2.4 (October 2002): 378-382
© 2002 National Communication Association

Addressing Materiality in Communication Theory

John W. Jordan

Michael Brian Schiffer. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. New York: Routledge, 1999. xiv + 158. Notes, bibliography, and index. $65 (cloth); $20.95 (paper).

The study of communication for years has been divided into distinct territories, texts, and method of analysis. These boundaries are variously reinforced or permeated by numerous scholarly approaches and practitioners, but some wonder if these factional interests have led researches to overlook other approaches to studying communication. Such a concern is expressed by Michael Brian Schiffer, professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, whose book The Material Life of Human Beings boldly claims that the most important communicative interactions are those of material artifacts. He further stipulates that communication scholars have systematically neglected the importance of material relationships by focusing exclusively on human “interpersonal” communication, and his response is an outline for a new ontology of communication based on the informational transactions of materiality in everyday life. Schiffer’s book is part indictment, part philosophy, and part theoretical construction in pursuit of “a general theory that interrelates artifacts, behavior, and communication” (x). Schiffer’s call to respect the materiality of communication is as invigorating as his argumentative approach is frustrating, but readers willing to give his book a fair read will find much to provoke their thinking across several lines.

Schiffer begins by observing that “what is singular about Homo sapiens is the constant intimacy of people with countless kinds of things—our immersion in the material medium” (4). This intimacy reaches beyond intentional communicative acts and covers nearly all interactions with “material,” which he broadly defines as “any form of matter or energy” (12). Daily sensory information informs us about our surroundings, Schiffer claims, and therefore constitutes communication. Essentially, anything that can be interpreted by a receiver as providing information can be considered material, and the exchange and reception of interaction counts as communication in his model. This ontological stance produces three interactor roles—sender, emitter, and receiver—and Schiffer favors a receiver-based theory of communication: “Communication enables an interactor—specifically, a person—to obtain information, through inference, from the material medium by registering the performances of people, artifacts, and externs” (30). Registering sensory information from any source provides information, and the emitter can then be said to have communicated, no matter how inert or unintentional the process. A smoke detector, then, is said to be in communication with the air because it receives information and acts accordingly (61). Schiffer’s materiality-based theory offers much for consideration and is particularly interesting in its ability to articulate how artifacts, such as human bodily performance, interact to communicate a “perception.” For example, clothing, jewelry, hair style, tattoos, mannerisms, and other elements are material artifacts that emit information to a receiver about our identity (13, 44). Schiffer’s theory is brief but orderly and methodical, and usefully explores some of the social, genetic, and bodily factors affecting material interaction in everyday contexts. The result is a means for broadening our understandings of who communicates, who perceives, and what counts as communication.

Schiffer argues for the importance of his approach through a critique of social-science communication theory, claiming that “there can be no such thing as pure ‘interpersonal’ communication because of the involvement of artifacts in all person-person interactions” (31). He argues further that grounding communication theory in materiality offers “a more suitable paradigm for studying communication than the two-body, language-based model derived from Western indigenous knowledge, whose variants permeate the social sciences” (67). Schiffer’s aim consists of laying the groundwork for identification and observation rather than a deeper analysis of the “why’s” and “how’s” of what he observes. Receivers occupy a privileged position in his theory, and are discouraged from considering the motivations behind a communicative act. Intent is a non-consideration, for “few people in the past performed in order to enlighten the historians and archaeologists of today” (63). Unfortunately, this leads him to ignore the important considerations of motive, and his theory opens our eyes to only a partial story. Schiffer’s theory is useful in acknowledging that material objects communicate, but it provides nothing in understanding what they communicate. We are not informed as to what may have motivated the interaction, aside from the peculiarities of everyday life.

An avowed positivist, Schiffer seeks to account for all material communication interactions in a single, unified, grand, meta-theory emerging from his own “archeological” method. A material theory of communication includes not only verbal exchanges, but virtually all others, including those at the molecular level, where the odor of freshly baked foods communicates in much the same way as speech (63-4). In addition, Schiffer’s material ontology supersedes space and time constraints on communication. A thousand-year-old pot excavated by an archeologist communicates at that moment by emitting information about its condition, appearance, and any residue remaining inside it (53). Because his model is receiver-centered, the people who buried the pot are incidental; the interaction of interest is between the pot (emitter) and digger (receiver). A material-based communication insists on the omnipresence of information emitters and receivers. Schiffer argues that his materiality-based theory of communication is superior to competing theories as it “finally frees students of communication from the two-body model based on language . . .  [and] gives the investigator ample flexibility for analyzing all communication” (89). Subsequent chapters are used to explain, in slightly more detail, some of the possibilities and implications for material interaction as a basis for studying communication. The theory, however, is not presented as comprehensively as Schiffer claims it to be. He offers a typology of interactions, and readers looking for more in-depth and complex examples may be disappointed by this thin volume, although they will be pointed in useful directions.

The theory Schiffer proposes seeks commonalities between material interactions at the most basic and generalized level rather than the complexities that lead to contextual understandings, and it is here that his book departs from informed research and becomes a hostile diatribe against competing theories of communication. Schiffer builds his theory almost solely on his relentless claim that “previous investigators have ignored what might be most distinctive and significant about our species: human life consists of ceaseless and varied interactions among people and myriad kinds of things” (2). This claim is based upon his own “perusal” of social science research in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communication, which reveals that materiality has been “marginalized” in the research (5-6). The result, in his view, is that “much of what social scientists have written about behavior is impoverished and misleading because it fails to take account of the articulation, deep and wide, between people and artifacts in activities of the material medium” (27). Interestingly, communications publications such as Quarterly Journal of Speech are not part of his sample, even though they have published articles pertaining to materiality and communication. One possible reason for this exclusion is given in his dismissal of “postmodern” research that finds it “fashionable . . . to bash the scientific enterprise, including the social sciences” with its “gratuitous anti-science posturing” and “heaps of badly written blather” (7-8). This critique of postmodernism is unfair and uninformed, and he fails to point to a single example of postmodern criticism that evinces these charges. Furthermore, this stance proves detrimental to his own theory construction as he negates a set of literature that is both on point and useful to his purposes.

Perhaps if Schiffer had not been so quick to lump together and dismiss scholarship in the humanities as misguided and anti-science, he might have discovered that many communication scholars have demonstrated interest in materiality in communication (for example, Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991; Dickinson, 1997). While we may benefit from acknowledging the importance of materiality, and should be cautioned about our own disciplinary myopia regarding material artifacts in communication, a theory such as Schiffer’s removes what is most human about social interaction in the name of totalizing theory. We seek something more than an acknowledgement that communication occurs. Human communication, our discipline’s primary—but not exclusive—focus, is concerned with socio-cultural and personal factors such as motives, intents, and biases as means for understanding the complexities of communication. Rather than joining the conversation, Schiffer weakens his own argument and closes avenues of communication by artificially compromising other research. It is discouraging to think that a prominent researcher such as Schiffer would feel that this is the best way to make room for his argument.

Readers may consider this book as two texts: one an essay on materiality and communication; the other a diatribe against the social sciences. Readers may also find that the latter weakens the usefulness of the former. Perhaps if Schiffer had been more focused on developing the merits of his theory through informed and thorough discussion, rather than continually devoting energy to circling back and lambasting communications research, his book would better serve the audience he ostensibly seeks to address. This book is an example of a good idea wrapped in a bad argument, and is likely to be a disappointment for those with an informed understanding of communications research. Even so, communication scholars interested in the physical side of communication can find some useful examples and approaches to understanding material interaction. They may have to dig and extrapolate more than in other circumstances, but the ideas are there and have the potential to be put to good, informed, and illuminating use.

John W. Jordan is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Works Cited

Blair, C., Jeppeson, M. S., & Pucci, E., Jr. (1991). Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77, 263-288.

Dickinson, G. (1997). Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83, 1-27.