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BUILDINGS, LANDSCAPES AND REGIMES OF MATERIALITY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2018
Abstract
Beginning with a surprisingly exuberant response to the landscape recorded by a distinguished scholar, this paper explores the agency of things and places though time. It argues that the recent ‘material turn’ is part of a broader re-enchantment of the world: a re-enchantment that has parallels with a similar process at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tracing this history suggests that within the space of a single generation the material world can be enchanted or disenchanted, with things and places imbued with – or stripped of –agency. In other words, different periods possess what we might call different regimes of materiality. Any approach which assumes the existence of material agency throughout history, or which imports our assumptions into a period which did not share them, will necessarily fail. Before we look at the material world, therefore, we need to examine how the material world was looked at, how it was conceptualised and how it was experienced. We need to apprehend its regime of materiality.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2018
Footnotes
My sincere thanks to Jennifer Hillman, Tom Pickles and Katherine Wilson for the invitation to speak, and to the Royal Historical Society for its support. I have explored some of the ideas in this paper at conferences in Belfast, London and Oxford and am deeply grateful for the opportunity to develop them over a number of years. I must also thank Dan Hicks and Sim Koole for bibliographical suggestions, and – as always – acknowledge my debts to Zoë Waxman for her invaluable help and advice.
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