So what about all this 'stuff'?

I am working on a paper about the relational dimension of practice. The most recent social theory (e.g., Latour, Knorr-Cetina) focuses on the important role objects have in mediating social relationships. Very simplistically stated, knowledge objects help us ground our sociality across time and space. They are envelopes of meaning which we incorporate into our shared life stories and to which we give symbolic meaning. In turn these objects give our social and relational lives stability and substance: they make our relational activities visible in ways we as humans cannot.

Check out my book cover here - beautiful isn't it? A classic knowledge object mediating my sociality as an academic. It "means" a deep practice - a practice of associations among me, my library colleagues with whom I conducted my study, my fellow students, my thesis supervisors, my de Maatschap colleagues, and on. But I’m wondering if it’s possible to have an enduring or substantive (i.e., across time and space) relationship that remains invisible and without mediating objects, never seen, but still mutually known and still a relational practice in significant ways? Is it possible for humans to be relational without objects that are unique or particular to those social activities? I'd like to say yes, because I don't like the idea that objects "come between" me and my social lives. But I think it's true.

Another interpretation is that it is “the sensuous materiality of the human body [that] may identify the ‘missing link’” (Pels, Hetherington & Vandenberghe) - that binds objects’ “naked materialism” with our human performances of “discursive idealism.” In this view, what's important is how knowledge objects participate in our performances of human relations.

Intuitively I think we weave im/material objects (broadly defined) into our relationships without always conscious intention and deliberation. The closer the objects are in time/space to our relating, the more subjective, active or significant these objects are in our sociality and the less distinct or separate they appear to be. Over time/space distances, however, objects become just that – more ‘objective’ or remote to our relational sociality.

I have a friend I have known for many years, with whom I used to correspond regularly. I remember how these letters would arrive at my house and how they would ‘perform’ in those moments as the friendship itself across the distance. Today these letters are in a box; they have lost their immediate performative qualities; they are much more ‘object’ like now, something that collects and contains relational practice, but not something that still conjures that relational practice, that shared knowing and meaning. And yet I still 'practice' this friendship with its own set of activities, knowing and meanings, though there are fewer material enactments these days - a telephone call, or facebook posting periodically. And the sociality is also different now - less intense. Maybe less social. Less of something. Less visible to both of us. More spaces between us.

Does this mean our relational practices are stronger or weaker, more visible or invisible, more present than absent, according to the performative intensity or power of the objects that mediate them? Or is the intensity and texture of a practice more influenced by joint intentionality? Hmmm ... at the very least, I think it might not hurt to keep a closer eye on what's happening to the im/material 'stuff’ that props me up, that 'dresses' my sensuous body-in-action!