Reviews

story. The language of Tupperworld is full of (p. xiv). As such, Wild Things should partly be seen as
character: Tuppenvare 'burp', Poly Party, Lazy a theoretical intervention in the field of design history
Susan, Cake-Take, Econo-Canister, Salt-n-Pepper aimed at reconfiguring the study of 'things' (ordinary
Caddy'. And many of the illustrations are laden material things) under the more variegated umbrella
with period charm. Advertising and promotional of material cultural studies. This, then, is a claim that
pictures emphasize context. These are well balanced, our object world (our designed environment) will
however, by Tupper's fantastic design sketches, benefit, not from the scrutiny of a canonical history of
patent drawings and photographs of Tupperware, design, nor from being subsumed within the field of
as displayed by the Museum of Modern Art, 'visual culture', but from being studied within the
included to demonstrate the abstract purity of the emergent fields of material culture and everyday life.
designs. The result is a rich study that explores its Crucial to this argument is the insistence that what
subject on a variety of levels and in relation to a has been missing in academic attention to things, is
wide range of contexts. any address to the 'thingness' of things: to their lived
materiality.
Gregory Votolato Wild Things is an ambitious book and its objective
Buckinghamshire Chiltems University College
appears to be twofold. On the one hand, by positing
Notes 'everyday life' as the arena where 'things' are found,
Attfield continually refocuses design history on the
1 Gregory Votolato, American Design in the Twentieth Century,
Manchester University Press, London, 1998, pp. 255-8. less prestigious, more ubiquitous world of reproduc-
2 John A. Walker, Design History and the History of Design, Pluto,
tion furniture, suburban semi-detached housing, and
London, 1989, pp. 100. such like. On the other hand, the more substantial
3 Richard Hofstadter, William Miller & Daniel Aaron, The ambition is to generate theoretical 'scenarios' (so to
American Republic, vol. 2, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, speak) that might accommodate these things in all
1965, p. 298. their wildness. Attfield is suggesting that, within the
4 Titles by Horatio Alger include Making His Way: Frank Courney's everyday, things function in a way analogous to the
Struggle Upward, World Before Him, and Rugged Dick Or, Street
Ufe in New York With the Boot-Blacks.
'wild' cards in a card game (p. 74); their meaning is
not simply unstable but non-existent until they are
5 Jeffrey I. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History, Rutgers
University Press, New Brunswick, 1997 and 'Into the fourth played and their value is designated. Yet the card
kingdom: representations of plastic materials, 1920-1950', Jour- game analogy is less than perfect. More useful for
nal of Design History, vol. 5, no. 3, 1992. understanding Wild Things might be the way that the
6 My mother, Mary Votolato, hosted Tupperware parties in the term 'wild' operates in the work of Michel de
early 1950s in a middle-class Italian community where guests
contributed regional dishes to the ethnic catering. A local
Certeau (a French theorist who, while often men-
Tupperware representative, who ensured that entertaining dis- tioned in Wild Things, is not someone Attfield
plays of the product line kept the party lively, orchestrated the particularly engages with). For de Certeau the 'wild-
events. Everyone bought, and all proceeds were donated to
Saint Rocco's Church.
ness' of the everyday resonates in both a major and
minor key. At one level, the wildness of the everyday
7 See Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of
Everyday Life in the 1950s, Harvard University Press, Cam- is simply the 'untamed': it is what gets remaindered
bridge, MA, 1994, p. 38. when the everyday is scrutinized from a rationalistic
perspective (major key). It is also, more mundanely
(and more appropriately), all those burps, hisses,
Wild Things: The Material Culture of Every- whispers, crackles and slurps that sound engineers
day Life refer to as 'wild' and that get filtered out in the
production process of sound recording (minor key).
Judy Attfield. Berg, 2000. 318 pp., 30 illus. £14.95
It is this minor sense of the wild that seems most
paper. ISBN 1 85973 369 7.
appropriate to Wild Things. 'Wild things' for the
traditional design historian, like wild sounds for the
In Judy Attfield's words, Wild Things is 'a first step in
sound engineer, are the unwanted, unanticipated,
establishing a theoretical starting point which,' she
extraneous, excessive meanings tnat have to be
hopes, 'can contribute to a larger project in the
filtered out in accounts of objects.
investigation of the material culture of everyday life'

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To get the 'wild' back into the mix, Attfield the physical materiality of transitional objects, and
orchestrates a number of theoretical discussions more generally the psychic investment that can obtain
around notions of authenticity, ephemerality, time, to things. For this she suggests that transitional objects
space and 'containment' (this last term being the operate at a metaphoric level: that is they substitute
theoretical construct that Attfield uses to suggest the like for like. In the case of a 'smelly duck' the likeness
way that 'wild things' are managed and put into 'a that it activates is (I would assume) the smells, orality
particular kind of eccentric order' by individuals). In a
and softness of my daughter's suckling past. This sense
fine account of reproduction furniture, Attfield man- of metaphor allows for a general consideration of the
ages to wrestle the notion of authenticity away from properties of materiality; it tells us why fabrics
its more insistent association with 'originality'. In become transitional objects and not building blocks.
doing so she returns the meaning of 'authenticity' Yet this does only tell us about the generality of
to the sphere of everyday life, where the emphasis is things. I would argue that it is not metaphoric
not on provenance and innovation but on a lived operations so much as metonymical ones that allow
connection to temporal continuity. In this way, us to consider the particularity of things.
'reproduction' can be lived as authentic because it Now, while this might seem like a particularly
offers (both maker and owner) a link to tradition. obscure point to pick up on, it does have very real
Similarly, in her discussion of the 'textility' of fabric
consequences. Towards die end of die book, Attfield
she suggests that the material qualities of domes (the relates some ethnographic research on die way some
evidence of wear, the intimate relationship with older people negotiated moving into sheltered
bodies) make them particularly suited to bearing accommodation, and the inevitable 'editing' of their
memories (albeit in ways unavailable to scrutiny). In material possessions that accompanied it. When Mrs
one particularly poignant passage she reveals that, Tucker was interviewed about her valued possessions
following the recent death of her father, she now she described her statue of'Buddha' (one of the few
keeps his 'most loved cardigan' in her jumper drawer. possessions to make it to the new address): 'My uncle
To invoke the 'material culture of everyday life' as brought that from India when I was a baby. And it
the topic of study means to privilege an experience of was in . . . my modier's home and I was the only one
the world in its most deeply felt yet uneventful form. who ever polished it. I was attached to that Buddha
Material diings are often invested with desire but this from my earliest remembrance. And I've never been
desire is not recoverable by simply confronting the without it' (p. 258). While, no doubt, the statue's
material thing. What needs recovering is the intimate polish-ability is crucial here, it is not the metaphoric
history of the objects and the way that the physical sense of substituting like for like that seems at issue
qualities of things become invested with content. (what, materially, could the statue be 'like' diat would
One of the cornerstones of her account of cultural make it so important?). More significant is the
materiality is provided by the psychoanalyst D. W. metonymical link back to die uncle and to the
Winnicott's theory of transitional objects. For Att- household where the young 'Mrs Tucker' was the
field 'the child's comfort blanket' (which is the only one who cared for the uncle's gift. In a similar
exemplary transitional object) is 'the paradigmatic metonymical way, what is crucial about smelly duck
cultural object' (p. 130). For Winnicott, the child's is its link back to a state of more amorphous
comforter (my daughter's is a mass-produced soft toy plenitude. In fact the transitional object might best
known, for obvious reasons, as 'smelly duck') acts as a be thought of as a synecdoche (a particular kind of
palliative for the traumatic transition from babyhood metonym), as a fragment that represents a greater
to childhood. In practical terms such comforters often whole, in this case the amorphous wholeness of pre-
facilitate weaning, but in a more 'gothic' sense they selfhood. Metonymy suggests diat material objects act
help the child negotiate the path from a state of non- as witnesses to a past (they were mere at the scene, so
separation (where everything within the infants to spealc), which gets relayed through the object in a
range, including its body, parents, toys and fabrics is variety of forms.
experienced as coextensive and where there is not yet
If the metonymical aspect of material culture is
a sense of 'self) to the recognition of separation (of
privileged (and this is the implicit assumption of die
subject-hood). Attfield uses Winnicott to consider
ethnographic examples cited in Wild Things) and seen

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as centra] to the everyday life of material culture, then mically uncharted. For me it is not a book to agree
a number of issues are at stake for studying 'things' as with or disagree with, but a book to think with (and
part of the everyday. First, it might suggest that the what more could you ask for?). In many ways,
object is not what is actually being studied; rather, though, Wild Things is not a book that is centred
'things' are being used as ciphers that can relay on 'wild things'; or rather it does not take the
particular memories. If this is true then the umbrella wildness of things as its primary subject matter. It is
term that might incorporate design history is not so a theoretical book that tries to pave the way for
much 'material culture' but a more general sense of allowing the wildness of things to emerge. In doing
the social history of everyday life. Second, and much this we might well ask what would happen if 'wild-
more important as far as I can see, is the difficulty that ness' became the primary subject? What would a
it evidences in providing general interpretative book look like that tried to be true to the 'wild'
accounts of cultural objects (or cultural history for orchestration of the heterogeneous everyday? How
that matter). The metonymicaJ dimension of things would it write the uneventful stubborn excess of the
seems to insist on their absolute particularity. If this is everyday without cleaning it up, smoothing it out
the case, then things might be seen to generate the and ultimately taming it? In the preface to Wild
historical on an exponentially enlarged yet micro- Things, Attfield states that her writing practice 'has
scopic scale. In the end, this might simply result in a been to adopt a style of tacking back and forth
massive (not to say unmanageable) archival practice between rhetorical questions, theoretical devices,
that is in danger of not being able to speak because items taken from the personal minutiae of everyday
everyone (or everything) is talking at once. Of life, and illustrative case studies' (p. xiii). The style is
course, as Attfield so rightly suggests, just because purposefully 'inconsistent'. Perhaps, then, the way
meaning is particular and resolutely individual, does that we write the material culture of everyday life will
not mean that it is not also social. And it might well require us to embrace inconsistency and to experi-
be that the social dimension of metonymy (the social ment with the very form of articulation. The muffled
dreams, fears and aspirations that accompany 'things') cacophony of the everyday and the stuttering things
is what could allow the study of the everyday life of that reside there offer an imaginative challenge to
material culture to provide important accounts of our those who want to write about 'wild things'.
social world.
Wild Things is an initial foray into a territory that, Ben Highmore
for all its ubiquity and ordinariness, remains acade- University of the West of England, Bristol

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