Page 26 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

10 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

meaning, it makes human activity possible. In this, he is close to the work of
Bruno Latour. Latour’s approach differs from the theory of commodity fetish-
ism or the ‘social lives of things’, because he sees anthropomorphism not as a
mystificatory thing nor as something we project onto objects, but as a property
of objects themselves, when they are situated in a network of relationships.
Objects, as Latour explains, act upon us and for us, affecting and even shaping
our behaviour and our actions. Another way of putting this is that things have
agency – the ability to act on and transform their world. Latour (1992) uses the
example of an automatic door-closer (or ‘groom’):
The automatic groom is already anthropomorphic through and through. It
is well known that the French like etymology; well, here is another one:
anqropoß and morpfoß together mean either that which has human shape
or that which gives shape to humans. Well the groom is indeed anthropo-
morphic, and in three senses: first, it has been made by men, it is a con-
struction; second it substitutes for the actions of people, and is a delegate
that permanently occupies the position of a human; and third, it shapes
human action by prescribing back what sort of people should pass through
the door.
The groom prescribes how we move through the door – if it pulls the door
closed smartly or violently we need to move nimbly. The eccentricities of a
particular door-closer become what Latour calls a ‘local cultural condition’, so
that people who use the door regularly learn the appropriate skills to move
through it, while those who do not, get caught in the door or hurt by its violent
movement. As Latour points out, it is not only faulty door-closers which dis-
criminate in this way, even smooth-moving hydraulic door-closers discriminate
against the young and the elderly, the disabled and anyone carrying heavy or
bulky items (such as delivery people, furniture removers and so on). The
important point here is that the groom is not representing a human actor – it
does not look like a person or symbolize a person – but human activities and
even human notions of social inequality are delegated to it. It, in turn, shapes
human activities.
This approach is very different from those which consider cultural artefacts
and technologies predominantly in terms of representation and meaning. The
usual objects of cultural and media studies are not functional in the sense that
the door-closer is, yet it is not difficult to see how they affect or prescribe human
behaviour. For instance, the length of a television advertising break, or the
timing of the television programme itself, has an impact on when and what
people eat and drink, and this affects other technologies usually considered as
outside the sphere of media studies. One (possibly apocryphal) example is how
the timing of the popular soap opera EastEnders produces sudden peaks in the