Open Cultural Studies 2019; 3: 442-446 Hans Peter Hahn* Commentary Epilogue—Thing Politics and Life-Worlds: On the Dynamics of Conceptual Developments for the Materiality of Society https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0037 Received March 7, 2019; accepted March 29, 2019 Keywords: networks; thing politics; obstinacy of things; life-world; phenomenology; “excess of things” Introduction The history of the study of material culture is essentially guided by the notion that things function as representatives of society, of the persons involved, and of status differences. “Tell me what you have, and I’ll tell you who you are” is the motto of this way of thinking. In this context, stability and traditions are closely associated with material culture, culminating in readings that consider material culture an expression of individual as well as collective identities. In many cases, material objects are also taken as evidence for the continuity of social relations and the expression of stable orientation and values. Informed by the widely acclaimed essays by Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, material culture studies propose a strong nexus of social structure, material equipment and the characteristics of certain social groups. Most probably this is the guiding theme in the long tradition of investigating the significance of materiality in societies (Hahn, Materielle Kultur 115ff). The fundamental metaphor of “material culture as text” aims at the meaning of objects. In this way of thinking, things convey messages; they contain meanings that can be read by individuals or even the majority in a society. Materiality without readable meaning does not figure in social debates, according to the view that has dominated the humanities for centuries. Methodologically, this results in prioritizing the search for the meaning of things, undoubtedly one of the great traditions of Western thought. However, semiotizing the material may bear some odd fruit, as the example of Christian symbolism clearly shows. The overemphasis on the expressivity of things becomes even less convincing when applied to investigations into the materiality of society as a whole. In this view, neither materiality nor the sensual perception of form, surface and other material qualities turn a thing into a meaningful element within the social order – its significance is merely and exclusively based on pre-established and widely accepted messages. Networks and Thing Politics Undoubtedly, by means of his Actor Network Theory (ANT) Bruno Latour has conceptually contributed to a better understanding of the dynamic entanglements of people and things. At the same time and paradoxically, with his question “Where are the missing masses?” he highlighted the idleness of things rather than their Research Article Open Access. © 2019 Hans Peter Hahn published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attributi- on 4.0 Public License. *Corresponding author: Hans Peter Hahn, Institut für Ethnologie, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M., E-mail: hans.hahn@em.uni-frankfurt.de