Leyten helped me to develop the arguments in Part III in general. Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry made me write an essay on magical things that has left traces, especially in the Conclusion to this book, as have my discussions with Stef Aupers, Dick Houtman, and Dorien Zandbergen in the context of the Cyberspace Salvations project. Without Sabine Luning, intellectual sparring partner for well over a decade now, the book would not have developed its reflections on economic anthropology, commodification, and scale in Chapters 8 and 9, just as the reflections on methodology in Chapter 2 could not have been written without discussions with other Leiden colleagues, and Igor Boog in particular. The temporal spirit of the book owes a debt to colleagues and friends in the Futurities project: Erik Baehre, Bart Barendregt, Andrea Cerda, Zane Kripe, and Marianne Maeckelbergh; and Zane and Andrea helped organize meetings with colleagues on (African) futures, among whom Elizabeth Ferry, Jane Guyer, Juan Obarrio, Achille Mbembe, and Charles Piot were particularly influential for my thinking. My more recent collaboration with Jasmijn Rana on diversity and democratizing heritage institutions has led to a perhaps even steeper learning curve on my part. I am very grateful to Dan Hicks for a meticulous, generous but also profoundly critical review of the book for an earlier press—this has become a much better book due to him—and two anonymous reviewers for Berghahn Books for their constructive comments. I thank David Gellner and David Parkin and the staff at Berghahn—especially Tom Bonnington—for finally turning this into a real book. Finally, I owe a word of thanks to Phineas Taylor Barnum: while he anticipated Donald Trump’s career as a professional liar by more than a century, he still taught me more about modernity than many a social scientist.

I am undoubtedly forgetting important interlocutors here and apologize to them for it. None of those involved in the book’s making is, of course, responsible for the views expressed in these pages, although I sincerely hope they will like what they see.

Acknowledgments of permission to use earlier publications appear in those chapters themselves.

PART I

Introductions

Chapter 1

THE AUTO-ICON

OR, WHAT A SECULARIST RELIC SAYS ABOUT MODERN DEMATERIALIZATIONS

In 1832, in a will drawn up shortly before his death, Jeremy Bentham, the self-proclaimed founder of Utilitarianism, left his body to medical science on the condition that some of its parts be used to produce an Auto-Icon that would be preserved in a cabinet, seated on his own chair and wearing his own clothes, and occasionally made present to friends and disciples should the desire to do so arise. His friend and surgeon, Thomas Southwood Smith, made sure Bentham’s wishes were carried out: after delivering a lecture over his friend’s remains, he prepared and stored the Auto-Icon and sometimes wheeled it out to Utilitarian gatherings. When Southwood Smith ceased to practice medicine in 1850, the cabinet, body, and desiccated head were donated to University College London. While the institution that Bentham inspired with his example initially received this gift with embarrassment, it was put on display at the end of the century, and until today gives the shivers to many of those who take a Free Family Day Out in Central London.¹

As we shall see in this introduction, Bentham’s Auto-Icon oscillates between reverence and revulsion, monument and mockery, education and embarrassment. It is an object that violates and confuses the boundaries by which modern people try to keep objects and images in their proper places. Both less than a person and more than dead matter, the Auto-Icon addresses us in extraordinary and excessive ways, whether by demanding obeisance from disciples or generating horrific fascination in tourists, and thus exceeds any ordinary representation of the founder of Utilitarianism. No longer animated by its original subject, the Auto-Icon has nevertheless acquired a capacity to address and possess us by the spirit of its dead matter. Since it is an icon of the secularist Jeremy Bentham, the modernity of this object seems hard to deny. Yet, since its inception, many observers classified the Auto-Icon as an idol, a relic, or a cult-item—as essentially religious and premodern. I think such paradoxes have to be understood by a complex modern need to reject, marginalize, and dematerialize such excessive objects, born of a fear that they might indeed possess us (rather than the other way around).

As such, the Auto-Icon epitomizes the problems that modern people have with matter and materiality. It is an excessive object that interrupts our everyday flow and invites us to reassure our modern humanist and/or secularist selves by relegating it to another time, place, or personality type. However, in the attempt to banish such objects to a religious past or a pathological subjectivity, we often tend to forget our equally modern tendencies—epitomized by Bentham as well—to produce monuments, idols, fetishes, and a host of other excessive objects ourselves. I believe we pay a price for such amnesia: it prevents us from fully understanding how we engage with matter and materiality in our past and present. In the chapters that follow I argue that when modern people are confronted with excessive objects, they more often than not treat them as a pathology of the human subject—a pathology that, as words like fetish, relic, and idol indicate, they would like to understand in terms of a premodern, religious or magical mindset, but that understanding obscures that modern people habitually generate such excessive objects themselves, whether as art, commodities, or technologies. A better understanding of the power of objects requires us to rethink materiality as a historical process. This is not a simple linear process of increasing secularization and transparency of objects as they confront the humanist subject. Instead, excessive objects acquire their power through a history of religious ruptures and continuities and shifting layers and hierarchies of object forms. They make people experience a multiplicity of times and spaces at the moments that these objects arrest the flow of everyday life. However, modern humanists, by insisting that objects are not supposed to behave like subjects, and by exaggerating the separations that Protestant Christianity, capitalism, and science have introduced between them, have obscured our understanding of such moments. If humanism is often haunted by the spirit of matter, countering humanism may show that this ghost is surprisingly real.

The second chapter of this part of the book will discuss the implications of this for material culture studies and set out how the different parts of this book counter humanist fears of matter. In this first chapter, however, I would like to employ the uncanny agency of the Auto-Icon to show the impossibility of the humanist attempt to banish excessive objects to an earlier, more religious epoch. Situated, in 1832, at a major watershed in the history of modern materiality—at the time of the emergence of our current understanding of objectivity (Daston and Galison 2007)—Jeremy Bentham’s desire to posthumously materialize his identity in an Auto-Icon produced a historical process of dismemberment, dislocation, and remembering of material items and qualities that reminded observers, through Bentham’s effigy, of multiple moments, stages, and places of their past, present, and future. The particularity and historicity of the Auto-Icon’s material constitution can help us understand why the excessive objects studied in this book require a methodology of material culture studies that resists modern tendencies to dematerialize objects, embraces their contingency, and teaches us that—contrary to the basic tenet of mechanical objectivity—things can never be (only) what they are.

I start with a thin description of the Auto-Icon, in order to show an approach to excessive objects that, I feel, has been neglected in material culture studies. We can start understanding this neglect through the observation that many modern humanists shy away from dead human bodies (not even excepting archaeologists). That discussion will allow me to move on to a discussion of the politics of dead human bodies at the time that Bentham’s own was converted into the Auto-Icon. This critical historical analysis of native points of view on the Auto-Icon will, I hope, show that Bentham’s version of the modern veneration of transparency and utility was haunted by material residues from his past. Finally, this sense of being haunted can be generalized to explicate four modern ways of dematerializing social relationships that, I believe, prevent material culture studies from achieving its full potential—ways that, I think, have both a Protestant Christian and capitalist genealogy. (The problems these genealogies create for material culture studies will be discussed in Chapter 2.)

Turn Left at Bentham: An Encounter with an Excessive Object

When studying material engagements between Dutch Catholic missionaries and East African mountain dwellers, I argued that the thick description of webs of meanings (pace Geertz 1973) should not be allowed to efface the thin description of their material mediations (Pels 1999: 27). In the same vein, a phenomenology of an encounter with the Auto-Icon may prevent us from overly sociologizing or culturalizing its social life (by employing a fetishistic methodology; cf. Appadurai 1986: 5).²

I cannot remember when exactly I was shown through the South Cloisters of University College London for the first time, but I cannot have been fully conscious of the fact that I walked on a marble floor and adapted my movements to the surrounding material constraints—plastered walls, corners, furnishings—once designed by an architect and built and maintained by construction workers. Being distracted by my UCL colleagues’ interesting conversation, I was most likely only subconsciously aware of the Cloisters’ Victorian aura—unless, of course, my companions explicitly drew my attention to their design. This subconscious tactility characterizes all our quotidian dealings with our material surroundings, just as I am not fully conscious of the computer I write this particular sentence on, or the room I write it in.³ These material frames are effective precisely because the level of skill I need to engage with them is embodied, sensory, and intimate, to such an extent that I can forget that these are all artifacts—supremely social things, once assembled by people who had a certain communication with or manipulation of other people in mind when they did so. It is one of the achievements of current material culture studies to have drawn our attention to the fact that such material frames constitute the normality of everyday life (Miller 1987, 2005: 5).

However, at the Cloisters, when turning left⁴ and coming face-to-face with the Auto-Icon, something peculiar may happen: walking and conversation—our normal frames—are interrupted by the object as it forces itself on our attention. My second encounter with the Auto-Icon retained some of the wonder and curiosity of the first: while dulled by previous familiarity, the moment of interruption was not erased. (In fact, I seem to recall repressing a kind of juvenile jocularity—Hey, Jeremy!—when coming up against it once more.) The Auto-Icon is capable of arresting people’s movements, or even drawing them to itself. In most people, three reactions seem to stand out. Firstly, as my own experience indicated, the encounter with the Auto-Icon makes people stop short and interrupt what they are doing—unless, of course, they were drawn by curiosity to the Auto-Icon in the first place. Secondly, they feel some of the wonder, curiosity, or horrified fascination with which people usually confront human skeletons or wax images—the kind of uncanny feeling that has been exploited by wax sculptors in Europe for centuries (Pilbeam 2006).⁵ Even when ignorant of its provenance or identity, we already feel we are in the presence of something that is both more than an object and less than a human person. Thirdly, most people would experience a desire for identification: who is that? In fact, the Auto-Icon’s outer cabinet immediately gratified that craving, since its large, gilded letters proclaimed the sitter to be Jeremy Bentham (see Figure 1.1)—as if we are confronted with a person rather than a dead object. This identity of the dead object with the person was, as we shall see, also important to Bentham himself, and it is echoed by many commentators (to the extent that head curator Sally McDonald felt she should address the Auto-Icon personally, in conformity with other contemporary museum relations with the deceased).⁶ It is this process of bringing dead matter and identity together—by stages of interruption, ambivalent animation, and personalizing being—that produces most of the object’s excess, and invites a more thorough consideration from the vantage point of material culture studies.

Figure 1.1. A 1980s photograph of the Auto-Icon in its cabinet, with the desiccated head set between the feet. The cabinet itself is encased by a second one made in 1940. © UCL Educational Media, used with permission.

Like a fetish, the Auto-Icon comes to life . . . [when] some process has been suddenly interrupted (Freud 1950: 201). Yet, the re-emergence of the study of material culture in the late 1980s did not pay much attention to these interruptions. The seminal work of Arjun Appadurai and Daniel Miller, among others, has reinvigorated material culture studies by bringing commodities and consumer items back into the limelight—a limelight they had lost when anthropology and its neighboring disciplines turned away from museum collections to more immaterial objects such as culture, function, and structure (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987). Despite their desire to restore all things to the position of social importance they take up in everyday life, however, their focus on commodities and consumption runs up against certain limits. Appadurai, while promoting material culture, banished fetishism to a subordinate methodological role, despite the fact that it is a matter of ethnographic record that objects move people (if not, perhaps, as often as people move objects). Like Appadurai, Daniel Miller has, after he justifiably criticized the negative view of consumption that follows from the critique of commodity fetishism, increasingly dismissed fetishism as a chimera cherished by academics only (compare Miller 1987: 204 to Miller 1995, 1998a: 128). His desire for a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction (2005: 38) reads, just like Appadurai’s social life of things, too much like a people-things romance to allow much room for objects that forcibly interrupt our everyday routines and generate anxiety by doing so. This, I think, can be explained by the fact that they employ a model of materiality that is largely (but not exclusively) based on consumption and the commodity, and thus, on the human artifact—a model that generates, I think, a different concept of material culture than one that is based, just like the Auto-Icon, on a dead body.⁷

So how does this dead body achieve the rupture of our everyday frames? Its monumental context helps to distinguish it from its immediate surroundings, and since my first encounter with it (sometime during the 1990s), the space around the Auto-Icon was turned increasingly into a museum space that invites contemplation. Still, Bentham’s presence in 2011 stood out from the interactive textboxes on the walls and the Koptos Lions (replicas from the nearby Petrie Museum) that faced him from across the hallway (see Figure 1.2). The Auto-Icon’s materiality and materials impressed themselves on my senses with their humanity and antiquity in more forceful ways: on the one hand, the spotlight in the cabinet made me immediately sense the Auto-Icon’s immobility and lack of animation, despite its human appearance; on the other hand, this apparently dead object looked at me (in the 1980s photograph of Figure 1.1) with its two pairs of glass eyes: one set in the wax head, the other in the original desiccated head between the feet. If my normal frames consisted of objects that remain inanimate and mute, this object seemed to possess at least a minimal social capacity for interlocution or address—a capacity that inanimate objects are not supposed to possess, at least in the modern humanism that informs much of the cultural contexts in which I normally move. The rupture in my everyday proceedings, therefore, had much to do with the fact that I was confronted with an object that seemed to behave like a subject, even at a nonverbal level. The object—to use Alfred Gell’s words—indexed an agency that was not my own but distributed over matter (1998: 96). But in a modern humanist context, where objects are not supposed to move subjects, distributed agency often also means alienated agency—agency not in its proper place, not under the sway of human sovereignty. More about that later.

Figure 1.2. The Auto-Icon in the South Cloisters of University College London in 2011. A visitor studies the digital information about the effigy. The Auto-Icon was moved in 2020 from the Wilkins Building to a glass cabinet at the UCL Student Center. © Peter Pels.

For now, we can propose that the interruption caused by the Auto-Icon is a complex form of signification, one where iconicity and indexicality seem to work together in a supplementary fashion. One the one hand, the identity of the object clearly says it is an icon, a mimetic representation—we don’t even need Bentham’s own affirmation of its iconic status, the labels on the wall, or even the letters on the Auto-Icon’s cabinet, to see that. On the other, even when we do not yet know that the effigy contains Bentham’s bones, clothes, chair, and walking stick, or that his real head was originally supposed to top his stuffed body, we already suspect that some form of contiguity played a role in the making of this object: the wax head and the visibly old clothes and attributes index a past moment when the materials of the image were close to, or part of, some original living being. Of course, I use the terms mimesis and contiguity here to suggest a parallel with what James Frazer defined as the two basic operations of magic—homeopathy and contagion (Frazer 1922: 12–13). Like Michael Taussig (1993b) and Zoe Crossland (2009: 73), I believe that these joint operations help us to understand why certain signifiers tend to be associated with the powers of magic and the uncanny. Crossland makes these suggestions on the basis of an analysis of a photograph of the dead body, the death mask, and the skull of the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, thus reinforcing my hunch that—while they are also artifacts—all three things are mimetically as well as causally connected to dead human bodies, and that this seems essential for understanding their excessive or uncanny working. Human remains have always generated an uncanny oscillation between animation and dead matter and a fascination with the personal identity that was, at some time in the past, the source of their animation. And yet, the answer to the question who is that?—while adding a discursive element to the sense-impressions we already have, and thus triggering a different, symbolic process of semiosis—does not dispel the Auto-Icon’s uncanny impression and our suspicion that Bentham or some other subject (such as the UCL Board) is, indeed, addressing us across a temporal void through the icon of a dead human body.

Humanism Dislikes Dead Human Bodies

The supplementary working of mimesis and contiguity in our apperception of dead human bodies seems universal, but dead human bodies have rarely played a role in sociocultural theory.⁸ Dead human bodies show, indeed, how difficult it is to become fully modern (Latour 1993): despite strenuous efforts by modern people to erect rigid boundaries between the living and the dead in a majority of modern social institutions, modern people have been repeatedly frustrated by the refusal of the human corpse to remain unambiguously dead. Not even the most stringent medicalization of corpses, historicization of human remains,