11Story

19 January 2010

Art and Agency

 

Take, for instance, the relationship between human beings and cars. A car, just as a possession and a means of transport is not intrinsically a locus of agency, either the owner’s agency or its own. But it is in fact very difficult for a car owner not to regard a car as a body-part, a prosthesis, something invested with his (or her) own social agency vis-à-vis other social agents. Just as a salesman confronts a potential client with his body (his good teeth and well-brushed hair, bodily indexes of business competence) so he confronts the buyer with his car (a Mondeo, late registration, black) another, detachable, part of his body available for inspection and approval. Conversely, an injury suffered by the car is a personal blow, an outrage, even though the damage can be made good and the insurance company will pay. Not only is the car a locus of the owner’s agency, and a conduit through which the agency of others (bad drivers, vandals) may affect him – it is also the locus of an ‘autonomous’ agency of its own. The car does not just reflect the owner’s personhood, it has personhood as a car. For example, I possess a Toyota which I esteem rather than abjectly love, but since Toyotas are ‘sensible’ and rather dispassionate cars, my Toyota does not mind (it is, after all, Japanese – cars have distinct ethnicities). In my family, this Toyota has a personal name, Toyolly, or ‘Olly’ for short. My Toyota is reliable and considerate; it only breaks down in relatively minor ways at times when it ‘knows’ that no great inconvenience will result. If, God forbid, my Toyota were to break down in the middle of the night, far from home, I should consider this an act of gross treachery for which I would hold the car personally and morally culpable, not myself or the garage mechanics who service it. Rationally, I know that such sentiments are somewhat bizarre, but I also know that 99 per cent of car owners attribute personality to their cars in much the same way that I do, and that such imaginings contribute to a satisfactory modus vivendi in a world of mechanical devices. In effect, this is a form of ‘religious belief’ (vehicular animism) which I accept because it is a part of ‘car culture’ – an important element in the de facto culture of twentieth-century Britain. Because this is a form of ‘animism’ which I actually and habitually practice, there is every reason to make mention of it as a template for imagining forms of animism that I do not happen to share, such as the worship of idols.   So, ‘things’ such as dolls and cars can appear as ‘agents’ in particular social situations; and so – we may argue – can ‘works of art’. While some form of hedged agreement to these propositions would, perhaps, be widely conceded in the current climate of conceptual relativism and pragmatism, it would be facile in the extreme not to observe that unwelcome contradictions arrive in their wake.   Alfred Gell Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998]

 
 

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