David Gary Shaw

Actor Networks, Social Selves, and Expressive Possession

Late medieval legislation to try to control what clothes were purchased and worn according to social group is at the tantalising heart of a puzzling web of self, society, and stuff: things, inflected by their sensory characteristics as much as their value, are caught in close proximity to the emotions of desire and resentment. In turn, the legislation links these feelings and materialities to government and rulemaking, morality and economy, lists and limits, petitions and process (Burkholder 2005, Hayward 2009). What is more, such laws appear to have started with the House of Commons, close to the ‘people’ to be controlled (McIntosh 1998). MPs were most aware and worried by clothing’s social and expressive power, its non-commercial mysteries. It is even more interesting and apt when we remember that the majority of the House of Commons were members from the country’s cities and boroughs (McKisack 1932). Their personal and social drives endow the objects of their concern, even those on their own backs, with a dense significance. What a complex and complicating thing is humanity, is the world, and how clever of Jervis (2017) to take the distribution of clothing seriously and to show us a new way of understanding how the circulation of goods has meaning for selves. One advantage of the notion of the social self that Jervis finds useful is that it mandates a human centre even as it denies that centre self-sufficiency or independence. The social self remains a sort of function of the striving individual (Shaw 2005). While there might be contexts built more of ideas than of textiles or pottery, Jervis reflects the most pressing point in historical work today: how do we think seriously about the self’s materiality and the ways it gets expressed and involved with the world (Shaw 2015)? In reflecting on Jervis’ ‘Consumption and the Social Self’ (2017), it is easy to admire his complex theoretical framing that surrounds the hardscape of clothing and pottery’s circulation and consumption. His work suggests a robust historical ecology, open to different approaches and entities, and how they mix. If I might be pardoned for self-quotation, here is an ‘attempt to see how the material world was appropriated to social selves and to see how the social expression of self took material forms’ (Shaw 2005). This work has been excitingly enabled by his searching for theoretical frameworks that would assist in connecting self to thing, to historical change, and to material context. Bolstered by philosophical insights from Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel DeLanda, and Bruno Latour, Jervis’ theories are importantly post-liberal and post-Marxist and can be seen as theories providing new ontologies more than modelling social systems. The challenge to somehow shake off the implications of the standard prejudices about the medieval is an admirable goal, harder to achieve in practice than in theory . To speak of consumption itself tends to conjure claims of the proto-modern. The effect of