museum anthropology

the banality of everyday

consumption: Collecting
Contemporary Urban Materiality
Paul R. Mullins
indiana university-purdue university indianapolis

abstract
This article examines what defines contemporary urban
materiality, focusing on the politics of banality and everyday life and examining how museums might collect quotidian material things. Rather than engage in guesswork
about what future audiences will define as early 21st-century urban significance, the article argues for a curatorial
focus on the apparently prosaic dimensions of urban materiality. Such a curatorial strategy will use commonplace
material things to illuminate the contemporary imagination
and social construction of urban life by focusing on the
things contemporary people reduce to banality and consign to the boundaries of consciousness. [material culture,
consumption, everyday life]

Victorian literature is saturated with descriptions of

what now appear to be utterly prosaic goods: household decorative material culture, consumer spaces,
and urban landscapes recurrently surface in Victorian
discourses (Pykett 2003). A Victorian fascination
with a radically transforming cityscape peopled by
myriad prosaic commodities provides a novel yet surprisingly rich departure point for reflection on how
we might piece together the material heritage of the
dawn of the 21st century. Victorian literature
provides no direction indicating what we should be
collecting, but it does outline some interesting starting points for how we might think about prosaic
materiality.
Nineteenth-century textual accounts of the everyday material world routinely interrogated form,
function, style, and the dominant meanings marketers and bourgeois moralists attached to particular
goods. Victorians often imagined how even the most
mundane objects create meaning in consequential if
circuitous ways; they probed the social significance
of everyday materiality; and writers struggled to capture the multivalent meanings of materiality in text.
Simultaneously, though, those same scribes betrayed

deep apprehensions over materiality and the broad

range of people gaining a foothold in that consumer
society, reluctant to grant consumer citizenship to
working classes, immigrants, and people of color.
Much of their careful observation of the urban landscape emerging throughout the world was not at all
laudatory, decrying the modest material dimensions
of the decaying urban core and gazing apprehensively
at the emergence of multicultural cities. Their fascination with quotidian materiality and urban decay
are remarkably similar to contemporary discourses
on urban desolation and material banality.
As we mull over the material fragments of the contemporary world that should be preserved and struggle to determine what meaningful stories they will
tell, it is perhaps worth returning to the Victorians
fascination with the material landscape of quotidian
things. Victorians often expressed their fascination
with the mute and multivalent landscape of material
things even as they sought to impress that landscape
with a distinct range of ideological meanings. In
1836, for instance, Charles Dickens detailed a little
front parlor in London that
is a perfect picture of quiet neatness; the carpet
is covered with brown Holland, the glass and
picture-frames are carefully enveloped in yellow
muslin; the table-covers are never taken off,
except when the leaves are turpentined and
bees-waxed, an operation which is regularly
commenced every other morning at half-past
nine oclockand the little nicnacs [sic] are
always arranged in precisely the same manner.
[1836:87]
Prescient observers like Dickens recognized that
an increasing volume of quotidian objects and radically transforming cityscapes like London itself
framed Victorian life in consequential ways that made
it impossible to describe social and material life as
separate phenomena.
On Dickenss desk in Kent sat two knick
knacks like those in his 1836 tale, figurines of a
smoking Turk and a porcelain monkey that to some
observers then and now would pass almost completely unnoticed and signify nothing more consequential than ethnic xenophobia or bourgeois
humor (Pettitt 2008). Yet those figurines illuminate
the ways rather commonplace things materialize

Museum Anthropology, Vol. 37, Iss. 1, pp. 4650 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/muan.12047

t h e b a n a l i t y o f e ve r y d a y c o n s u m p t i o n

imagination; in particular, they compel us to avoid

reducing material goods simply to representational
mechanisms and instead to confront the utterly
multivalent and ambiguous meanings of everyday
things that routinely pass without conscious reflection. Dickenss figurines and his fictional parlors
carpets, pictures, and table covers were among
countless goods in a rapidly transforming urban
landscape that thoughtful period observers saw as
meaningful points of class, color, and social contestation even as they struggled to articulate and
resolve what they meant.
Such prosaic materiality raises the issue of how
we can interpret the seemingly uniform backdrop
of mass-produced goods that shapes contemporary
urban life and what precisely we might choose to
leave behind for future generations as a document
of this moment. Every historical moment has had
its own distinct encounters with the material, and
for Victorians that experience routinely wrestled
with novel commodity worlds and seemingly banal
urban landscapes. Victorians pondered such materiality because they recognized its consequence, and
many bourgeois observers aspired to impress their
meanings on the material world so that others
would see the social world through particular ideological lenses. This focus on the meaningfulness of
apparent banalityand efforts to dictate how others will see that material world and the broader
social fabricis actually a useful starting point for
an analysis of contemporary urban materiality as
well.
There seem to be three key dimensions to
interpreting and preserving contemporary urban
materiality: one relates to the most fundamental
facets of how we interpret material things and the
agency we grant material objects; the second
revolves around the politics of banality and everyday life, and whether we wish to prioritize them
over the spectacular dimensions of our moment;
and the third turns on who actually assembles
such collections and the broader social process by
which we make curatorial decisions. These are not
problems to resolve; instead, they are open questions to frame productive discussions about how
any given community and institution determines
how it will document itself, our experiences, and
our society.

The Agency of Things

Dickenss figurines complicate materiality by pushing
us to see things as recursive in their capacity to create and accommodate a wide range of meanings, a
vision of materiality that aspires to grant things genuine agency. This recursive symbolism stands in opposition to seeing things simply as reflective in their
representation of the meanings that ideologues, manufacturers, and moral voices project onto objects
(Leone 1992:130, 1998:57). Contemporary scholars
typically reduce material culture to a reflective mechanism mirroring behaviors and representing concrete
instilled meanings. In this model, Dickenss smoking
Turk might be construed as a symbol of nationalist
might or an effort to fortify whiteness, and such figurines certainly did inelegantly reproduce such ideologies. Yet these figurines worked materially because
in many consumers eyes they were apprehended as
small, humorous, and innocuous things with no especially bounded or concrete meaning. Commodities
certainly have a symbolic dimension that reflects
instilled and dominant meanings; goods are vehicles
of ideological incorporation on many levels, and
objects can be the framing mechanisms for highly
structured narratives. However, to stop there risks
ignoring that things reproduce such ideologies and
dominant meaningsand sometimes elide them
entirelybecause objects are so ambiguous, silent,
and personal. Bill Brown cautions that we tend to
look through objects (to see what they disclose about
history, society, nature, or cultureabove all, what
they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of
things (2001:4). The idiosyncratic experience of literally interacting with material things inevitably
unleashes a wide range of meanings that routinely
ignore or even defy dominant representations and
produce no especially coherent articulation or symbolic narrative.
The notion of a material world invested with
agency is elegant in theory, but in practice assembling a material collection that reveals such an active
world of goods is methodologically challenging, at
best. We could approach the mission to collect 21stcentury urban material as an exercise intended to
coherently document this historical moment. Methodologically, this might be done by assembling a
focus group and hammering out a statement framed
around some collectively articulated, central
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dimensions of our lives, like race, class lines, consumption, youth culture, subculture, globalization,
or any number of similarly interesting and provocative framing mechanisms. Such an approach would
certainly craft some interesting frameworks for a
curatorial foray into any city.
Nevertheless, a collection framed by the agency of
things would instead focus on collecting the things we
perceive most persistently yet ironically evade simultaneously: that is, what dimensions of contemporary
cities tug at our senses and impose themselves on our
collective imagination, shaping our experiences of life
in 21st-century cities, even if we often try to ignore
them? It is difficult to conceive of an urban material
narrative that does not include aesthetic ugliness,
material abandonment, and disorder, all of which
complicate the romanticization of cities as magnets
for a creative class, vestiges of ethnic persistence, or
as documents of past heritage. The early 21st-century
American city has many selfless advocates and laudable revival stories, but the city is also persistently
linked in our collective imagination to utter ruination. The material ruination of the American city, of
course, was wrought by factors such as urban renewal,
postindustrialization, the mortgage crisis, and racism,
and increasingly those structural realities reach into
the suburbs and rural America, and have profound
impacts in cities across the globe. This material
decline has often been stereotypically hyperbolized by
academics, state ideologues, and popular observers
alike, yet genuine material decline and its social imagination form a critical dimension of how we conceive
contemporary cities. The material dimensions of that
ruin are modest but ubiquitous: desolate bus stops,
aging interstate highways, graffiti, vacant lots, layers
of dirt, hand-painted store signs, fast-food debris,
cigarette butts, and billboards inevitably have a
profound collective sway over many peoples subjectification of the city.
A self-styled genre of ruin porn photographers
has descended on American cities intent to document its decay and underscore the ironic beauty of
urban desolation (e.g., RomanyWG 2010). Some
truly gorgeous pictures of abandoned buildings and
desolate cities bespeak tragedy, but many of these
images (or the way they are viewed) betray a sort of
pejorative appreciation for the cityscape (cf. de Certeau et al. 1998:71). Images certainly harbor the
48

potential to identify historical processes of change

and shape contemporary transformations. Photographer Camilo Jose Vergara, for instance, has critically
and sympathetically plumbed the depths of urban
abandonment and transformation since the 1970s, a
mission that has included celebrations of rebirth as
well as a sober witnessing of ruination that has descended on much of postwar urban America. In the
ablest hands, an image documents materiality in distinctive ways, pulling our eye toward the material
minutia we ignore and evoking the sensory richness
of materiality, yet images cannot stand in for things
themselves. Those very things that weigh on urbanites senses and lurk in our consciousness unexamined, evaded, and reduced to banality may provide
some of the most illuminating narratives of 21stcentury urbanity.
Quotidian Urban Materiality
There is a profoundly consequential dimension of
imagination and sensory idiosyncrasy in contemporary urban materiality, yet much of that experience
occurs largely beneath self-reflection in a realm of
repetitive practices. Consequently, the second challenge is to articulate a concrete theory of banality
and everyday life that recognizes the social and
political meaningfulness of quotidian materiality.
The numerous things that fashion contemporary
cityscapes in a fabric of semi-automatic practices are
not all that different from the things that Victorians
pondered, but everyday materiality is often dismissed as insignificant banality in the pale of dominant narratives. Everyday life and materiality deal
significant challenges to traditional interpretive
frameworks because their spontaneity, unexpressed
nature, transience, ordinariness, and experiential idiosyncrasies resist coherent, linear narratives; simultaneously, though, they reveal enormous ideological
homogenization as the everyday persistently retreats
from critical apprehension (de Certeau 1984;
Lefebvre 1991).
The everyday is an exceptionally broad concept
revolving around routinization and repetition, the
everyday monotonies that Henri Lefebvre (1987:10)
referred to as organized passivity. Rather than pose
the everyday simply as oppositional transgressions
foiling orthodoxies and structure, the everyday is
instead more productively framed as practices that

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reproduce those ideologies and structural orthodoxies by connecting dominant institutions, structures,
and bureaucracies. By working between structural
institutions, the everyday becomes essential to the
reproduction of structural orthodoxy, despite holding the very seeds of revolution against order and
rationality (Vaneigem 1979). This breaks from theoretical dualisms that tend to oppose the everyday with
something not everyday, like realunreal, mediated
unmediated, ordinaryspectacular, or tradition
modernity (Poster 2002). In such polarizations, the
real world is often characterized as unreflective
doing, a place of unmediated experience and desire
in which nothing appears to happen; that everyday
world is routinely contrasted to the dimensions of life
structured by and known through rational reflection,
that is, through thinking as opposed to doing
(Sandywell 2004:167).
Consequently, it is not an especially clear curatorial charge to collect the everyday because this
encompasses potentially all materiality that is part of
repetitive practice. Instead, a materiality of ordinariness might more productively focus on nonplaces
and nonthings, because they are the dimensions of
our contemporary world that are uninvestigated and
untheorized. Abandoned buildings, lawn ornaments,
and bus stops are among the urban material realities
we reduce to the banal that remain unexamined. Such
objects will not necessarily reflect who we are in some
historically accurate or objective form, and theories
of the everyday always caution against such essentialism; instead, those material things illuminate the critical dimensions of our lives that we are unable to
articulate, consigning them to the status of ordinary
and submerging them within monotonous repetition.
Of course, meaningful forms of selfhood, heritage,
and social meaning are invested in spaces and objects
as disparate if prosaic as porch stoops, McDonalds,
stray dogs, or telephone pole signs. Yet for various,
mostly unexamined reasons, we anxiously cast those
things as mundane and quotidian or aspire to efface
them entirely. Victorian figurines were once ignored
as meaningless things alongside a universe of domestic goods and spaces that were similarly unquestioned
and prosaic, yet in retrospect they are animated alien
documents that reveal Victorians complex social
imagination of difference, globalization, and selfhood.

Collecting Us
Museums offer exceptionally powerful spaces to
encounter prosaic things in ways that compel us to
see them, interrogate their representations, and contemplate their genuine social significance by probing
how they actually work. Consequently, the third
challenge in the exercise of deciding what should be
preserved in contemporary cities is determining who
makes such curatorial decisions. What museums
actually preserve for an audience and context a century away risks reducing itself to a guesswork exercise
that aspires to reveal what we consider to be important about ourselves and urban life. Inevitably, like
any time capsule, what we collect says more about us
than it says about the social and historical moment in
which we live. However, the political act of making
such decisions in partnerships with communities
with a concrete power to determine curatorial policies and interpretations has genuine immediate
impact on museum practice and the ways we cast ourselves. In this sense, the real question is not who owns
the future but instead who possesses the power of
interpretation in the present. Rather than try to
assemble a collection for the future, we are better
served by instead self-consciously assembling goods
that illuminate the niches of our contemporary lives,
especially those we cannot fathom.
Aspiring to forecast what might be important to
audiences in a decade, let alone a century, is at best
challenging. Nevertheless, if we want to tell ourselves a
meaningful story about us (as opposed to imagining
how we will be conceived by others in a century), the
most illuminating narratives might well be told using
the most seemingly inconsequential things populating
the contemporary city. The narratives that prosaic
goods tell are inevitably discontinuous and in many
ways unexpressed because the fabric of fire hydrants,
urban odors, roadside puddles, litter, graffiti, and commodities forms what Margaret Morse (1990:195196)
has called a semiautomatic landscape: that is, the
cityscape is the barely acknowledged ground of everyday experience that we all negotiate with little or no
reflection. Such landscapes and everyday material
experiences do not provide the sort of unified grand
narratives that scholars or museums have traditionally
favored, so inevitably, how we tell stories of these places
and lives will be distinctive and may illuminate how all
material narratives work in museums or any other
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context. Material things have a fundamentally recursive symbolism in which objects and constellations
of goods create meanings through our active involvement with them, so the challenge is to find things that
inspire involvement and imagination. This search for
involving objects is not antithetical to a curatorial
focus on nonplaces and nonthings, but it challenges curators to seek things that fall outside or are at
the margins of dominant urban narratives.
The precise limits to urban materialitythe actual
things we will use to tell stories about contemporary
city lifeare at best ambiguous. Museums once isolated the physical thing from its alternative representations, casting its meaning in terms set by the
institution itself and weaving those meanings into an
overall narrative; likewise, material culture scholars
have long spent much of their energy aspiring to
resolve the fundamental meaning of specific things
and erasing interpretive ambiguities. Material culture
does not reveal an essential interpretive truth, but it
can illuminate unstable historical moments, show
that the present was not inevitable, and underscore
that history is not an orderly grand narrative (Benjamin 1969; cf. Schwartz 2001). Casting aside all such
narratives that subjectify things is not really possible
or especially desirable, but flexible, clearly authored
narratives in which goods and discourses reveal dissonance and the imponderable may provide the most
illuminating perspectives on contemporary urban
materiality, which is fraught by internal dissensions
along various lines of difference that are routinely
masked as well as illuminated by materiality. What
we choose to dub significant is perhaps less illuminating than the discourses we can trigger by simply making that material cityscape visible at all and asking not
what we should preserve for a century later but
instead what makes our lives in cities distinctive and
meaningful now.

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