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Reading artefacts — do we really read them?

08 Apr 2010 Thomas  

10 Responses to “Reading artefacts — do we really read them?”

1. on 08 Apr 2010 at 2:31 pm 1Anna Adamek

   Interesting points Thomas, but I would argue that we do not actually read texts, we read codes. Text is only one of codes; there are many others, non-language dependant: notes on a music sheet, mathematical equations, chemical equations…
   What do I do when I approach an artifact? I look at it carefully, move it around and start narrating. I am definitely reading it, although not the same way I would read a text.
   The text is literal, verbal, sequential and temporary; an artifact is spatial, dynamic, nonverbal and allusive, but an artifact is still a signifier. It has a meaning just lake a word, a note, and a digit. And like other signifiers it can be placed in mutable, subjective chains that affect its meaning (exhibits, warehouses, collectons).

2. on 08 Apr 2010 at 4:19 pm 2Thomas

   Hi Anna,

   Thanks for this comment. It helps to substitute ‘text’ with ‘code’, i.e., to think in terms of ‘decoding artefacts’ instead of ‘reading artefacts’. There is always a decoding aspect of our engagement with artefacts, precisely because they are intentionally crafted and the result of practices saturated with meaning. In one sense, the engagement with historical artefacts is thus indeed about decoding (but not reading).

   The basic fundamental problem is not solved by substituting ‘text’ with ‘code’, however. Because even though artefacts are made in meaningful practice, they are not just signifiers (or maybe rather signfied, signifié). They are also physical ‘things’, somewhat like Aristotle’s ‘material cause’ of an object, in contrast to its formal, efficient and final causes.

   My post was actually conflating two kinds of criticism. One against the use of the word ‘reading’, where ‘decoding’ is, in my mind, more appropriate. And the other, and more fundamental, against the tendency of cultural studies to devalue the ‘material causes’ of things in favour of the formal, efficient and final causes (to continue to speak in Aristotelian terms).

   In other words, when you say that “an artifact is still a signifier” (or do you mean signified?), I am afraid that you are missing the important material thingness aspect of artefacts.

3. on 08 Apr 2010 at 4:42 pm 3Alistair K

   It is possible to read objects in a fairly literal way. I suggest here that the problematic word is not so much ‘read’, as it is ‘language’.

   Object examination is analogous to examining paper, ink, and the traces of production in manuscript and print at both macroscopic and microscopic scales. Shapes in the metal, wood and ivory have direct messages to convey. With the naked eye you can tell whether an item was engraved or stamped. With a simple magnifying glass you can tell in what order the lines were laid down. With optical microscopy you can tell whether the metal was cast, cold-worked, annealed. With electron beams and x-rays you can identify the alloy and further microstructures such as crystal alignments. All of this is as essential to describing the object’s early life as parchment, hand, binding and ink are essential and standard to describing the origins of a manuscript. In other words, we already do this.

   At a macro level, we can read using the methods of ergonomics and morphological taxonomy, as I demonstrated via syringes.

   At a both macro and micro levels, we can hypothesise and test genealogies of instrument ways analogous to those for manuscript stemmata. (It seems to me that computational phylogenetics could offer much to this field.)

   At all scales we face problems akin to early modern Europeans trying to recover Near Eastern antiquity: they confronted unfamiliar scripts representing languages that they did not understand, plus ruins and treasures demonstrating the results of technology and aesthetics, but communicating their origins through languages that can be read only in matter, not script. And what could it mean to ‘read’ an unknown script, or a dead one whose meaning has been entirely constructed centuries or millennia after the fact? How are these things even identified as texts? Many a visitor to the Alhambra would easily miss the words all over the ceilings — is that text?

   One may object that the message in matter is ambiguous. But this applies also to written texts. Writing is representative and inherently biased; perhaps it contains errors from imperfect reproduction; perhaps, like the Donation of Constantine, it deliberately lies — when we cannot tell, we must seek solace in the Principle of Charity or the lectio difficilior or in constraining our conclusions. The message conveyed by matter, in contrast, comes to us via far fewer interpretative intermediaries.

   On the other hand, script survives in a way that matter does not. You can copy a text (with some risk of error) but matter cannot be replicated at every level: wood, paper, bone and ivory warp and swell and crack. Metals tarnish. Liquids evaporate or separate or congeal. Rubber and paper and plastic crumble. All materials get worn away with handling. The reader of objects must search for and allow for such changes; the replicator must think hard about the interpretation inherent in his act. This is analogous to recovering what bookworms have excised from an old ledger. Sometimes you can deduce it, other times you cannot. It is easy to say “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”, and for interpretations to be based less on evidence than imagination, but this is equally problematic for script. We happen to be far more practised in catching such sins in one medium than in the other.

   Scripts and objects record different things. Recovering their messages requires different languages but, I contend, very similar thought processes.

   In conclusion, perhaps there is a useful approach to your question by asking what counts as a legible language. I think that historians who propose to read objects can learn a great deal from material culturalists, conservators, scientists, statisticians, archaeologists. Among their languages is that written by Nature herself in the very fabric of existence. It seems to me that anyone who can learn languages, palaeography and philology to read written texts should have no less difficulty learning some algebras, a calculus or two and basic science to read material ones.

4. on 09 Apr 2010 at 7:04 am 4Lucy

   I see objects as something we encounter. We each have unique experiences of objects but do not necessarily ‘read’ them. We read texts because they have been authored and are intended to be read. Objects have different purposes specific to each object. We can build relationships with objects through observing them over a period of time and finding methods to gain information and insights into them. In my research this involves the activity of drawing them. However, objects themselves do not ‘speak’ or ‘tell’ us information. The text panels and information leaflets that accompany the objects do that. These can be read and tell us information from an author’s point of view. It is up to the observer of the object to gain insight through the experience they encounter. This will always be subjective but the onus is on the viewer to seek out information through observing an object rather than receive information passively from a third party. Understanding of the object’s materiality and presence is directly dependant on both parties being present. Reading matter can be read in any form in any place at any time and is not reliant on being in the presence of the actual artefact.

5. on 11 Apr 2010 at 12:12 pm 5Adam

   Great discussion of an extremely complicated set of issues. I’ll argue that what is involved in the rhetoric of reading objects is an enshrined set of ideas about what constitutes a human subject, and how we as organisms appropriate the world around us. These enshrined ideas focus on human existence as a continual process of reading and deciphering the world, and see this process as taking place within or close to the conscious surface of the subject.

   We are seen as being at our most ‘human’ when we are engaging in reading and deciphering, and thus of most interest to scholars in the ‘humanities’, whose primary job it is to understand these activities. In other words, when our engagement with objects are described as ‘reading’ what is implied is that humans are primarily creatures of meaning and that the most distinguishing characteristic of the human subject is its ability to decode its surrounding.

   But one of the unfortunate consequences of the idea of ‘the decoding subject’ seems to me to be that we focus the entire scope of our investigations on an extremely restricted set of human activities. We happily ignore the fact that we are primarily material beings that appropriate our surroundings through entire registers of material sensations that exists before and outside any ‘reading’.

   There is a whole set of metaphors here – code, meaning, language, signifier, legibility, writing, reading, deciphering, and so on – which seems to me to get in the way of understanding how we primarily engage with objects, namely as material existences that have a similar material affect on us. What is needed, it seems to me, is a new vocabulary (along with a new set of approaches, topics and analytical tools) that allows us to write history and produce exhibition for a subject that is thoroughly and primarily materialized.

6. on 11 Apr 2010 at 1:11 pm 6Thomas

   Hi Adam, that’s a much more succinct way of making the argument against ‘reading artefacts’ than I can produce — and one that begins to open up the black box of a philosophy of things.

   But — what does this new vocabulary look like? Maybe (to avoid being trapped in language again) it’s not so much a question of a new ‘vocabulary’, but rather a new curatorial practice? Another set of gestures.

   Somehow, your comment gives me associations to the ‘theory’ of carpentry, pottery and other forms of skills.

7. on 11 Apr 2010 at 10:43 pm 7Adam Mosley

   I say few things of some relevance to this discussion in my introduction to a special issue of Studies in History & Philosophy of Science, 38.2 (2007): ‘Objects, texts and images in the history of science’. To summarise, I do think that historians of material culture and historians of the book have a lot to learn from one another – the approaches of instrument historians and book historians have converged in many respects in recent years, but this is not generally recognised. However, I’m not a fan of the tendency to use ‘text’ (and hence ‘reading’) in the widest possible sense – if I’m studying an instrument that carries some text, than referring to the instrument as a text can only be confusing.

8. on 16 Apr 2010 at 3:02 pm 8Robert Bud

   I have just come across this thread and apologise for being so late. However I do want to comment on the sense of reading as being a purely passive ingestion of knowledge whereas clearly it is also about the reconstruction of ourselves as readers. In that way engagement with objects and I would prefer “engaging” to “reading” is akin to engaging not just with an information text but also a novel. Confronting an instrument has the possibility of helping us reconstruct our world in the way that engaging with a novel can. The experience of editing our encyclopedia Instruments of Science evoked for me this experience, as we chose and learned about weird flowmeters and the strange fluourescent cell blood sorters which were based on ink jet printers. I would hope that a visit to the Science Museum would also evoke this sort of experience.

9. on 21 May 2010 at 8:08 pm 9Graham Larkin

   As demonstrated by Alistair K’s examples above, texts are things, and indeed they are artifacts.

   One can refer in perfectly reasonable, non-metaphorical English to reading things that are not texts, such as facial expressions, rooms full of people or situations. So why not artifacts? The word *read* is rooted in the O.E. verb *rædan* (“explain, read, rule, advise”) and the noun *ræd* (“advice”). Our word *riddle* is derived from the same root, since the act of interpretation is involved in all cases.

   Whether you’re reading a text or a face or an artifact, you are involved in decoding, interpreting, material engagement &c.

   Stick to your guns, Dr. Pantalony!

10. on 09 Jul 2010 at 9:25 pm 10David Pantalony

    I never responded to Graham’s posting below. In short, I do not have any guns to stick to! I don’t have any deep philosophical commitment to the use of “reading.” I speak for myself (because Rich Kremer has argued for the reading metaphor) that I have used reading simply as a provocative title. Most undergrads and newcomers to collection work do not see artifacts as an independent source of information. The title does a good job at stimulating new ways of thinking about artifacts. In a practical sense, however, I rarely use “reading.” I would not tell my colleagues that I am going back into the collection to read some historic microscopes. I would most likely say look or examine.

    Interestingly, my dad, a haematologist who has spent over 50 years looking through a microscope at slides of bone marrows, says he has used the word read, but in very specific circumstances. His routine language would normally be examine, interpret and the verb “sign out” which relates to a “diagnostic event.” The language is routine, but his methods are not static and the field is certainly alive with controversy and conflict.

    So maybe as our field matures, we will adopt this kind of routine language and not worry about provocation, or expressing just the right sense of what is the activity. We will just do it, incorporate artifacts into our research, in the many different ways there are to do this.

    For yet another view, Jai Virdi has also put her two cents into her history blog:

    http://activehistory.ca/2010/06/scientific-instruments-as-“a-history-with-of-and-through-things”/#more-1845

    On a realted note, the CSTM Summer Institute for this year is full. Anna has assembled people from across Canada, the US and even China. Most importantly, an eclectic group of CSTM artifacts will again be part of the action. The new participants will be joining our google group, so stay tuned for their input.

    http://groups.google.com/group/reading-artifacts-CSTM

    Our Summer Institute this year, with Anna Adamek as the workshop leader, will be emphasizing different approaches than last year. We will be doing the same next year as well, so consider coming for a future SI – new people, new artifacts, new approaches.

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