Secular Materialism A Critique of Earthly Theory

Journal of
Article
MATERIAL CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture 16(2) 107129 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1359183511401496 mcu.sagepub.com
Secular materialism: a critique of earthly theory

Mitch Rose
University of Hull, UK
Abstract
Over the last 20 years, studies of material culture have increasingly come to rely on the assumption that cultural and material forms are co-constitutive. Indeed, it is thought that the co-constitutive nature of culture and materiality guarantees the significance of materiality in the constitution of social relations. This article illustrates the limitations of the co-constitutive relation by characterizing it as overly secular. Specifically, it argues that the co-constitutive relation grounds the significance of material culture in a set of earthly dynamics that rob materiality of its privileged position. The article develops this position through two manoeuvres: (1) it describes a particular conception of absence as it is developed in current debates in continental theory; and (2) it demonstrates how a blindness to absence provides a limited understanding of the significance of material objects within social relations. In conclusion, the author argues that the recognition of absence re-orients the way we understand the significance of material objects by attuning us to how materiality marks that which is necessarily beyond the social.
Keywords
absence, Christopher Tilley, Daniel Miller, Material Culture Studies, mystery A scholarly discipline that pretends to free itself from all that is esoteric is an illusion. (Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV: 199; quoted in De la Durantaye, 2009)
1. Introduction
For at least the last 20 years, the study of material culture has endeavoured to emphasize the fundamental import of objects in the constitution of identity and social relations. If one noticed the increased interest in the study of everyday things, objects, sites and landscapes1 and surveyed the range of output platforms where this work is circulated,
Corresponding author: Mitch Rose, Department of Geography, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK. Email: m.rose@hull.ac.uk
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including edited collections, textbooks, readers and handbooks, monograph series and this dedicated quarterly journal, one would no doubt conclude that this endeavour has been a success. Material Culture Studies (MCS) have indeed illustrated how material culture is fundamental (rather than supplemental) to the constitution of socialcultural relations. I use the term fundamental here quite consciously. In saying that material culture is fundamental, I mean to emphasize that material culture is not a reflection of preexisting structures or subjectivities. Rather, as many, if not most, authors in MCS have endeavoured to illustrate, material culture is constitutive of these terms. As Tilley (2006: 61) suggests, material culture is inseparable from culture and human society. It is not a sub-set of either, a part or a domain of something that is bigger, broader or more significant, but constitutive. Social relations, therefore, do not pre-exist material culture but, rather, materiality provides the means by which ideas about society, identity and belonging come to operate and exist: ideas, values and social relations do not exist prior to cultural forms, which then become merely passive reflections of them, but are themselves actively created through the processes in which these forms themselves come into being (p. 61). I begin by stating that I very much share in the general proposition of MCS that material culture is constitutive of culture and identity. And yet, there is something about the way the fundamental import of materiality is framed that gives me pause. While I certainly agree that material objects engender the sociality they are historically thought only passively to reflect, I nonetheless find the arguments that are used to arrive at this position two-dimensional. This is not to suggest that they are simplistic or that they lack complexity or richness. I mean they are literally two-dimensional i.e. they are flat. The aim of this article is to illustrate that, while some of the most interesting advances in anthropological theory are happening in the study of material culture (see Henare et al., 2007; Ingold, 2007), the theoretical trajectory that this work tends to take is one that promotes a certain economism, that is, a certain attention to, and emphasis on, productive relations. Indeed, when one examines the recent literature on material culture, it is quickly apparent that the conceptual ambition is to overcome what is often referred to as a subjectobject dualism (Bender and Aitken, 1998; Ingold, 2000; Keane, 2005; Massey, 2005; Miller, 1994; Tilley, 1994). Through the development of ontological schemas borrowed from Bourdieu (1977), Hegel (1979), Heidegger (1996), Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Latour (1993), authors such as Miller (1994, 2008a), Tilley (1994, 1999, 2004) and Ingold (2000) attempt conceptually to bridge the historical distinction between the subjective self and the objective world. They do this by positing an intense inter-relationship between subjects and objects where the relationships pre-exist the terms in which they are set. In this framing, subjects and objects come to be subjects and objects, that is, come to have the nounal qualities of subjects and objects, by being in-relation. The term used throughout MCS is that subjects and objects are co-constitutive, meaning that subjects and objects are expressions of the relations in which they are entwined. The flatness of the theory comes from the internality of this co-constitutive economy. As I will discuss, the intensive and extensive network of co-constitutive relations that engender subjects and objects, while no doubt complex, is also inescapably two-dimensional. There is no exit from the industry of giving and taking. As a system it is remorselessly productive, predicated as it is on an unending litany of creative engagements. It is a system, it
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seems, whose processes leave no room for quiet, where there is no space for pause or passive slumber. There is no retreat or escape from the entanglement of subjectobject relations since these relations are the means by which such formations come to be we are, it seems, the worldly relations we constantly weave. The primary aim of this article is to illustrate how this productivist ontology this active system of givings and takings undermines, rather than reinforces, the MCS ambition to elucidate the fundamental significance of material objects. As part of the co-constitutive relation, objects have no privileged role to play. While they are no doubt essential to the maintenance and functioning of social relations, their part is by no means profound or at least no more profound than any other aspect of the productive economy of which they are a part. As Miller (2005: 38) suggests, the relationship between subjects and objects is one of equality: a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction. Similarly, Tilley (2006) states that subjects and objects are intertwined in a synaesthesia, a continual entwining between self and world, subject and object, I and it. My argument is that by conceptualizing objects as part of this dialectical economy of equality, where subjects and objects continually entwine in systems of reciprocity and exchange, MCS misses out on those aspects of subjectobject relations that are meta-economical, and thus, possibly some of the most profound and fundamental ways that objects function in everyday human life. I am thinking here of the sombre power of a tomb, a concrete form whose function is not merely to constitute social relations (although it no doubt has this role) but, more fundamentally, to mark the absence of a loss a life whose absence leaves a hole in the world. While the nature of that life, its absence and the hole it leaves can no doubt be rendered in diverse ways owing to various religious and/or cultural (for lack of more encompassing terms) forms, to understand the tomb only as an object embedded in a co-constitutive economy of meaning and relations is to understand it purely in terms of what it gives and does. It is to see the tomb as a positive force that engenders a subjects (mourner and mourned) embeddedness in a set of social and filial connections tethering presence and absence, subject and object, individual and community in a productive fashion. The problem with this framing is that it does not take seriously the absence at the heart of the tomb. The essence of tombs, I would suggest, lies in what they do not give, indeed, in what they can never give. To engage with a tomb means reckoning with an absence; an event of absence where someone once present is now absent; an event we are called upon to recognize and reckon with. Regardless of how that reckoning takes shape, the tomb marks the site of the reckoning itself; it marks the impact of an event precipitated from outside life and outside the social; an event that presents itself to us from beyond the flux of productive co-constitutive relations; that aspect of the dead that remained and that could not be sublated by the dialectical operation (Derrida, 1988: 54). The point here is that conceptualizing objects only in terms of what they do (what they constitute, produce and engender) blinds our analysis to the a-productive dimension not only of objects but of social life in general; that aspect that withdraws from assimilation and cannot be appropriated by any social force. The aim of this critique is to illustrate how this lack of engagement with this absence hampers the study of material culture empirically in addition to undermining the claim that objects are fundamental to the constitution of social life.
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The discussion is divided into nine sections, including the introduction. Sections two and three review the theoretical contributions of two of the sub-disciplines most influential figures: Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley. The significance of Miller and Tilley for the field of MCS cannot be overstated. While MCS encompasses a vast range of work, much of which draws upon an eclectic array of theoretical ideas, the perspectives and concepts developed by these authors have been instrumental in reviving the subfield. As both authors discuss, the study of material culture was historically viewed by anthropologists with suspicion and often elicited critiques of fetishism (see Miller, 1994). In very distinct ways, Miller and Tilley rebuke this trend by articulating a conception of material culture that endeavours to overcome the subjectobject, surfacedepth distinctions of their predecessors and presents material culture as a constitutive component in the creation of everyday cultural life. The next section (section four) critiques Miller and Tilley by characterizing their theoretical position as earthly theory. Specifically, I argue that the co-constitutive relation described by Miller and Tilley traps the socialmaterial relation within a set of banal everyday processes. Section five discusses how an attention to absence potentially opens up MCS to other kinds of dynamics forces that are transcendent to the earthly and everyday which are equally, if not more, powerful to the constitution of social relations and its various material forms. Sections six, seven and eight illustrate the consequences of this earthly theory. Taking various examples from Millers and Tilleys work, each section illustrates how their analyses privilege the present and productive over the absent and silent. The aim here is simply to illustrate what is missing from their analyses and what an engagement with transcendence could potentially illuminate. Section nine concludes by discussing more fully how earthly theory paradoxically robs material objects of their fundamental significance. Objects, I argue, are not actually fundamental in MCS, they are just necessary. This is not to suggest they do not serve a function they no doubt do. But that function is truncated by the flat ontology they are trapped within. Before developing the arguments further, it is important to introduce two qualifiers, the first concerning the articles ambitions and the second its target. First, the logical trajectory of this article no doubt leads (and to some extent beckons) to a fully explicated theory of material culture predicated upon a philosophical conception of absence, particularly as the concept is rendered in the work of Levinas and Derrida. My aim, however, is more circumscribed. While section five does develop (in a preliminary and abbreviated fashion) a conception of absence and suggests that this conception of absence can provide a more fundamental ground for thinking about the significance of material culture, it does this in order to better illustrate what earthly theory neglects. Thus, while an alternative understanding of what material culture is and does is suggested, the article does not develop these suggestions into a fully-fledged theory. Such an article would not be an explicit engagement with the work of Miller and Tilley, but would focus on the conceptual heritage of absence in the existential tradition, its place in current debates in continental philosophy and the implications of these debates not only for MCS but for anthropology as a whole. While this line of thought is one I hope to develop in the future, this article is an engagement with a specific body of literature, and thus provides only a modest contribution to what is bound to be a more elaborate and ambitious project. The second qualifier concerns the articles focus on the work of Daniel Miller and Christopher
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Tilley. Using their work as a means to critique certain assumptions circulating within MCS is a problematic and reductive exercise. MCS is a wide and varied sub-field that incorporates a range of theoretical positions that are not always compatible or consistent. In this sense, the following critiques should not be thought of as a critique of the subfield, but rather of Miller and Tilley specifically. This said, it would be difficult to deny Millers and Tilleys well-deserved theoretical influence. It is precisely because of the theoretical rigour and creative application of their ideas that their work has been so influential and the reason why they make a useful entry point for critique. In this sense, I see the following discussion as an act of generosity, a means of extending their work into yet further regions of thought and debate. In doing so, I hope not only to reinforce the significance and value of Millers and Tilleys work, but also the significance and value of material culture itself, that is, the significance and value of the question of material culture and its profound (indeed, fundamental) relevance to social life.
2. Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller has perhaps been the most significant figure in the revival of MCS in anthropology. Writing at a time when structuralism in its various Marxist and linguistic guises was the dominant theoretical model for analysing and assessing cultural practices, Miller blazed a trail for thinking about cultural objects and artefacts as significant cultural phenomena in their own right. Rather than being merely an expression or reflection of deeper sociological mechanisms (the systems and processes considered to be the cause or engine of all cultural phenomena), Miller presents material objects as the means by which culture comes to be appropriated by subjects (see Miller, 1994, 1998). In this sense, his work develops a specific theoretical trajectory about the place of material culture in everyday human life and a more generalized theory of social relations and the central place of objects in their constitution. The essence of Millers argument is that subjects are constituted as cultural subjects through the appropriation and use of externalities. He begins with the uncontroversial proposition that subjects find themselves in historical contexts where they are given an array of beliefs, ideas, norms, values, practices, etc. The question Miller asks is: how do these cultural elements become part of us? How do they come to be conceived as belonging to us, and how do we, through this process, come to identify with the culture we find? For structuralists, the answer is that we are passively socialized into our culture. Thus, social relations reproduce themselves simply by being dominant, imprinting themselves on those who are part of their system (e.g. Sahlins, 1976). For Miller, however, such relations only become our own through active consumption. We actively appropriate the culture we find and, through that process, incorporate and internalize its structures. While Miller draws upon a range of social theorists to extend his point, the driving force behind his work is Hegels concept of sublation, the movement by which society re-appropriates its own external form that is, assimilates its own culture (Miller, 1994: 17). As Miller suggests, Hegels concept of subjectivity is founded on an ongoing movement between alienation and re-appropriation, where a subject initially sees the world and its objects as foreign to it and then, at some point, recognizes those externalities as part of its own being. The epiphany of recognition is followed by the subject
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incorporating that which is other into itself, making it no longer foreign but an element of its own being. It is this alienationincorporation mechanism that describes how subjects come to take ownership of the cultural world they historically receive. Given this perspective, it is clear why objects take on such significance. It is only by seeing our culture at a distance, via the objects and materials it generates, that we can come to take ownership of it and incorporate it into our self. For Miller, culture must be objectified: it must be initially alienated in order for us to incorporate it. By introducing the consumptive gesture into this formulation, Miller necessarily introduces perspective, a distance from society and its objects that the subject must then traverse in order for culture to be its own. In the process, Miller simultaneously creates and bridges a subject object divide. On the one hand, he positions the object world at a distance from our being and simultaneously argues that that distance is constitutive. It is only by moving back and forth between the subjects self and the subjects (historically received) world by regularly traversing the distance between the two that the subject comes to understand its world as its own. Thus, while Miller does not completely collapse the subjectobject divide as he claims, he does fundamentally reconfigure the terms. For Miller, there is no subject without objects. The subject does not pre-exist the object world nor is the object world simply supplemental to cultural identity. Rather than collapse or transcend the subjectobject distinction, Miller creates a distance and then builds a bridge, thus situating subjects and objects in a relation of fundamental interdependence. At first glance, Millers framework seems to have much in common with that of Cultural Studies (e.g. Berger, 1972, 1980; Hall, 1997; Hall and Du Gay, 1996; Williams, 1977, 2005). Also influenced by Hegel (via the early Marx), Cultural Studies similarly explores how individual agents perpetuate culture through everyday objectifying practices. Yet there is an important distinction. Cultural Studies, particularly in the early literature of Berger and Williams, continues to ground the objectifying practices it explores (whether they be productive or consumptive) in relation to a dominant social order. Culture, in Cultural Studies, is a meaning system that reflects and reinforces hegemony. And while that hegemony can be resisted through the meanings it establishes, cultures existence (its presence) relies on the order underneath signifying itself in various forms. Millers position on the relation between power and culture is more subtle. While he is certainly conscious of how power relations shape a subjects ability to access and consume externalities, power relations and their objects are not conceptualized as processes that structure thought. For Miller, there is always distance (an objectification) between the cultural world and the subjects that incorporate that world. And incorporation does not equate with inscription because consumption is always strategic. In this sense, Miller turns Cultural Studies on its head. The practice of consuming objects does not reinforce a cultural system already produced (already reflecting and reinforcing the dominant order), but is the very means by which a cultural order comes to be engendered. As Miller (2005) suggests, the clothes have no emperor. Rather than conceptualizing material culture (clothes) as the expression of an already sedimented and internalized cultural system (emperor), Miller presents material culture as the means by which a sedimented culture is constituted. Does this mean that agents are free to consume whatever and however? Obviously not, since power relations always operate as a constraint to the various ways culture can be expressed. But the question of power is a question of access and
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consequences, not inscription or structuration. In this sense, Millers work bears a stronger resemblance to Butlers (1990, 1993) concept of performativity: a framework (also influenced by Hegel) that emphasizes action and experimentation as the means by which gender (or in Millers case, culture) is affected. Culture, in Miller (like gender in Butler), is an empty centre. It is an idea affected through everyday experimental consumptive practices rather than a structure played out by semi-conscious agents. This is the radical manoeuvre for Miller: conceptualizing culture as an ongoing performance predicated on everyday consumptive practices. For Miller, it is the use of objects that constitutes culture and not vice versa.
3. Christopher Tilley
The second major theoretical trajectory I want to discuss is the phenomenological approach discussed by Christopher Tilley. While there has been increasing interest in phenomenology throughout the cultural sciences,2 Tilleys contribution has been to apply these insights specifically to the study of material culture. At the heart of his work is not simply a series of phenomenologically inflected ideas about the relationship between materiality and culture, but also the attempt to invent a set of archaeological methods that can operationalize this perspective in the field. This section focuses on the former concerns as their impact travels beyond their archaeological application. As someone working within the phenomenological tradition, Tilley begins by endeavouring to reconfigure the subjectobject divide. Unlike Miller, who establishes a space between the subject and object only to bridge it, Tilley collapses subject and object into the same conceptual scheme. He does this through two theoretical manoeuvres. First, Tilley (2004: 2) draws upon Merleau-Pontys concept of the bodysubject: a mind physically embodied, a body and a mind which always encounters the world from a particular point of view a physical subject in spacetime. The bodysubject provides a conception of subjectivity that is, first and foremost, of and in (rather than above or outside) the physical world. As Tilley suggests, all subjects have bodies. We are ourselves material physical creatures who find ourselves embedded within an equally physical domain. The point for Tilley is that our body is a modality of this generalized physical world. While the human body is no doubt different from a tree or stone, all three share in a more fundamental corporeality, what Merleau-Ponty calls flesh. The second manoeuvre is Tilleys suggestion that subjectivity is founded on, and engendered by, the bodys capacity to sense. For Tilley, it is sense that primordially awakens the subject to his or her own self-conscious presence. Thus, subjectivity is not the expression of a consciousness whose self-awareness precedes its sensing body, but consciousness (and thus subjectivity) arises from the bodys capacity to sense. For Tilley, it is only through the process of sensing that we come to recognize, cognate and consider that which senses, that is, the I, the self, the self-regarding subject. It is the sensing body that affords the subjects awareness of itself as a self-conscious being. The implications of these manoeuvres are twofold: first, the physical world and the body that senses are thought to share a pre-established unity, as Tilley (2004: 17) suggests, even in the case of looking at something, I am touched by that which I look at the act of perceiving the world binds the subject with the world of which he or she is
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already a part. Thus, Tilley (1996: 162) can say that we create objects and objects create us: while people create their landscapes these landscapes recursively act back so as to create the people who belong to them. It is only by being touched by the world, affected by its material physical presence, that subjectivity can emerge. The second point is that subjectivity arises from the sensory world. Thus, we are not self-conscious cognitive subjects who find ourselves in a world, but are embodied subjects whose subjectivity is gifted by the world that gives itself to sense. As Tilley (2006: 61) puts it, the world affords us the capacity to perceive our selves: through making, using, exchanging, consuming, interacting and living with things people make themselves in the process. Thus, like Miller, Tilley et al. (2006) argue that understanding material culture, and indeed, culture itself involves exploring the manner in which people think through themselves and their lives and identities through the medium of ... things (p. 4). Yet there is an important distinction here between Tilley and Miller. While both authors discuss the desire to bridge the distinction between subject and object, Tilleys route to this end (in a classically phenomenological fashion) is via ontology rather than social practices. For Miller, subjects become themselves through their fundamental engagement with things via consumption. While Miller would argue that such consumption is necessary for subjectivity to transpire, it is nonetheless a matter of joining a subjectobject divide. For Tilley, however, subjects and objects are a secondary effect of a prior unity. All beings, whether they are animate, conscious or mute as stones, are modalities of a primordial materiality. They are part of the flesh of the world. The point for Tilley is that the distance between subjects and objects is not something that needs to be theoretically bridged (as for Miller) since the primordial one-ness is already presumed. What needs to be thought is how distinctive objects and subjects arise from an initial unified position. Tilleys (2004) attempt to address this question both theoretically and empirically takes him into the realm of landscapes, a mode of materiality that exemplifies the subjectobject unity that he is attempting to exhume. As a nexus of human environment imbrications, landscape brings together those natureculture descriptors most often set apart in social science: topography and emotion, scenery and memory, perspective and power. Landscapes, for Tilley, are not just aesthetically, politically and meaningfully imbued landforms. While they no doubt are such things, to see them only in these terms misses their essence as a coalescence of embodied experience: earthly structures provoking emotive attachments begetting other emotive attachments and, inevitably, engendering further earthly structures. Tilleys discussion of the experience of Neolithic temple spaces in Malta (Tilley, 2004), West Penwith (Tilley and Bennett, 2001) and Bodmin Moor (Tilley et al., 2001; Bender et al., 2007) are illustrative. While many anthropologists and archaeologists would seek to understand the significance of these temples via what they symbolize and what cosmologies they represent, Tilley attempts to engage the temples experientially with an eye to the habitat and ecology in which they are set (and from which they emerge), as well as to the corporeal situations they engender via their architecture and appointment. Specifically, this means exploring the temples in terms of their situation in the surrounding environment; how they manipulate ones body when moving through their chambers; how they play with light and dark, air and airlessness in their passageways; how they open up vision at some points and obscure it at others. These experiential elements of the temple are not signifiers per se. Rather they are
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devices designed to operationalize a series of corporeal modalities that, in the experiencing, engender a sense of a particular cultural world.
4. Earthly theory
The aim of the previous sections was to illustrate the distinct trajectories of Millers and Tilleys respective frameworks. While Millers work responds to the longstanding structural Marxist tradition of conceptualizing material culture (as well as culture itself) as a reflection of relations of production, Tilleys target is representational analysis which privileges culture as a primarily cognitive system that can be read off its material expressions. In terms of theoretical heritage, Miller traces a line from Hegel (1979) through Simmel (1978) and Bourdieu (1977) and, in his later work, Latour (1993, 1996). Tilley, on the other hand, is more grounded in the phenomenological tradition, and thus finds inspiration in Merleau-Ponty (1962) and, to a lesser extent, Heidegger (1996). Yet, despite their differences in starting point and trajectory, both Miller and Tilley find themselves working towards a similar theoretical horizon. In terms of critique, they both reject the tendency in structuralism and representational analysis to conceptualize objects as reflections of an already acculturated mind. Thus, rather than maintaining an exclusive focus on the subject as the core question for cultural analysis, and treating the objects they throw off as peripheral, Miller and Tilley develop frameworks where neither subjects nor objects take ontological priority. In addition, they do this through two similar theoretical manoeuvres. Firstly, they make subjects and objects beholden to each other. As has been repeated by both authors numerous times, subjects and objects are coconstitutive. While such a statement may at first appear banal, its significance lies in the fact that both authors see subjects and objects as purely co-constitutive. In other words, there are only subjects, objects and the relations between them. While Miller and Tilley will sometimes use the term dialectic to describe the relationship between subjects and objects, they do not use the term in the traditional sense of a larger anonymous force (e.g. capitalism) being differentially applied (see Ollman, 1993). For Miller and Tilley, there are no driving meta-historical forces at work since, for both authors, subjects do not (indeed cannot) enter the socialcultural scene pre-conceived. There is simply no preexisting realm for creating cultural subjects before their engagement with the material world. The second manoeuvre is that the material processes they describe are conceptualized as everyday and worldly. For both authors, what matters for culture is not what happens in a subjects conscious, unconscious or indeed trans-conscious (as in structured) mind, but rather, what happens in the immediacy of everyday relations and events. If subjectivity is not pre-determined, if it has no shape before it enters a sphere of material engagements, then it must be something that takes place. The operative word here is place. It does not happen outside (in a distant metaphysical ether) or within (in the deep recesses of the inscribed mind), but in the here and now of the world. It is constituted (and regularly re-constituted) in the meaningful engagements of everyday material life. What is particularly interesting about these two theoretical manoeuvres is not simply how they reconfigure MCS, but more significantly, how they radically reconceptualize culture itself. Despite their differences, Miller and Tilley converge in their mutual endeavour to contract and collapse the sphere within which cultural processes occur. I
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say contract because subjects and objects are positioned as thoroughly and purely reliant on each other for their respective emergence. Again, for Miller and Tilley, subjectivity has no place outside the subjectobject relation. Thus, culture only exists through a process of intensive co-becoming, a continual back and forth between subjects and objects embedded and invested in each others existence. I use the term collapse to signal how Miller and Tilley abandon the traditional explanatory role of extra-empirical phenomena (i.e. structures in both their transcendent and humanist guises) in order to provide a far more earth-bound account of cultural processes. In Miller and Tilley, everything necessary for the constitution of subjects, objects and the complex coalitions they engender is already in-the-world (or at least in-the-social). The key point for both authors is that social relations must be freed from the spectre of an acculturated subject that has to be accounted for via extra-phenomenal mechanisms. Once this position has been disbanded, Miller and Tilley (1) narrow their focus to the immediacy of everyday co-constitutive processes, and (2) collapse subjectsobjects into an earthly domain where all forces are equal. This is how subjects and objects become part of the same earthly milieu. For Miller and Tilley, subjects and objects are equal, that is: they are in a dialectical republic because they are different modalities of the same process. By emphasizing the co-constitutive nature of subjectobject relations, the everyday becomes the source of culture and cultural expressions. Thus, rather than being the stage upon which cultural processes occur, the everyday becomes the means by which (and mode through which) people, plants, mountains, temples, smells, tastes, views, emotions, etc. come to be. The precedents for this intense focus on the co-constitutive effects of everyday grounded material practices are many in modern social theory, and MCS is an eclectic mirepoix of a number of them. In the idea that everything is always already there, ready and available to be consumed or corporeally engaged with, we see a connection with Heideggers (1996) conception of Dasein and its equipmental relations (as picking up and pushing forward its world); in envisioning the world as a flat plane of connections from which subjects and objects contingently and chaotically emerge, we hear the echoes of Deleuzes (1994) molecularized version of phenomenology and Latours (1993) everexpanding network; in attending to how complex social relations, coalitions, institutions, cultural ideologies and power relations can be generated from everyday social practices, we see the far-reaching effects of post-structuralism in general (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Lyotard, 1993) and Foucault (1978, 1995) in particular; and, most significantly, in the intense internality of practical inter-dependent engagements that work to constitute a self-sustaining cultural world, we find the powerful influence of Bourdieu (1977) and his concept of habitus. It is to the benefit of MCS that a relatively basic set of postulates (subjects and objects are co-constitutive and worldly) can find such a wide range of theoretical predecessors, and it is possible that this has been a significant factor in making the theoretical perspectives that Miller and Tilley have developed so popular. Throughout the MCS literature, the notion that subjects and objects co-constitute each other in a worldly earthly dimension (without the influence of extra-physical dynamics) is taken as common sense reinforced by a wide range of empirical studies. Yet, it is precisely on this issue, on the ontological faith in the co-constitutive relationship and the possibilities inherent in the everyday, that this critique begins.
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5. Marking the immaterial

Under the guidance of Miller and Tilley, MCS have become enchanted with the material and the myriad possibilities inherent in the everyday. In Miller and Tilley, the everyday material world is a place overwhelmed by meanings, legacies, sensitivities, perceptions, emotions, etc., all of which have their own history and trajectory, and yet, at the same time, are all available (to varying degrees) to be engaged with and/or consumed. Everything, in Miller and Tilley, is present in everyday life subjects, objects and all the processes and forces that they are an expression of. The consequence of this perspective is that it traps human processes in an inexorable baseness a back-and-forth internality that is without transcendence or escape. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the frameworks proposed by Miller and Tilley are closed. On the contrary, there is a strong sense of contingency in their work and both authors are keen to illustrate how subjectobject formations emerge in numerous complex and hybrid forms. My point, rather, is that it is profoundly secular. Miller and Tilley introduce an animate vital world that is also very flat. While it explodes with sensibilities and emotions, with visibilities and tactile resonance, there is nothing outside these movements and forces, no exteriority or alterity, to which these events might also refer. In this sense, their perspectives stand for what I term a secular materialism. It is not simply materialist it is a materialism that does not refer or defer to anything beyond its own internal mechanisms and processes. It is secular because, for Miller and Tilley, there is nothing above and beyond the everyday, nothing that gives to the world except that which is already in the world. What is not present or seen is conceptualized as either not yet visible a visibility lying in wait or non-existent. While this holism, this expansive earthly network of moving open relations, promises to bridge the subjectobject divide, the flipside is it promotes a deep secularism, an earthly theory that founds all social relations on what is present and available. In an effort to develop a trajectory of thought that can think material culture (or indeed culture itself) in terms other than what is present and available; in an attempt to elucidate a dimension that can add breadth and height to material culture, a dimension that can provide escape from earthly theory and the flat ontology it situates; with a desire to suggest that there is more to material culture than materiality itself and the relations from which it emerges, I want to ask a question about what, precisely, material culture marks? In presenting this question, I do not mean to suggest that MCS have misidentified their object or what it signifies, i.e. it is not that MCS have been imprecise in their understanding of the significance of objects or their theorization of what objects mean and do. The emphasis is on the word marks. To mark is not to signify. While a marker can signify, this possibility is itself predicated on there being something there, a marker that can be made to speak or express. In this sense, precisely refers to the precise possibility for signification; the possibility of there being a site where signification can occur. To put this another way, the question I am asking does not concern theorizing what material culture is or even how material culture works, but why material culture, as a phenomenon, appears at all. What asks for material culture? What beckons it? From what preestablished scene are objects called forth to mark a place from which they can subsequently be made to speak?
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The question can perhaps be best described through an example. The parish church marks a scene of social and cultural relations. Through its evocative synthesis of meanings, corporeal practices, affective sensibilities and everyday histories, the church makes present a specific modality of cultural and community life. It connects, via its material formidability, stories and events in a manner that simultaneously concentrates and elaborates a certain imagination of being. And yet, what gives the church this capacity, this ability to establish relations, is precisely what the church, as a material site, does not show. Like the name of God itself, the church reverberates and circulates around something that cannot be captured. The church is not built to attest and announce the presence of God that would be impossible. Rather, what the church stands for is Gods absence. It is because God is absent that the church is present. This is not to say that God is dead but that God resists presence, i.e. God resists appearing within the orbit of beings that can be comprehended, understood and/or rendered knowable. The church is a marker of God because God resists presence; it is because God fails to appear, fails to be available to mortal vision, that the church is built. While it would be easy to dismiss this line of argument as theological speculation, a Cartesian deus ex machina on which to pin a tired and already well worn-out metaphysics, such a manoeuvre would not get around the philosophical problem that God presents. For philosophers like Levinas (1969, 1981, 1987), Derrida (1995a, 1995b), and others (Chrtien, 2004; Irigaray, 1991; Marion, 1991, 2008), God names what earthly theory leaves out, indeed, what it must leave out that which cannot be sublated, objectified, incorporated or appropriated; that which cannot be brought into a co-constitutive relation or a dialectical republic. For Levinas, God signals a dimension of radical alterity, a realm that infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge (Levinas, 1996: 12). God is wholly Other and essentially non-coincident to everyday existence. Similarly, Chrtien (2004: 25) describes God as an infinite choral call, a voice made up of a multitude of voices that exceed the human ear and which is inevitably and invariably misheard: in what [the listener] hears lies always already what he has failed to hear, what he cannot hear. Finally, Marion (2008) argues that God marks a threshold that reveals to human beings the poverty of their fallen existence, an invisible mirror that reflects back to the limitations of being and the circumscribed economy within which it operates. Taken together, these theorists name an inscrutable dimension that, while being infinitely outside being, nonetheless intrudes on being in a manner that is beyond all knowability, management, manoeuvrability and control. The point here is not (necessarily) to argue for the inclusion of God into our theories of material culture, but to suggest that the demand to build, produce and create resides not in social relations, but in a dimension outside such relations. The dimension I am describing is defined by its essential non-appearance, but it is precisely its absence that engenders what we might term a call: a solicitation to build, produce and create in response to that which we cannot control, manage or comprehend.3 This response is not a strategic or tactical response since it does not address anything specific. It is a response to something we do not understand, something we cannot see, a blind retort, a reply to that which our intentions have not encompassed (Lyotard, 1986: 123). It is a response to what Levinas (1987) terms a mystery. A mystery that can be seen in our relationship
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to the future; an opacity whose appearance on our horizon solicits plans, calculations and preparations that are routinely shattered. Even as the future utterly eludes us, it nonetheless beckons us into particular forms of action. It is because the future is beyond reproach that it cannot be made to answer for what it delivers, that we predict and plan to meet its coming secrets. This mystery can also be seen in our relationship with the body, a powerful modality for sensing, knowing and acting that, however, is inherently limited by its vulnerability. As Harrison (2008) suggests, the bodys vulnerability to hunger, pain and disease is a condition of existence. To be hungry or in need of rest is to be at the whim of something other than oneself. It stands as a demand that we have no purchase on. One cannot challenge, engage with or face down ones hunger or tiredness, it is a demand that cannot be mollified or negotiated with but only satisfied. And yet, it is precisely the bodys vulnerability that engenders our endeavour to take care of it to seek its satisfaction and well-being despite the fact that such acts may have little effect on the bodys inherent limitations. Finally, there is the mystery of other people; the other individual whose measure and moods invariably have consequences on our own life. The appearance of other people always carries with them a demand to respond. Indeed, the very concept of governance, as it is rendered in Foucault (2007), is testament to this demand, that is, the need to engender security against the unpredictable forces that other people unleash. In all these examples, mystery marks a relationship that is fundamentally asymmetrical, i.e. a relationship where we have no claim over what we receive or what is delivered. And it is precisely because we are at the whims of the future, of our bodies and other people that we build homes (to protect vulnerable bodies), create odds (to predict unpredictable outcomes) and pray to gods (to face incomprehensible futures). It is precisely the unaccountability of these mysteries that engenders our response. We build, prepare and produce in an effort to face that which escapes our powers to grasp.4 In this sense, the economy of material forms that MCS endeavour to trace, the ongoing production of objects, buildings and landscapes, can be thought of as an ongoing response to that which requires continual redress the absent/present Other whose endless withdrawal summons us into new modes of marking an arcane, elusive and wholly unpredictable life. As one can perhaps glean from the discussion thus far, the trajectory of this position is that mystery is the fundamental origin of material culture. In this rendering, material culture is built in response to a solicitation from that which withdraws: the call to build a physical place (a church, a tomb, a home) where we can hold onto that which always and inevitably eludes us. The aim of this article, however, is not to build this position into a fully-fledged theory of material culture. My point, rather, is to illuminate the limits of earthly theorys secular horizon. The next section turns the discussion back to the work of Miller and Tilley in order to illustrate how the question of absence is neglected in their work and the implications of that neglect. Specifically, I discuss what I take to be three broad consequences of Millers and Tilleys secular materialist position: its economism, its presentism and its insularity. In each section, I endeavour to illustrate how their frameworks force objects into relations of consumption and exchange that the objects themselves resist; how the practice of building, producing and consuming is not a matter of actualizing what is always already ours, but of marking that which is never ours and can never be ours.
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6. Economism
Millers and Tilleys desire to collapse the subjectobject divide, while laudable for all the reasons they suggest, has the consequence of presenting the world as an endless repository of commodities, meanings, corporealities (affects, sensations, emotions), etc. that give themselves over to the constitution of various subjectobject relations. For Miller and Tilley, the worlds existence is predicated on its capacity to give; its nature is to support and promote the existence of other beings. As Tilley et al. (2006: 4) suggest: persons make and use things and things make persons. Subjects and objects are indelibly lined. Through considering one, we find the other (see also Tilley, 1999: 76). My point here is not simply to draw attention to the indelible linearity of this reciprocal relation, but its unrelenting productivity. It is not only that subjects and objects are entwined; it is that they are imbricated in an economy of giving and taking. Tilleys (2004: 18) discussion of a painter painting trees (an example drawn from Merleau-Ponty) is a useful illustration of this relationship: the painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. Thus, trees have agency because they give themselves over to the painter to be painted. While I agree that trees have agency, I wonder whether that agency can be conceptualized in terms other than whom or what it serves. In Millers and Tilleys co-constitutive economy, all beings are perpetually at the beckoning of each others existence. Thus, subjects and objects are perpetually caught in a dance of remorseless reciprocity, perpetually owing each other the means to their ongoing existence. Trees, for Tilley, are only trees (only become trees) as they affect and move the painter. Their appearance is reduced to this economism, that is, to what they can endow, engender or produce. Given that this economy is the engine of all being, it is hard to imagine what could possibly be outside. Even if we wanted to retain some residual component of being that was extra- or meta-economical (some aspect that was unavailable for appropriation or use), where, within the earthly horizon that Miller and Tilley establish, would that element be? What could remain beyond the sphere of earthly availability? As previously suggested, both authors have a conception of the not-yet-present or the not-yet-seen, but such concepts merely stake out what has not-yet-come-to-pass, similar to what MerleauPonty calls the invisible or what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand. The question is, where would we find that aspect of objects that is never available that aspect that is not lying-in-wait, but is, in its essence, unclaimable? Where, for instance, lies love? We think of love, friendship and intimate relations as something essential to human life and yet they have an ambivalent place within an economy of giving and receiving. While love is often presented as something that can be objectified, commodified and/or consumed, love itself (if such a thing can be named) transcends such forms of appropriation. As Derrida (1997) suggests, we, as subjects, never properly have love nor can we ever give it. We do not own our love but, on the contrary, are always at the whims of our beloved, and are elated or destroyed by their coming and going. While we no doubt exchange tokens of love, such gifts bear the mark of an incapacity, that is, of an inability to possess love through reciprocal exchange. Indeed, such tokens are given precisely because they stand in lieu of the love we cannot secure, predicated as it is on another
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person whose presence cannot be guaranteed. Levinas terms such tokens caress. We perform our love through caress precisely because the beloved cannot be grasped: by caressing, the lover searches and forages without end (Peperzak, 1993: 194). Caressing, according to Levinas, is a means of holding onto loves future. A future that, he states, is never future enough, meaning never comfortably secured in our temporal imagination. The caress is, thus, a failing gesture, it
consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to tell it. (Levinas, 1969: 257258)
It is only because love remains unavailable for having or giving, based as it is on the mystery of others, that we mark our love with caress. A token that stands for a promise that a subject cannot be held to, but is given nonetheless. Such a conception of love stands in contrast to the one described by Miller (1998) in A Theory of Shopping. While Miller interestingly conceptualizes shopping as a gift of love, and similarly understands such gifts as an attempt to objectify (and thus secure) ones sense of being responsible for, and being claimed by, another, he simultaneously secularizes the gift by making it part of a social economy of giving and receiving. Thus, while I find Millers conception of the relationship between love and shopping compelling, I find the analysis itself somewhat amputated. For Miller, the ultimate grounds for the gift of love are the worldly relations in which it is presented. While Miller acknowledges that gifts of love have a transcendent dimension, the grounds for the gift are the social relations it is thought to reflect and engender. While such gifts no doubt do engender and reflect loving relations, the circulation of such gifts cannot encompass that relation or actualize the love they claim. Gifts of love mark an asymptotic ambition, an impossible gesture to secure love against the infinite. Following Derrida (1993, 1997) and Levinas (1969), I would see tokens of love as impossible gifts (see Argyrou, 2007); markers that hold out the possibility for a love that can never be secured. While gifts of love are no doubt commodities, their function exceeds the economy in which they circulate and the social relations that that economy engenders. Thus, while gifts of love do play the economic role Miller suggests, this role is not their foundation; and to understand it as such leaves us with both a limited understanding of love and a purely economic understanding of loving relations.
7. Presentism
A second consequence of earthly theory is its focus on that which is present i.e. that which is there for appropriation and use by a co-constitutive economy. As in the previous section, I am interested here in that which exceeds presence, those forms of existence that resist a co-constitutive economy. By way of illustration, I want to revisit the earlier discussion of tombs. In Tilley, tombs are conceptualized as part of the worldly complex they help constitute. Thus, they exist as another fractal of a phenomenological worldly whole, reinforcing and reflecting the cultural environment in which they are situated. Tilleys
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(2004) analysis of tombs in Malta focuses particularly on their visibility within a wider socio-material landscape as well as the forms of movements they impose on a living body entering its structure. While my aim here is not to take away from Tilleys analysis, I want to suggest that such a reading of tombs provides a somewhat limited conception for what tombs do. I do not doubt that tombs appear in the landscape in the way Tilley describes and that their appearance in such forms potentially reflects a set of endemic worldly relations, and yet his analysis tells us very little about tombs themselves as forms of material culture. It says very little about what tombs are and what tombs do. They are approached from the beginning as present forms within a co-constitutive economy of social relations and meaning. Using the same kind of analysis that we used to discuss the parish church, we might also think about tombs in terms of the absence they keep present; the irretrievable loss they make visible. While acknowledging that there are various material practices for commemorating the dead, tombs mark a non-presence; they are a mode of making present that which can never be present, a loss that can never be retrieved. In this sense, what gives the tomb its materiality, its presence as a stone in or on the earth, is the absence it marks. Tombs do not emerge from a co-constitutive process but, rather, from a need to name and mark absence, a life that is no longer there, and thus unavailable for appropriation or sublation. While the tomb itself may serve social relations, its foundation lies in that which resists the economy of presence. Tombs are bequeathed by death. This myopic focus on that which is present can perhaps be explained by Tilleys desire to situate the body as a phenomenological origin or foundation. As he states (Tilley, 1999: 34): the body is the ground or anchor by means of which we locate ourselves in the world. The body is no doubt a highly plastic plane for sensing and its affective capacities and possibilities for knowing stretch along a thoroughly complex horizon. Yet this is not to say that our body provides the anchor by which the subject locates itself in the world; nor is it to say that we are always in and of our bodies and cannot leave them (p. 4). Indeed, the issues I have been discussing throughout this article concern the subjects capacity to escape the base physicality of its world. Thus, while the body is certainly implicated in various forms of religious practice (fasting, yoga, etc.),5 in other traditions it is seen as something that must be transcended (in Buddhism, Sufism and certain forms of Christianity), where the subject is thought to know precisely by abandoning the body, that is, by endeavouring to embrace that which is metaphysical. Thus, while MCS have provided many interesting accounts of the world of religious practice (Buggeln, 2003; Meskell, 2004; Miller, 2008b; Miller and Slater, 2000; Rowlands, 2002), the founding notion that we are always in and of our bodies and cannot leave them keeps such analyses at the level of what is available to corporeal engagement. In this sense, Tilleys analysis is not only blind to the present absence of the divine (its presence as absence), but it denies its existence. It denies that there is more to the world than the body can touch, see and/or consume. Such a denial is not only theoretically and empirically limiting, it is a profound deafness to a significant means of experience.
8. Insularity
The final consequence of earthly theory is its insularity. In Millers and Tilleys coconstitutive framework, the world is presented as a networked unity. For both authors,
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there exists at the heart of their mutual ontologies a primal connectedness, a set of relations whose co-constitutive possibilities have no boundaries, bar those established by other co-constitutive relations. As Tilley (2004: 22) suggests: an embodied mind is part of culture and part of the world [it] establishes connections between things allow[ing] us to see similarity in difference, permitting us to connect the world together. The problem with the theoretical ambition to see everything as connected is the loss of alterity. This is not to suggest that there is no place for difference in Miller and Tilley. But the difference that takes place in their work operates through the multivalent subject object hybrids that emerge and recede through the co-constitutive relation. My problem with this rendition of alterity is that it makes difference profoundly unthreatening. In Miller, the process of sublation involves a subject coming to consume what is always already theirs: objectification helps people come closer to a realisation of who they already feel they really are (Miller, 1998: 178). Thus, sublation is a reunification rather than a confrontation. Similarly, Tilley presents a sensuous material world whose forms take shape in their specificity as they are incorporated into corporeal relationships e.g. of seer and seen. Thus, it is only by entering into a field of resonance and sensibility, where things take on recognizable and familiar forms, that our relationship with ourselves and the world is made clear. Difference, in Miller and Tilley, is something easily tamed readily consumed and/or sublated. While the processes of sublation and corporeal engagement do not incorporate and renew the world as it stands (they both involve interpretive syntheses), the process of coming to know and understand ones self involves taking what is exterior, foreign and distant and making it something consumable. It means taking what is Other and making it identifiable and comfortable within the confines of ones own being. There are two related political implications of this framework. The first is the point made earlier, that there is no real alterity here. The co-constitutive relation is a relation founded on the annulment of difference. As Argyrou (2002) suggests, as well as Heidegger (1974) before him, relation by definition implies sameness. The co-constitutive relation, as an agent of dialogic production, necessitates the incorporation (indeed, the sublation) of difference. Relation must subsume difference to its dialectical synthetic logic. The second implication, following from the first, is that the co-constitutive relation engenders an ontological equivalence between all beings. Indeed, if nothing resists consumption if everything is equally commodifiable and incorporatable and if there is no enduring element of distinctiveness that operates beyond the constant circulation of the subjectobject relation then what keeps all individualism from being collapsed into a singular elemental plane? While I am sympathetic to Tilleys and Millers idea that subjectivity is an open-ended engagement with a restless world, I am uncomfortable with the equality the dialectical republic of connectedness that such a framework entails. In emphasizing the continuity between all (human and non-human) beings and celebrating the multi-faceted connections that create us all, the subject, as a unique nonsubstitutable expression, is lost.6 Such a critique may seem like a conservative defence of humanism and Cartesian exceptionalism (and to some extent it is); however, my defence of subjectivity is not at the level of humanity but at the level of the single being. In a world where everything is connected and we are all made of the same stuff, what makes each individual irreplaceable? What
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makes each individuals death tragic? What within the single individual human remains utterly and essentially distinct i.e. unconsumable, untradeable and outside all economy? Millers and Tilleys frameworks have no place for such a notion of singularity. While they discuss the constitution of individual identities as multi-faceted complexities, such phenomena are considered to be (on the ontic level) performative or (on the ontological level) a temporary synthesis. In each case, there is no transcendent element guaranteeing a beings specificity. There are only bodies, forces, sensibilities, perceptions and relations dialectically emanating from, and corporeally responding to, an open-ended multivalent world. This is a consequence of their secular materialism; the conviction that everything that gives beings their capacity to be exists in the earthly dimensions of the everyday. While there are no doubt plenty of creative expressions emanating from this holism, the lack of something outside or beyond its chaotic movement makes every identity within it fungible.
9. The necessary and the fundamental

Given the huge amount of interest in material culture, the explosion of thought around material objects and the powerful statements about the agency and power of the material world, it is odd that I find Millers and Tilleys conception of what material objects can do somewhat limiting. They have no doubt succeeded in illustrating the theoretical importance of objects in the constitution of social cultural life. They have also empirically demonstrated the significant hold that material objects have on various subjects in various settings. Yet, by restricting their conception of objects to a function within a secular co-constitutive economy, they simultaneously limit their significance. Objects, for Tilley and Miller, are no doubt essential. They play a significant role in the functioning of a co-constitutive process. But they are not fundamental. They do nothing to engender or support this economy. They are simply one of the means by which it functions. This is not to say that they are unimportant, but they have no priority. They do not preside over the economy they are a part of, they simply participate in its processes. However, what if we think of material culture as a response to what is absent and elusive rather than what is present and immediate? What if we think of material objects as an attempt to mark a love we can never have (a ring), an individual who will never return (a tomb) or a divinity that shrouds its face in mystery (a temple, statue or altar)? What if we think of objects not as a means by which identities come to be possessed (Miller) or by which we become immersed in the do-ings and way-ings of everyday life (Tilley), but as things that mark our desires for such sufficiencies, that is, as things that give phenomenality (feebly, weakly and always insufficiently) to that which resists possession or coincidence? What if material objects stood not for what appears but for what never appears, giving presence to that which defies presence, e.g. the mysteries of love, the proximity of death, the yearning of hope, the calling of the divine? In this framing things are fundamental. They are a necessary means of giving the inherent insecurity of life, the utter unknowability of the future (and the love, death and hope that awaits there) some semblance of presence; a concrete form we can hold onto in the face of an alterity more radical than any identifiable or knowable difference. Here, objects are not simply essential, they are fundamental: tombs as a means to address the forever absent, a ring to secure a love we can never properly hold. Such objects do not secure the cultural world
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they cultivate. They do not actually guarantee the forms of existence they mark. But they provide what Derrida (1982) might term a dream of presence. A material stake in the earth to mark a dream of a world we can never hope to hold or possess, but must dream of possessing nonetheless (also see Caputo, 1987; Rose, 2006, 2010). I recognize there is a frustration here in that I am not outlining a coherent theory of material culture predicated upon the transcendent, but that project, unfortunately, will have to wait for another paper. This article is modest in aims and suggestive in proposition. Through an engagement with some key theoretical works in MCS, it puts forth the idea that there is more to life than life itself and there is more to existence than what the co-constitutive economy gives, produces and engenders. The fact that such dynamics originate from a register from outside the social does not mean that they are insignificant or epiphenomenal. Indeed, what I have attempted to illustrate is how the social is inherently vulnerable to the Other and the fundamental role material culture plays in attempting (always unsuccessfully) to address this vulnerability. In this sense, this critique is an attempt to step back from what might be seen as a long-term endeavour in MCS to eradicate all metaphysics from its theoretical index and reduce all cultural forces to the material relations in which they are expressed. There remains a place in socialcultural theory for what remains outside of what we can empirically encounter and it is only by engaging with this place, a dimension outside the social, that material culture can be approached as something fundamental. Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Material Culture for their patient assistance with seeing this paper through. I would also like to thank Mark Johnson and an anonymous reviewer for their engaged and insightful comments.
Notes
1. In anthropology (Appadurai, 1986; Henare et al., 2007; Macdonald, 2009; Miller, 1994; Tilley, 2004; Van Binsbergen and Geschiere, 2005), geography (Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Gregson and Lowe, 1995; Gregson et al., 2007; Jackson, 2000; Tolia-Kelly, 2006) and other disciplines (Attfield, 2000; Dant, 1999; Tiffany, 2000). 2. In anthropology (Gow, 1999; Ingold, 2000; Melhuish, 2005; Moutu, 2007) and geography (Cloke and Jones, 2001, 2004; Dubow, 2001; Harrison, 2000, 2007; Wylie, 2002, 2006). 3. Levinass later work is often characterized as emanating from an engagement with the critiques and subsequent debates/conversations with Derrida on this issue, i.e. the capacity to write the Other. See Derrida (1978, 1991, 1999) and Caputo (1997), Critchley (1999), and iek (2006). 4. In the language of Levinas (1981: 185), the Other leaves its trace:
After the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes, [one] discovers the trace, the unpronounceable inscription to which are suited not the nouns designating beings, or the verbs in which their essence resounds, but that which marks with its seal all that a noun can convey.
The key phrase here is all that a noun can convey. For Levinas, the trace is the origin of our noun-littered lives. We speak (as we write and build) because there is always more that can be said in our response to the Other. What is said is never sufficient because it responds to that which perpetually retires and retreats. 5. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
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6. I recognize that such a statement betrays an adherence to a tradition that has a history of contemplating subjectivity as a problem of the individual (Strathern, 1990). In this sense, I accept that there is nothing inherently wrong about a theory that does not guarantee the subject as a singularity. The question of singularity is pertinent as it relates to ethics, but such a stance would bring us into the fold of a Western tradition.
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Biographical note
Mitch Rose is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Hull. His research interests centre on questions of cultural theory and landscape. In addition to these conceptual interests, he is interested in the culture, history and politics of the Middle East, where most of his work on landscape is based.

Secular Materialism A Critique of Earthly Theory

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Secular materialism: a critique of earthly theory

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

5. Marking the immaterial

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

9. The necessary and the fundamental

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

Journal of Material Culture 16(2)

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