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Culture & Society
After Word? On Some Dynamics of Duality Interrogation: Or: Why Bonfires
Are Not Enough
Steve Woolgar
Theory Culture Society 2002 19: 261
DOI: 10.1177/026327602761899255
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After Word? On Some Dynamics

of Duality Interrogation
Or: Why Bonfires Are Not Enough

Steve Woolgar

Introduction
S THE editors make clear in their introduction to this special issue
(Pels et al., 2002), the main impetus for this work is what they term
the rise of the new materialisms the growth of perspectives which
exhibit an increased sensitivity to the performative and integrative capacity
of things to help make what we call society. These new perspectives emphasize how much the social is held, ordered and fixed by the material. They
represent a new challenge for social theory which has traditionally only been
marginally interested in phenomena viewed as nonsocial, and hence only
tangentially interested in relations between humans and non-humans,
culture and nature, society and technology. The rise of attention to the
material necessitates a fresh look at our existing assumptions about what
holds society together. The new materialisms bring a newly appreciated
impact of material environments and the socializing effect of things that
encourages us to rethink traditional conceptions about the performance of
social order and social relations.
This way of formulating the problem draws upon and highlights a
profound and long-standing duality between the material and the social. As
is evident both from the breadth of topics addressed and from the range of
the disciplinary origins of the contributors to this special issue, tinkering
with this duality hits a deep and very wide nerve in contemporary scholarship. The struggle with this duality (and with related dualities) is perhaps
a defining feature of social theory over many years. So while each of the
particular empirical examples is relatively modest in scope, the overall

 Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 19(5/6): 261270
[0263-2764(200210)19:5/6;261270;028417]

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262 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

effect is profound. This particular duality implicates our base assumptions

in epistemology, ontology, methodology, ethics and other core concepts in
social theory.
Pels et al. invest their opening discussion of the materialsocial
duality with a temporal dynamic. They suggest that we have hitherto given
too much emphasis to the social, that poststructuralism and constructivism
(they dont say postmodernism) have melted everything into air. We have
been caught in a panegyric of textuality and discursivity. Now is the time
for things to reassert themselves, it is time that we noticed again the
sensuous immediacy of objects, it is high time to feel the sheer force of
things which strike back at us. The central image here is the swing of the
pendulum from the social (back) to the material. A swing (back) to the
material, it is argued, is necessary in order to redress the current imbalance. And it is this shift that necessitates our reopening the question of how
we explain society.
As we have seen, the postulated duality between the material and the
social is then the starting point for the range of fascinating arguments in
this special issue. In this article I reflect on the nature of this duality and
the dynamics of the arguments organized around it.
On the Entrenchment of Dualities
The socialmaterial duality is but one of many closely related dualities. Pels
et al. say their purpose is to reinvigorate and possibly alter the terms of
classical debates about idealism versus materialism, realism versus
constructivism, agency versus structure, or essentialism versus fluidity and
difference. But to what extent do these arguments amount to a reinvigoration rather than altering the terms of the debate? Are we merely to expect
a further swing of the pendulum or is the very idea of materiality versus
sociality at stake? Can the kinds of analysis assembled here open the way
for a challenge to the very idea of duality itself?
Writers such as Law and Mol (1995) and Woolgar (1997) have enthusiastically embraced the prospect of a glorious bonfire of the dualities. The
allusion to Tom Wolfes (1990 [1987]) famous novel deliberately depicts the
very idea of duality as a vanity. It is a conceit, a conceptual bubble that
needs and deserves bursting. But on the whole the contributions to this issue
tend not to pursue such a flagrant scorched earth policy. Pels (2002)
captures the mood when he says there is no simple escape route out of this
dilemma. His modest claim is merely to suggest a few elements towards
its possible resolution.
For Pels, the duality turns on the performative character of language.
The magically generative force of language creates what it states. The word
makes the world that is then experienced as independent of the word that
made it. It is a classical dilemma which runs through such wellknown
recent examples as Berger and Luckmanns social construction of knowledge and Giddens notion of structuration. The response very often takes
the form of compromise solutions. The word and the world; the real and the
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social; structure and agency; sociality and materiality. All are subject to
blending. The reasonable middle ground, the option of the third way is a
compromise between two extremes.
What accounts for resistance to resolution? Why are these dualities
so entrenched? Is it because allegiance to either side of the duality connotes
a commitment to one or another set of fundamental social and political
choices? We can learn from the many efforts to break down another
entrenched duality: that between the social and the technical. Debates
around this duality have been highly charged: they bring out the religious
in people. This is because, as science and technology studies have convincingly shown, technology can be understood as politics by other means. In
particular, technology can be understood to comprise sets of congealed
social arrangements. That is, it embodies possibilities for action and
relationships.
But of course, as contributions to this special issue make clear, the
socialmaterial duality is not somehow available merely transcendentally,
independent of specific locale. The salience of the duality itself changes.
Let us pursue this with an (idiosyncratic) example.
The MaterialSocial Relation: An Architectural Example
I am writing this having just moved office, from a cramped Victorian
building, handily situated next door to a fast-food outlet in the city centre,
to a brand new 40m structure, the much discussed magnificent new
building of the Sad Business School. In Oxford, discussion of this building
tends not to take the form of voluble outrage with which, for example,
Parisian intellectuals greeted the pyramid in the Louvre. Perhaps because
the constitution of the School and previous attempts to site it have been
mired in controversy, discussion of the completed building takes place sotto
voce and with genteel understatement. When asked what they think of the
building, my colleagues say well, its very striking isnt it or I havent seen
the inside yet. By coincidence, BBC Radio 4s Today programme not long
ago launched a popular survey of British buildings we love and hate. When
asked to identify the one British building she would most like to knock
down, one panellist clearly unaffected by the constraints of understatement nominated the entire University of Oxford. Why? Because, she
explained, its material spaces are traditionally high walled, inward looking,
elitist and exclusionary. Until we rid the national psyche of such values,
enshrined in material structure, we as a nation cannot move forward.
We might expect interpretations of the object to be highly charged
during a period of transition. This is when one tries to anticipate new uses
of new spaces and materials, new modes of occupying and new ways of
becoming ones (new) self in an unfamiliar space. When, in short, new
possible social arrangements are implicated. It is at these times, we might
say, that objects most obviously need interpretations. They need spokespersons and delegates and this need is managed within a social structure of
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(presumed) competences and expertise. The existence and extent of the

need is clearly time-sensitive. So too is the relation between the material
and the social.
As an early occupant of the new material structure, I experience some
pressure to come up with good accounts of the building. At this early stage
of its life, the structure remains unarticulated that is, large numbers of
people are unclear what can or will be said about it. My colleagues outside
the Business School look to me, a member of the occupying forces, as a
potential spokesperson on its behalf. Requests for stories range from the
earnest to the ribald.
I am relieved to discover a fund of architectural stories. The Sad
Business School is part and parcel of an Oxford University busily reinventing itself to serve the modern world as well as to research past glories
. . . Now through the Sad Business School, Oxford has plugged itself firmly
into the global economy (Glancey, 2001). The architects have created one
of the most thoughtful new buildings in a decade (Sudjic, 2001). The stories
themselves draw upon existing descriptions previously appended to spaces
and structures. The project creates and defines two new and important city
spaces (Dixon Jones, 1999). The architects have created a beautiful serene
building that performs the noble trick of appearing to be brand new and
very much of our times, yet rooted in the distant past . . . here is a touch
of ancient Rome at its very best (Glancey, 2001). [The architects] have
made a building which is convincingly a place. It takes the architecturally
unpromising material of academic life, individual office cells, strung along
corridors, lecture theatres, seminar rooms, and made them into an institution that offers a sense of identity (Sudjic, 2001).
I am relieved to find these stories because in dealing with all the
elements of my world, I am now equipped with some additional narrative
accounts, a resource for describing the material, for depicting its social
relations. It is easy to build upon these accounts, to flesh out details and
then propel the elaborated versions into usage. So I can now see that the
building is the new outward looking face of the University. It turns out that
the huge plate glass frontage symbolizes a new point of visible engagement
with the outside community. It is near the railway station. Its concrete ramps
and walkways accommodate local skateboarders.
My sense is that the availability of these architectural descriptions has
now helped fill a gap. I was experiencing a gap a lack perhaps (Knorr
Cetina and Brgger, 2002) between the being of the material structure
and what it is; between its being and recognizing that that is what it is. It
doesnt quite work to suggest that while experiencing this gap I was thinking
of the material structure as senseless, as some sort of mutely pre-interpretive object, independent of any description. I was always conscious that
there are things to say and things that would be said about the building.
The point is that I felt disarmed because I didnt know or understand what
the stories were. I hadnt yet learned how and when to apply them.
More generally, then, we see how the materialsocial relation involves
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an expectation that the material comes as loadable with the social. Or to

put it slightly differently, a common practical experience is that material
objects need stories. Indeed, it seems difficult to think of objects that do
not need stories. Only a little less unusual are objects that have no purpose,
as a visit to any antiques dealer will show. Almost invariably the prospective customer just like any of the apparently limitless supply of inquisitive
owners of antiques on TV programmes such as The Antiques Road Show
will be told what the otherwise obscure looking object actually is (or was)
for. And, of course, in the rare event that the expert doesnt know, the suggestion that there is no story is itself hearable as an especially intriguing story.
Connecting the Two Sides of the Duality
So what new twists and nuances are afforded by the particular constitution
of this longstanding dilemma as one between sociality and materiality? The
preceding articles convincingly demonstrate how the social and the material
are experienced as intricately entangled. In this light we can understand
our analytic efforts to (re)specify the duality as tantamount to asking where
we draw the line. The relationship between the material and the social is
thus a boundary problem. The discussions in this special issue comprise a
rich inventory of different ways of connecting the two sides of the duality,
of different emphases accorded the material and the social, and of different
ways of determining a boundary between them. What is perhaps less clear,
as we discuss below, is the extent to which these contributions challenge
the assumption that there needs to be a boundary at all.
For Harr, for example, the issue is where to draw the line in the face
of his preference for the priority of the social over the material. Symbolic
and narrative renderings of objects are what make them social, but a line
is necessary because he takes the view that there are constraints on this
rendering process. Not any interpretation is possible. In this view, the
constraints are inherent in the material. Thus, objects are said to have affordances which predispose them to a particular range of interpretive possibilities (cf. Hutchby [2001] who similarly draws on the notion of affordance
to criticize the metaphor of technology as text in Grint and Woolgar, 1987).
The connection between the material and the social is thereby effected
through a reassertion of (what appear to be) the inherent, shall we say essential, constraining properties of the material. The move is interesting because
it uses affordance as a way of drawing a boundary around apparently essentialist properties of matter (albeit ones which constrain rather than determine their interpretation). And yet, it is unclear what prevents the
dissolution of the boundary in the face of the observation that affordance is
a shorthand for the consensual outcome of interpretation. The (common
sense) claim that objects are not routinely the target of limitless, unbounded
interpretation is explained by recourse to invoking a property of the object
(its affordance), rather than by, say, initiating an inquiry into the social basis
for patterned interpretation. This attempt to draw a line is thus open to the
charge of reintroducing essentialism by the backdoor.
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Other contributors suggest new forms of connection between the

material and the social in an effort to modify or even dissolve the duality.
Thus for example van Loon (2002) stresses that the acquisition of knowledge about viruses is a matter of making them insightful, making present,
that is, of enpresenting. He explains that enpresenting is a bringing into
being, it is neither presenting nor representing as both notions imply a
difference between essence (real) and appearance (image). Enpresenting is
an act of disclosure that constitutes the disclosed and what can be
disclosed. We see here the extent of the struggle with language conventions
that is required. Disclosure conventionally refers to the act of allowing
something to be seen, which suggests that there was something, somewhere
to be seen in the first place. Constitution conventionally refers to the
bringing of something (somewhere) into being. The dissolution of the duality
requires nothing less of van Loon than the blending of the performative
epistemological effect of these two (conventionally) distinct terms.
Similarly, in their study of market traders engagement with and use
of computer displays, Knorr Cetina and Brgger (2002) use the Husserlian
idea of appresentation to emphasize that the screens do not, in their core
elements, represent a reality out there but are constitutive of it. On the
face of it, their appeal to the constitution of reality appears to be a familiar
plea for the pre-eminence of the social over the material. But Knorr Cetina
and Brgger are keen to suggest that something new and different is
happening. The persistence of the socialmaterial duality itself enables the
experience of self in terms of (the Lacanian sense of) lack. For traders,
the self as a structure of wanting can then be played out in relation to available subjectobject relations. The characteristic of a postsocial relationship is that the self as a structure of wanting loops its desire through the
object and back, on a continuing basis. The object is the market on the
screen, an unfolding object. In this, Knorr Cetina and Brgger simply
disallow the distinction (boundary) between the market as an actual
transcendental life form with essential characteristics which are
evident to traders and analysts alike and the market as a life form as
experienced by traders. It needs to be emphasized that we are not speaking
metaphorically when we point out that the market-on-screen has a presence
and a profile in its own right. Their effort to dissolve the boundary hinges
on their (ontological?) assertion that the screen is the ontologically liquid
market.
The theme of mediation, which runs throughout these articles, can be
understood as another device for managing boundaries between the social
and the material. So Hetherington (2002) shows how the museum is a space
of seeing that constitutes subjects and objects in certain ways through a
history and geography of optic relations. What we see within a museum is
performed by a material semiotics that constitutes it as a scopic space. How
objects are placed; how they are ordered and classified help perform what
we see. The book is a material form which mediates one form of seeing
relationship; the hand mediates a quite different form of relationship.
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Hetherington thus shows how the material can be implicated in different

kinds of outcome.
The Example of Electronic Technologies
This emphasis on mediation could be taken to imply that different facets of
the material world differentially yield, filter, constitute, enable features of
the social world. The temptation is to think of a fixed number of elements
drawn from either side of the socialmaterial duality, standing in various
relations to each other. But how helpful is this view?
The case of new electronic technologies provides a useful analogy. The
new electronic technologies (Internet, World Wide Web, mobile telephony,
electronic surveillance) are all associated with familiar claims that we are
now departing (or about to depart) from hitherto entrenched ideas about
space, time and distance. The contrast fashioned here is not a million miles
from that between the material and the social. The significant changes
anticipated in relation to these new technologies involve visions of the
virtual: virtual community, virtual reality, virtual society. Apparently
running counter to the broad trend of the discussions in this special issue,
these visions promote the disengagement from the material, in favour of a
view of the world in which relationships of all kinds are increasingly electronically mediated. Actual, physical, visceral, bodily, face to face, proximal
contact gives way to remote, mediated, distant, ethereal exchanges. In virtue
of the new electronic technologies, unbounded sociality goes hand in hand
with the increasing irrelevance of the material.
One form of response to these visions has been the recent investigation
of the actual usage and experience of the new electronic technologies. A
number of social science perspectives have thus been brought to bear upon
the situated practical day to day experience of new technologies. By and
large the outcomes of these studies have been framed so as to argue against
the anticipated extreme effects associated with the Internet. It is a technology which has neither inherently positive nor negative capacities. More
interesting, perhaps, is the conclusion that the realms of the real and the
virtual are intimately entangled. The experience of use seems to make it
harder to distinguish the real from the virtual. Of particular interest is the
suggestion of complex crossover effects between real and virtual channels.
According to what Woolgar (2002) calls the third rule of virtuality, new
virtual technologies tend to supplement rather than substitute for existing
(real) technologies. This is what explains why the mythical paperless office
never materialized, the fact that for example we now both email and
continue to use existing communication channels the phone, fax, paper
memo, even conversation. For at least some period after their introduction
the new technologies sit alongside rather than displace the old. And in any
case practical engagement with the virtual necessarily depends on ones
physical situation in relation to a particular material assembly of electronic
devices, computer, display, wiring. So the terms of engagement between the
two sides of this particular duality the virtual and the real cannot be
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268 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

construed as a zero sum game. The fourth rule of virtuality the more
virtual the more real reminds us that the use of virtual technologies can
actually stimulate more real (non electronically mediated) activities
(Woolgar, 2002). This fits Slaters (2002) observation that online trading of
pornography often generates offline encounters. It also explains the finding
that some teleworkers end up travelling more, that email is probably one of
the greatest sources of stimulation of the market in long-haul air travel, that
online museums seem to stimulate increased visits to actual museums and
so on.
The analogy suggests that the relation between the material and the
social should no longer be thought of as a zero sum game. Instead of thinking
in terms of a pendulum swinging (back) to the material from the social, or
of construing the interconnection between the social and material as one of
co-performance and co-construction, we might instead consider that the
entanglement between the two is mutually stimulating. The more material
the more social?
How Will All This End?
How will all this end? Is this debate just one further step along the path of
successive symmetricization of phenomena (Woolgar, 1997)? Merton urged
us to be symmetrical with respect to science construed as a social institution; it should be treated on a par with any other object of institutional
sociological analysis. Bloor (1976) persuaded us to exercise symmetry with
respect to the truth and falsity of scientific knowledge. Callon and Latour
beguiled us with the prospect of symmetry between humans and nonhumans. The reflexivists (see for example Ashmore, 1989) tried to sell us
symmetry between the analyst and the analysed. In all this perhaps the only
constant is duality itself. If we are now facing up to the challenge of exercising symmetry with respect to the material and the social, what comes
next? Do we now go on to identify yet another duality for symmetrical
interrogation? Or do we conclude that this would be just another distraction from the challenge of interrogating the very idea of duality?
The future possible course of the debate can be broached by considering under what kinds of circumstances might we expect a resolution. For
example, what might clinch widespread (or wider spread) commitment to
the prominence of the material over the social? It is difficult to resist the
observation that there is really not very much material (in the nicest possible
sense) in this collection. As part of her presentation at the conference from
which these articles derive, Elizabeth Shove (1999) passed a lump of
concrete around her audience. But there is no concrete in these pages.
Except of course in virtue of my just having conjured (constituted, enpresented, performed) its relevant presence in this discussion.
What will account for any of these outcomes? Should we say that the
sheer force of the argument has won the day? Is it the discursive cunning
mere talk about the material rather than the material itself which
persuades us to reprioritize the material in our discussions? Can we say that
it is the duality that is organizing and driving the discussion?
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The major contribution of these articles is an impressive inventory of

novel ways for shaking and disturbing the duality that is the
socialitymateriality relation. Yet in our explication of this duality we
remain prisoners of the language conventions that both support and derive
from just this duality. So the duality endures. Bonfires are clearly not
enough.
References
Ashmore, Malcolm (1989) The Reflexive Thesis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
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Dixon Jones (1999) The Sad Business School Dixon Jones website.
Glancey, Jonathan (2001) When Worlds Collide, The Guardian, Monday 10
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Hetherington, Kevin (2002) The Unsightly: Touching the Parthenon Frieze,
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Hutchby, Ian (2001) Technologies, Texts and Affordances, Sociology 35(2):
44156.
Knorr Cetina, Karin and Urs Brgger (2002) Traders Engagements with Markets:
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Law, John and Annemarie Mol (1995) Notes on Materiality and Sociality, Sociological Review 43(2): 27494.
Pels, Dick (2002) Everyday Essentialism: Social Inertia and the Mnchhausen
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Theory, pp. 23555 in S.P. Turner (ed.) Social Theory and Sociology: the Classics
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Virtual Society? Get Real! The Social Science of Electronic Technologies. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Steve Woolgar holds the Chair of Marketing at the University of Oxford.

He was previously Professor of Sociology, Director of CRICT (Centre for
Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology) and Head of the
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Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University. He has published

widely in social studies of science and technology, social theory and social
problems. His latest book is S. Woolgar (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology,
Cyberbole, Reality (Oxford University Press, 2002).

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