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Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318

Modes of objectification in educational experience

Webb Keane
University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology, 101 West Hall, 1085 S. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107, United States

Abstract
Three aspects of the concept of objectification emerge from the papers in this issue. First is the role of experience in the
process of conceptual objectification. Objectification disaggregates experiences and renders some of them irrelevant by means of
translation across semiotic modalities. Second is the recursive character of objectification. Third is the fact that the forms and
relative success of objectifications depend on social interactions. Social interactions are not only the background that facilitates or
hinders objectification. They themselves can motivate, and, in part, are constituted by some forms of objectification as well. The
pedagogical theories that underlie the classroom practices these studies observe embody certain semiotic ideologies, which both
support and are in tension with those very practices. Although the educational theory stresses the development of the students sense
of agency, the studies here show that the inculcation of habits such as nominalization work to mute the agency of the student and
the role of technology within the laboratory experiment, and instead to foreground inscription and objectified data. At the same
time, this ideology also denies the role that such habits as nominalization play in the display of knowledge and the eventual success
of students in school. This contradiction between semiotic ideology and practice contributes to the displacement effects sometimes
called fetishism.
2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Objectification; Experience; Social interaction; Semiotic ideology

We are, I suppose, all intelligent enough to open our eyes and look upon nature for ourselves, and we will try to
make nature as it surrounds us its own text book.. . . Whenever we study books we are one remove away from
the things that we would be better acquainted with.. . . [N]othing is so well known as to leave nothing to be done
about it, and then what you dont know yourselves will be considered by you as something utterly unknown.
(Louis Agassiz 1873, in Wright & Wright, 1950, p. 504)

1. Introduction

The papers in this volume make powerful use of the idea of objectification and extend it in promising new direc-
tions. Three aspects of this concept emerge from the various topics under discussion. First is the role of experience
in the process of conceptual objectification. Included in the concept of naive experience that science education seeks
to challenge are the potentially secondary qualities that are bundled into the material object. Objectification dis-
aggregates experiences and renders some of them irrelevant by means of translation across semiotic modalities, a
necessary step whose own characteristics require careful attention. Analyzing this process may allow us to rethink

E-mail address: wkeane@umich.edu.

0898-5898/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.linged.2008.05.008
 W. Keane / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318 313

some of the assumptions about experience exemplified, in some respects, by the words of Louis Agassiz quoted above,
and, more directly, bound up in the pedagogic tradition inherited from philosophical pragmatism by way of John
Dewey.
A second aspect of objectification is its recursive character. As research on entextualization by Bauman and Briggs
(1990, 2003), Kuipers (1990), Silverstein and Urban (1996), and others has shown, objectification in language must be
understood as an essentially dialectical process. That is, the conceptual power of the processes by which language is
objectified lies, in part, in the ways in which entexualization facilitates subsequent recontextualizations. This important
observation can be extended to processes of objectification and other semiotic modalities more generally (Keane,
2003).
The final aspect of the concept that these studies forcefully bring out is the missing third dimension: not just
experience and its objectification, but the fact that the forms and relative success of objectifications depend on social
interactions. Nominalization, for example, may turn out to be above all the proper form that answers to a teachers
questions should takea matter not just of grammar or cognition, but of pragmatic skill. But social interactions are
not only the background that facilitates or hinders objectification. They themselves can motivate, and, in part, are
constituted by some forms of objectification as well. The learning of new concepts and the emergence of new social
identities turn out to be inseparable components of a single social and conceptual dynamic. And this leads me to a
final observation. The pedagogical theories that underlie the classroom practices these studies observe embody certain
semiotic ideologies (cf. Keane, 2007, pp. 1622). Yet there are important strains between the practices and ideologies.
The rest of this chapter elaborates on these points.

2. Varieties of objectication in social thought

In using the concept of objectification, it is worth bearing in mind three things. First, more abstract versions of
the concept of objectification (for instance, the reification of social categories, activities, or processes) tend to rest
on implicit assumptions about material things. Second, these assumptions draw on underlying semiotic ideologies
about the relations among, and differences of, persons, things, and language. And third, these ideologies are rarely
socially, politically, or morally neutral. The concept of objectification has a multistranded genealogy within western
social thought that implicates it in moral and political values (Keane, 2006). The negative versions tend to focus on the
denial of human agency (as in the Marxist tradition) and the treating of persons as means rather than ends (reversing a
distinction central to the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy). The latter tradition includes ways of thinking about
objectification that express traditional worries about the relations between mind and body, the ways in which humans
are defined by something immaterial and those in which humans exist as sheer corporeal matter. In many of these
models, negative forms of objectification are characteristic products of specific historical periods. In Marxism, for
example, the kinds of objectification associated with commodity fetishism are peculiar to capitalism; according to
much post-structuralist thought, objectifying knowledge techniques such as maps, graphs, and social statistics are
inseparable from the forms of power peculiar to modernity.
In contrast to the negative versions of objectification, however, there is also a counter-tradition of more positive
treatments. Within the natural sciences, of course, the productive value of clear and distinct ideas (objectifications at
least in one interpretation), was well established by Descartes and others. Attempts in the social sciences to apply
models derived from this tradition have tended to result in highly problematic forms of positivism that, as many critics
have observed, are at best inappropriate to social and historical phenomena (Steinmetz, 2005). But non-positivistic
strains in social thought and social science have also developed positive treatments of objectification that can work
in a dialectical relationship to the negative ones. Following Hegel, Marx (1967) took objectification in its positive
sense to be an original defining feature of human existence. In this view, humans realize themselves through their
ability to transform nature. Their subjective powers depend upon the capacity to objectify themselves through the
material results of their productive activity. The negative form of objectification, then, is a distortion of this original
relation. It lies in the estrangement between the acting subject and its objective manifestations under the historically
specific conditions of commodified labor (a point to which I return below, in discussing fetishism). Durkheimian
sociology provided its own account of human self-realization through the objectification of social groups in rituals and
collective representations. In this tradition, objectification makes otherwise imperceptible things available to the senses
(such as cosmological orders and social relations), and implicit assumptions are rendered more palpable, if not fully
314 W. Keane / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318

explicit.1 New anthropological approaches to material culture have revived aspects of the more humanist versions of
objectification to focus on the ways in which material objects enable people to realize themselves, either as producers
or as owners and consumers (cf. Foster, 2002; Gell, 1998; Miller, 1987, 2005; Myers, 2001). Whereas the negative
approaches focus on the denial of agency and activity, and the association of objects with stasis and non-humanness,
the positive ones tend to focus on their durability, manipulability, and their indexical ties to the act of production and
the producers. From this angle, objects play a necessary mediating role in the activities of human self-realization and
social interaction. Objects do not only manifest human productive powers, they reflect those powers back to those who
make, use, or transact them. Within linguistic anthropology, the concept of entextualization can be seen to put both
positive and negative approaches into relation with one another.
If social theory offers us various evaluations of objectification, this may be due in part to the great variation among
the modalities of objectification the theorists seem to have in mind. In the finer grained empirical research exemplified
in this collection, we should be attentive to those distinctions. As Stanton Wortham (this volume) remarks, in his
contribution to this volume, there are a number of distinct kinds of objectification at play in the classroom, and asks,
If there can be more than one type of objectification occurring simultaneously, however, how do they relate?. . . If so,
how can analysts know which sorts of objectification are relevant in a given case? A starting point is to consider the
various features of the object that are treated as diagnostic of objectification in the analyses presented in this volume.
One feature of these various traditions in social theory is this: theories of objectification tend to presuppose certain
assumptions about what objectification produces, that is, what is an object. The latter may be an object of attention
(as in phenomenology), a representation, a category of thought, bodily disposition, an institutional form, a set of
social arrangements, or, indeed, a physical thing. But no matter how abstract the object in question may be, the way
it is conceptualized depends on certain ideas (implicit or explicit) about material objects and their relationships to
human knowledge and activity.2 Different views of objectification draw on different features of material things, as
they understand them. These may include the following: being durable, subject to destruction, locatable in space,
immobile, transportable, perceptible, bounded, external to discourse, manipulable, separate from persons (at least in
some respects, insofar as persons are defined by subjective states, intentional actions, or particular social positions).
Depending on which of these features is most salient, the process of objectification will be seen as entailing a
move along the spectrum defined by that particular feature. For example, the process of objectification may be seen
as a shift from transient to durable, imperceptible to perceptible, from active to inactive, from focusing on process to
focusing on product, from fluid to fixed, from autarkic to subject to external control, or from socially positioned to
unpositioned. These moves characteristically involve a move among semiotic modalities. Thus, entextualization may
describe a transformation of speech into writing, scientific analysis a translation of sense perceptions into abstractions,
social objectification the emergence out of the fluid dynamics of interaction of durable, and verbalizable, classifications.
Massoud and Kuipers note that [p]art of the power of objectification comes by its capacity to obscure its own indexical
creativity, and to make it appear that it is only encapsulating and representing what is already there, when in fact it
is creating something new. They are referring to the relations among kinds of indexicality, between what Michael
Silverstein (2003) calls creative (or entailing) and presupposing indexicality. Moreover, objectification commonly
involves an upshift from indexicals to symbols, that is, from semantically underspecified marks of causal effects in
particular contexts to rules that establish repeatable tokens of established sign types.

3. Positive and negative objectication in the classroom

The classroom studies in this volume range among these various kinds of objectification. These include the productive
relation of persons to things, the productive relation of things to persons, and the relation of persons to persons by means
of things. All are at play in the science classroom being examined here. The pedagogical structure of the laboratory
experiment is meant, in essence, to transform the knowing subject through its manipulation of material things. The

1 For a now classic criticism from within this tradition, see Bourdieus (1977) discussion of the social science objectivism, the resultant synoptic

illusion, and the ways in which making tacit social knowledge explicit distorts shared taken-for-granted background understandings (doxa) and
individual practical, embodied dispositions identified with habitus.
2 Notice, for example, that verbal deixis in these English language examples characteristically takes the form of metaphorically pointing to

metaphorical object, as when students point to weight using a demonstrative pronoun (Viechnicki; compare Hanks, 1992).
 W. Keane / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318 315

classroom experiment is not, in principle, supposed only to realize the existing knowledge of the teachers who designed
it. In the tradition of John Dewey (1938), the activity of transforming material nature is meant to produce pre-discursive
experiences. The unity of practice and tacit knowledge that interested Dewey plays a privileged role in CTA, at least
in principle. Although in effect these original experiences do not entirely count as knowledge until they have been
further objectified through the processes of abstraction such as nominalization and entextualization (as well as graphic
and numerical representation), they have their subjective effects by virtue of this prior experience. This is why the
hands-on technique is supposed to be superior to mere lecturing and reading. Not only is the laboratory procedure an
externalization of human capacities for activity (as in the Marxist tradition), but writing down the results is similarly
an externalization of the transformed subjectivity that is supposed to result. Merely carrying out the experiment is not
really sufficient. Even Dewey (1938) held that present experience does not produce knowledge directly, since it has to
be brought to bear on prior experiences and induce reflection. I would argue that this kind of transcontextual process
requires the mediation of at least some mode of objectification. The pedagogical problem, then, is determining exactly
what mode of objectification is appropriate.
As Wright remarks, observation entails the production of a kind of spectaclethere must be some thing that is
meaningful to observe (Wright, this volume, p. 13). Observation alone does not produce the meaningful thing. That
requires the mediating role of representations, through the production of such manipulable tokens of abstraction as
numbers, graphs, and words. The primary focus of the studies here is the last of these, especially such processes as
nominalization. But that process depends on the prior underlying process of regimenting linguistic practice to the
demands of reference and predication. Correct observations require knowing the right word to use for the thing being
observed. That thing includes a process, hence the strong predisposition towards nominalization. Note that the process
could, in theory be rendered in forms other than nouns, but the native intuitions about objectification seem to demand
that conceptual objects be treated grammatically like material things.
To this point, we have relations between persons and things. These are mediated by actions. The actions range from
direct manipulation of things (laboratory procedures) to representations of things and processes (numbers, graphs,
words). To the extent that the experiments are not sufficient to produce scientific understanding, but require this further
step, relations between persons and things are mediated by representations. But an important finding of these studies
is that classroom activities produce relations of persons to persons by way of things. This is already evident within the
basic pedagogical structure of the classroom. It is only by means of the objectification of students knowledge, such as
through writing, that teachers can evaluate otherwise imperceptible things like thought, understanding, even character.
In this case, objectification mediates social relations by virtue of its capacity to effect a transfer from (what in native
terms is commonly construed as) interior to exterior, or from subject to object.
But as Massoud and Kuipers note, things mediate relations among the students themselves. Citing Knorr-Cetina
(1999), they describe the object-centered sociality that emerges over the course of laboratory activity as students
position themselves in relation to their instruments. However, unlike the self-objectification demanded by tests, papers,
and forms of classroom evaluation, this object-centered sociality is apparently not highly salient to the participants.
Indeed, it may be invisible. The production of distinct classes of identity among the students described by Wortham
seems to them as something that emerges naturally, on its own. Thus, the temporal character of objectification plays
an important part in obscuring the social production of the object (in this case, the typification of personalities); the
recurrence of characterizations of students that had been formulated on previous occasions gives them the appearance
of durability much like that embedded within American folk notions of personality and character.3 Here we have one
version of an important aspect of objectification, the role it plays in naturalization and other displacements or denials
of activities and processes.
One of the most important formulations of this aspect of objectification is Marxs concept of fetishism, something that
is alluded to at various points in the studies in this volume. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the result of a systematic
misunderstanding of the relations of persons to things and to other persons under certain, historically specific, social
arrangements. This misunderstanding is due to the reciprocal effects of the selling of labor under capitalism. On the one

3 Wortham makes an important observation in this context, that social identity is something that achieves stability over time but the temporal

processes involved in producing social identities work at more than one scale. The next line of inquiry, it seems, would be to explain how these
different temporal processes interact, and if some eventually play a greater role in long-range outcomes, why. As I read Worthams account, Philips
ability to affect how he is perceived changes over time in part because of the authority of teacher to denominate him good at science. But unless this
characterization becomes reinforced institutionally, for example, it is uncertain whether it will hold into the future.
316 W. Keane / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318

hand, workers and owners confront one another not as having social relations, but in their (negative) objectified form
as buyers and sellers of commodified labor. Their social relations appear to them to be relations between things (wages
and labor time). On the other hand, workers confront commodified objects not in their (positive) objectified form, as the
outcome of their own productive capacities, but as bearers of prices. The prices of commodities are experienced as real
properties of the commodities, rather than reflecting the social relations between those who sell their labor and those
who purchase it. Through their prices, commodities seem to enter into relations to other commodities (including labor).
As a result, things seem to have a life of their own. Their prices, for instance, displace the social relations those prices
actually reflect. The very process by which social relations come to appear as relations between things also makes
relations between things appear to be social relations. In short, fetishism describes how certain social arrangements
lead people to deny their own agency by displacing it onto things.4
Whatever its utility as an account of political economy, this model of fetishism has played an important role in how
social scientists understand relations of persons and things and their social contexts more generally. Notice the double
action: fetishism does not merely describe how things come to be treated as if they were animate or had agency. More
than that, it is the very process of doing so that leads to the obscuring or denial of the agency of persons. Thus, by treating
the findings of previous experiments as given, or, in Latour and Woolgars (1986) terms, as a black box, scientists
can reduce activities to their outcomes, as objects, and thereby obscure the agency that went into those processes. In
the cases brought together here we see similar fetish-like objectifications at work. For example, as Viechnicki (this
volume) portrays nominalization, it plays an important role in how potentially fallible technology or researchers
become invisible, so to speak, and the data are seen to speak for themselves. More generally, reported speech, as a
form of entextualization, can have the effect of representing prior interactions as presupposable facts.5
And yet it is important not to reduce objectification to the self-misunderstanding and the negation of agency. As I
have noted, even Marx recognized a potentially positive side of objectification. Massoud and Kuipers point out that we
can see objectification as a form of participation. Goodwin and Goodwin (2004) showed how participants display
to one another what they are doing and how they expect others to align themselves toward the activity of the moment.
For them, objectification is an emergent structure that is wholly characteristic of social interaction, not simply a denial
or pathology of it. Seen in this light, it is important to bear in mind that externalization makes interaction possible:
objectification is not just a relation between subject and object, but between subjects, since in objectifying oneself, one
is doing so, in many respects, for others.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which objectification works to make social interaction possible is simple exter-
nalization, for example, through speech, gesture, or the exchange of objects. But there are other dimensions to the
mediation of social interaction apparent in the studies here. One is that objectification facilitates relations across time.
Relations across time can involve a communication of prior self to later self. When, as Massoud and Kuipers report,
Gloria twice reframes her original question, repeatedly referring back to her own speech, she is drawing on her
own prior entextualizations to establish her authority in the present context. Her developing legitimacy as a member
of a certain community of practice depends on the ability to objectify her own thoughts and actions in ways that,
however unwittingly, display skillful self-command as an intelligent actor across contexts. Her self-objectification
is not simply a denial of her own agency, it is critical to her exertion of agency as well. As Wright puts it, lin-
guistic representations . . . become the stable resource for producing facts. Putting experience into language gives
it an object-like qualities of durability (experience is therefore rendered more or less stable) and separateness from
the person (thus it can be easier for the speaker to exert agency over it through verbal manipulation) which allow
it to enter into social circulation (cf. Urban, 2001). However much a phenomenology of experience may tell us that
the weight stuck on the shovel (Viechnicki) participates in (negative) objectification through its denial of actions
and actors, such turns of phrase are also symptoms of the trans-temporal character of (positive) objectification. In
Wrights words this linguistic step was crucial for the students to be able to transfer their knowledge from the
first labs to later labs in the curriculum. Without this step of objectification, it would have been cumbersome for
the students to transfer their knowledge to new contexts (Wright, this volume, p. 33). Activity across temporal

4 Elsewhere (Keane, 2007) I have argued that this particular understanding of fetishism reproduces a particular moralizing view of history that

must not be taken entirely at face value. But the Marxist concept of fetishism is useful for purposes of the discussion here. However, I return to the
moral narrative in the concluding section of this essay.
5 Entextualization can also contribute to the process of turning temporal relations (before, after) into logical ones (if, then), a topic I cannot address

here.
 W. Keane / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318 317

distances would seem to require the forms of objectification exemplified by the dynamic of entextualization and
recontextualization.6

4. Experience and semiotic ideology

As the studies in this volume show, the pedagogical strategies in CTA rest on a theory of experience: the data should
speak for themselves, and knowledge is most fully or usefully internalized if it derives from experience. These two
ideas are thoroughly embedded within the educational tradition that goes back to Dewey, and his roots in American
philosophical pragmatism. As Massoud and Kuipers point out, this pedagogy rests on Deweys distinction between
knowledge (a thing) and inquiry (an activity). Just as Marxs account of the commodity fetish was meant to point to
a possible avenue of emancipation, so too did Deweys view of experience: true democracy depended on being able
to sustain active inquiry. By placing experience at the basis of knowledge, progressive education was supposed to
liberate the student from the authority of teachers. The narrative of emancipation implicit in this model bears some
generic similarities to Marxs (and to moral narratives of modernity more generally): historical progress is the story
of emancipation through a process by which people reclaim for themselves the agency that properly was theirs but
which had been displaced onto others. Once people had learned by rote, under the authority of literally dictatorial
teachers; now they will, to paraphrase Agassiz, go into nature and see for themselves. This is not the place to elaborate
on this implicit historical narrative of progress (cf. Keane, 2007). But note that the narrative rests on a distinct semiotic
ideology about the relations among people, language, and experience, and renders it in political or moral terms.
In this approach to education, it seems, language is relatively inadequate to experience. Or at least, language can only
serve a secondary role given the primacy of experience, since the CTA approach (Viechnicki) aims to give experience
of concepts such as conservation of matter before providing students with words for it. And yet words and other
objectifying media cannot be eliminated from the process. Nor should they, or so one might hazard, given the ubiquity
I have suggested objectification has, as a potentially positive element in self-development and social interaction.
Consider, in this light, the claim by Singer, Hilton, and Schweingruber (2005) quoted by Wright that there is
almost no direct evidence that typical laboratory experiences that are isolated from the flow of science instruction
are particularly valuable for learning specific scientific content (p. 88). If this is the case, what exactly is the basis
for the importance CTA places on laboratory experience? Apparently it is not simply derived from empirical insight
into cognition and practice. This suggests that the relationship between experience and language I have sketched here
reflects a particular semiotic ideology, an implicit understanding of the relations among words, things, and persons,
and their respective functions. As Wright points out, the preferred sequence for learning is from first hand experience
to verbal representation, that is, a move across semiotic modalities in which experience and signs are separated and
placed in a hierarchy. The inadequacy of language in this semiotic ideology seems to derive from two assumptions.
The first is the widespread tendency, within contemporary Western language ideologies, to view the primary function
of language in terms of reference and predication.7 Thus, for example, the pedagogic theory fails to take into account
the educational role of learning to speak like a scientist in classroom success, a matter not just of correct reference
but, for instance, of pragmatics (knowing what counts as a felicitous answer to a teachers question) and grammar
(nominalization).
But the educational theory does not only overlook the productive use of language it encourages. There is also a
contradiction between purported aim and observed outcome. Deweys goal was to encourage greater independence and
a sense of agency on the part of the student. Yet as the studies here show, the inculcation of habits such as nominalization
work to mute the agency of the student and the role of technology within the laboratory experiment, and instead to
foreground inscription and objectified data. At the same time, this ideology also denies the role that such habits as
nominalization play in the display of knowledge and the eventual success of students in school. This contradiction
between semiotic ideology and practice that contributes to the displacement effects sometimes called fetishism.

6 An important aspect of objectification I cannot address here is linguistic form.

7 Historically linked to this (cf. Bauman and Briggs, 2003) are other aspects of dominant language ideologies. One is reflected in Wrights
observation (this volume) that in classroom interaction, written words hold authority over the spoken. Another is Viechnickis point that by insisting
students avoid special terms and jargon, and denying that they are learning to talk like scientists, the classroom system is reproducing an ideology
of linguistic transparency.
318 W. Keane / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 312318

As a concluding observation, I would like to suggest that some of the problems that have been revealed in these
classroom studies reflect wider issues. One that should be of particular interest to the researchers themselves is the
question of ethnographic method itself. The emphasis on experience over text, the contradictions between ideology
and practice, the tension between students experience and teachers authority, and the ambivalent stance toward
objectified metalanguages should strike a familiar chord for anthropologists. The fieldwork tradition in anthropology,
and the anxieties about textual and theoretical mediation it has fostered, rest on an empiricism whose underpinnings
bear strong family resemblances to the semiotic ideology of experience built into this pedagogic tradition. Both are
haunted by similar tensions produced by the effort to reconcile the notions that facts should speak for themselves and
that observations have a reality prior to words, with the idea that the ultimate task of the anthropologist is to render
visible such invisible entities as culture, social structure, or power.

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