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Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann
Joost van Loon Editors

Discussing New
Materialism
Methodological Implications
for the Study of Materialities
Discussing New Materialism
Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann · Joost van Loon
Editors

Discussing New
Materialism
Methodological Implications for the
Study of Materialities
Editors
Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann Joost van Loon
Institut für Sozialwesen Fachbereich Soziologie
Universität Kassel KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Kassel, Hessen, Germany Eichstätt, Bayern, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-22299-4 ISBN 978-3-658-22300-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22300-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967710

Springer VS
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole
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Contents

Part I Introduction
New Materialism and Its Methodological
Consequences: An Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann and Joost van Loon

Part II Postphenomenology and Actor-Network-Theory

What Makes Sensation of a Sentient Thing Possible:
The Concept of Time in the Work of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann
Historical Materialism and Actor-Network-Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Joost van Loon

Part III Cyborg and Agential Realism

The Cyborg, Its Friends and Feminist
Theories of Materiality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Anne-Jorunn Berg
“Cutting Together/Apart” – Impulses from
Karen Barad’s Feminist Materialism
for a Relational Sociology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Susanne Völker

v
vi Contents

Part IV Praxeology and Communicative Constructivism

Rethinking Bodies and Objects in
Social Interaction: A Multimodal and
Multisensorial Approach to Tasting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Lorenza Mondada
Materiality, Meaning, Social Practices:
Remarks on New Materialism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Robert Schmidt
New Materialism? A View from Sociology of Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Reiner Keller

Part V Algorithmic Culture and Doing Science

From Hardware to Software to Runtime:
The Politics of (at Least) Three Digital Materialities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Jan-Hendrik Passoth
Of Rabbits and Men, or: How to Study
Innovation in Nanomedicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Wiebke Schär
About the Contributors

Anne-Jorunn Berg was Professor and Director of the Center for Gender Research
at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has been central in the development of
gender and technology studies in Scandinavia. Her work is based at the inter-
section of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist theory and she
has been involved in several national and international research projects explor-
ing implications and possibilities given this vantage point. She has worked
extensively with Donna Haraway’s theorizing on the material-semiotic and
conceptualizations of nature. Her research interests are varied: smart homes,
intersectionality, innovation, whiteness studies, digital feminism, materiality,
research methods or housework, always with a keen eye on gendered processes,
formations or relations. Currently, she is Professor at the Faculty for Social Sci-
ence at Nord University, Norway.
Address: Faculty for Social Science, Nord University, PO box 1490, 8049 Bodo,
Norway
e-mail: ajb@nord.no
Reiner Keller is Professor of Sociology at Augsburg University (Germany) since
2011. Currently, he is Scientific Director of the Jakob-Fugger Center for Transna-
tional Studies, Augsburg University, and, since 2015, a member of the executive
committee of the German Sociological Association. He has developed the Sociology
of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) since the late 1990s. His research
centres on sociology of knowledge and culture, discourse studies, sociological the-
ory, qualitative methods, risk and environment, politics of knowledge and knowing,
and French sociology. He has published extensively on these areas and subjects.
Address: Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Universität Augsburg,
Universitätsstr. 10, 86135 Augsburg, Germany
e-mail: reiner.keller@phil.uni-augsburg.de
vii
viii About the Contributors

Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann is Professor of Sociological Methodology of Qualita-

tive Reconstructive Research at the University of Kassel, Germany. Since 2018,
she is Director of the Center of Empirical Research Methods at the University
of Kassel. Her research focuses on the interpretive paradigm of Alfred Schütz
and its further development. With reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she has
made other forms of intentionality such as fleshly habituality fruitful for phenom-
enology, moving beyond the classic model of interaction with two human actors,
limited to their content of consciousness. On this basis, she has developed a meth-
odology and method for video hermeneutics that take into account the special
content of fleshly behavior. With her work, she brings Merleau-Ponty’s ontology
of the flesh into sociology of knowledge and expands classical hermeneutics. She
has been involved in numerous important studies such as the analysis of video-­
recorded interactions of doctor-patient consultations or the effect of computerized
knowledge in the operating theatre (funded by the German Research Associa-
tion). Currently, her research is located in the field of child welfare and the con-
struction of violence.
Address: University of Kassel, Department of Social Welfare and Social Work,
Arnold-Bode-Str. 10, 34127 Kassel, Germany
e-mail: ulrike.kissmann@uni-kassel.de
Lorenza Mondada is Professor for Linguistics at the University of Basel and
Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Helsinki. Her research deals
with social interaction in ordinary, professional and institutional settings, within
an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective. Her specific focus
is on video analysis and multimodality, integrating language and embodiment in
the study of human action and sociality. Her work on multimodality in interaction
studies how the situated and endogenous organization of social interaction draws
on a diversity of multimodal resources such as, beside language, gesture, gaze,
body posture, body movements, objects manipulations as well as multisensorial
practices such as touching, tasting and seeing. She has extensively published in
J. of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies, Language in Society, ROLSI, J. of Sociolin-
guistics, and co-edited several collective books (for Cambridge University Press,
Benjamins, Routledge, De Gruyter).
Address: University of Basel, Department of Linguistics and Literature, Maiengasse
51, 4056 Basel, Switzerland
e-mail: Lorenza.mondada@unibas.ch
About the Contributors ix

Jan-Hendrik Passoth is Privatdozent at European University Viadrina in Frank-

furt (Oder) and Research Group Leader of the Digital/Media/Lab at the Munich
Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) at Technische Universität München.
His group of doctoral and post-doctoral researchers study digital transformations
in ethnographic cases studies on industrial production, borders and migration or
public broadcasting. He studied sociology, computer science and political science
at Hamburg University where he also completed his dissertation on “Technology
and Society” in sociology. He has worked in Hamburg, Bielefeld and Berlin and
has been a visiting scholar at Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University
and a fellow at ZIF in Bielefeld and the Locating Media Group at the University
of Siegen. His research draws on insights from science and technology studies
(STS) and focusses on the use of standardized and interconnected software tech-
nologies in popular culture, politics and the media and the changing role of com-
puter science for contemporary societies.
Address: Technische Universität München, Munich Center for Technology in
Society, Digital Media Lab, Arcisstr. 21, 80333 München, Germany
e-mail: jan.passoth@tum.de
Wiebke Schär is Senior Researcher at Sine-Institute Munich. Her research
interests include STS, health studies, studies of innovation and sustainabil-
ity as well as studies of risk. She is a qualitative researcher, specialised in ANT
(Actor-Network)-analysis. She worked on the following issues: the social impact
of infectious diseases such as SARS, the natures-cultures of the Danube River, the
risk of dietary supplement, controversies and participatory tools and visualization
tools in social sciences. Her doctoral thesis is concerned with an ethnography of
innovation in nanomedicine. Currently she works in a project in cooperation with
the City of Munich, which is focused on health promotion and prevention.
Address: sine – Süddeutsches Institut für empirische Sozialforschung e. V., Schwan-
thalerstr. 91, 80336 Munich, Germany
e-mail: wiebke.schaer@sine-institut.de
Robert Schmidt is Professor for Process-Oriented Sociology at Catholic Uni-
versity Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. After studying sociology and theatre in Erlangen,
New York and Berlin, he completed his doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin
and his habilitation at Technical University of Darmstadt. From 2000 to 2010
he was a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre “Performing Cul-
tures” at Freie Universität Berlin. He held visiting professorships at the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Vienna (2011), the Technical University of Darmstadt
x About the Contributors

(2011–2012) and was Interim Professor for Sociology and Qualitative Methods in
Empirical Social Research at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürn-
berg (2012–2013). His research focuses on the sociology of social practices,
the ethnography of organization, and process-oriented methodology. His recent
publications include: “Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und
empirische Analysen”, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2012 and “Reflexive Knowledge in
Practices”, in “The Nexus of Practices”, edited by Ted Schatzki, Elizabeth Shove
and Allison Hui, pp. 141–154, Routledge 2017.
Address: Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Kapuzinergasse 2, 85072
Eichstätt, Germany
e-mail: RSchmidt@ku.de
Joost van Loon is currently Chair of General Sociology and Sociological The-
ory at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. He has published exten-
sively on issues related to sociological theory, media- and cultural studies, science
and technology and risk. He is author of among others Risk and Technological
Culture (2002) and Media Technology: Critical Perspectives (2008) and is Editor-
in-Chief of the transdisciplinary journal Space and Culture.
Address: Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Kapuzinergasse 2, 85072
Eichstätt, Germany
e-mail: joost.vanloon@ku.de
Susanne Völker is Professor of Methods and Methodology for Social and Edu-
cational Sciences and Gender Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany.
She is Scientific Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Cologne Univer-
sity (GeStiK). As a qualitative researcher in social sciences, she has entangled
the praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu with feminist new materialist approaches. Her
areas of research are located in the field of queer theory, gender studies, theory of
precarization, practice theory and research on social inequality.
Address: University of Cologne, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department for
Educational and Social Sciences, Richard-Strauss-Str. 2, 50931 Köln, Germany
e-mail: Susanne.voelker@uni-koeln.de
 Part I
Introduction
New Materialism and Its
Methodological Consequences: An
Introduction

Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann and Joost van Loon

What to do with a term that is too broad to stand for anything specific and too
despised to find anyone defending it? We were confronted with this question when
reflecting new materialism on our panel session during the 2016 Biannual Confer-
ence of the German Sociological Association (“Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziolo-
gie”). Originally, the panel session consisted of four discussants, representing each
a specific perspective on materiality. Later, we decided to edit an anthology and
to compare more than four approaches. We are aware that some authors currently
have worked through the myriad of materialist standpoints and their critiques (see,
e.g., Bath et al. 2017; Keller et al. 2013; Henkel and L­ indemann 2017). However,
our edited volume is the only one that explicitly puts the emphasis on the ensuing
methodological consequences. From our perspective, it is necessary to broaden the
discussion on new materialism by a thorough reflection on empirical methods. Up
to now, Deleuzean “assemblages” and so-called posthuman concepts have given
rise to what has been termed “post-qualitative” thinking in qualitative methodol-
ogy (see, e.g., Koro-Ljungberg et al. 2017). Our publication aims at presenting
a wide range of theoretical approaches together with the corresponding concep-
tualizations for empirical enquiry. Therefore, the contributions each locate them-
selves within the discussion of new materialism and elaborate on the theoretical
assumptions that lead to the respective methodology as well as method. They ask,

U. T. Kissmann (*)
University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
E-Mail: ulrike.kissmann@uni-kassel.de
J. van Loon
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany
E-Mail: joost.vanloon@ku.de

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 3
U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon (ed.), Discussing New Materialism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22300-7_1
4 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

for example, which requirements have to be met to study matter and whether tradi-
tional sociology furnishes sufficient tools for it.
From the outset, we have to ask what is new materialism? It is perhaps best
described as a loose gathering of rejects. Those associated with it have almost
without exception deployed different terms to describe their own position: Agen-
tial realism (Barad); schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari); cyborg feminism
(Haraway); posthuman feminism (Braidotti); speculative realism (Harman);
actor-network-theory (Latour, Callon, Law, Mol); speculative constructivism
(Stengers); monadology (Tarde); process-theology (Whitehead). They are a loose
gathering because they derive from divergent, sometimes even completely oppo-
sitional, ontological and epistemological considerations, analytical methods and
even disciplines. They have been gathered by a process of ascription, usually by
those who disagree with the challenges these interventions have offered. To put it
differently, the postfix “ism” is a very reliable index of rejection.
We have opted for a pragmatic use of the term to enable us to explicate the
nature of the allergic rejections that have been invoked. In that sense, we under-
stand new materialism as a label associated with ontological and epistemologi-
cal interventions. As good interventions interrupt, irritate and therefore challenge,
they should not expect a warm welcome from those whose vested (institutional)
interests and personal preferences (prejudices) are being questioned. The nature
of these allergic reactions can be simplified as an itch that refuses to go away.
This itch is the matter of matter, or better: the matter that matters. In other words,
what has been gathered under “(new) materialism” as label of rejection, is matter
as matter of concern.
To state that matter matters is a truism bordering on tautology. Who would
dare to say that matter does not matter? That matter matters is deeply inscribed
into the semantics of the very word matter. Starting with the verb, to matter is
to make a difference. “It matters” means that “it” makes a difference. As a noun,
matter refers to substance for which the Greeks used the word hyle (“mere”
substance). Matter as noun is remarkable because it is alluding to something
extremely concrete, whilst it itself remains extremely abstract (the same could be
said of its related word “mass”): i.e., materiality. However, in everyday E ­ nglish,
the question “What is the matter?” is usually not understood as a request for a
specification of a particular substance, for example, the identification of its
molecular structure; but instead invoking concern: “Please tell me what is of con-
cern to you; what is on your mind.” So the noun matter can also be invoked as a
performative stand-in for (representative of) “of concern.”
These simple vernacular exercises are important because they highlight the
way in which in the social sciences, the concept of matter is most likely being
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 5

specified. We assert that those most irritated by it are more likely to invoke
­matter-as-noun in the sense of hyle, naked, formless, or better general substance.
Some authors (see, e.g., Kalthoff et al. 2016, p. 11 ff.) suggest that sociology
should only concern itself with “socio-material constellations” instead of tak-
ing matter seriously. That is, sociology should have no interest in general, amor-
phous substance; but only in substances that are social, or perhaps better: socially
shaped (morphe). Matter only matters when it has been socially formatted. Simi-
larly, social constructivism conceives matter solely as sociomateriality, i.e., as a
practical bundling of human actions and nonhuman artefacts (see, originally,
Berger and Luckmann 1966). It, too, deploys the opposition between sociality
and materiality analogous to Aristotle’s separation of hyle and morphe, or Kant’s
separation between ideas and things-as-such; to state that “pure matter” (amor-
phous substance) is sociologically irrelevant. What matters to sociology is social,
or perhaps even better socialized matter.
The distinction of “matter” and “the social” has been extremely influential
and persistent. After its appearance in Aristotle’s and later in Kant’s work, it was
solidified during the emergence of the “human sciences” (or “sciences of man”)
in the 19th century (Foucault, 1970, p. 344–387).
Matter was excluded from the human sciences and left to the realm of the nat-
ural sciences. All that remains are social “forms,” often equated with particular
functions (e.g., Durkheim, 1912). This perspective on disciplines as fundamen-
tally opposed can also be found in the phenomenological tradition of sociology.
The Schützean distinction between first-order and second-order construction
in “The Problem of Social Reality” (Schütz 1962) is a means to separate epis-
temologically the social sciences from the natural sciences (as well as sociolo-
gists from lay people). Schütz ascribes the first-order constructions to the natural
sciences whereas the social sciences proceed through second-order constructions.
Many protagonists of new materialism challenge these traditional disciplinary
boundaries. Deleuze and Latour, for example, each draw upon the early sociology
of Gabriel Tarde, who analyzed society through an unapologetically (quasi-) sci-
entific, biological lens, as he perceived society as organism made up of many
microorganisms. Barad, too, refers to the physicist Niels Bohr in order to compre-
hend reality. New materialism therefore is not only a rejection of the distinction
between “matter” and “the social,” but also a critique of the separation of the nat-
ural sciences and social sciences and, with this, Schützean social constructions.
In the following paragraph, we will analyze the idea of reality within social
constructivism. We have chosen this example because Berger and Luckmann,
together with their predecessor Alfred Schütz, conceived reality as social and,
at the same moment, as a field for sociological enquiry. This suggests that “the
6 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

social” and sociology function as each other’s precondition. We will ask why and
how sociology is conceptualized as investigating the social and in how far matter
is excluded from the discipline.

The basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and subti-
tle, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge
must analyse the process in which this occurs. (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 13)

Despite attempting to sidestep the philosophical question, what might be con-

sidered “reality,” Berger and Luckmann still attempt to address it sociologically.
Before doing so, they explicitly position the realm of sociology as falling “some-
where in the middle between that of the man in the street [sic] and that of the phi-
losopher” (ibid., p. 14). That is, 1) sociologists are not “men in the streets” and 2)
sociologists are not “philosophers.”
Ad 1) Berger and Luckmann claim that “the” man-in-the-street1 takes their real-
ity for granted, “unless he is stopped by some sort of problem” (ibid.). When such
a man cannot continue his stroll, for example because an obstacle is in his way,
he has to navigate his way around the obstacle. In Latin, an obstacle that stops is
understood as “thrown (jacere) – against (ob),” i.e., an object. In English, to object
means to resist.
Our first question therefore is as follows: Do followers of Berger and Luck-
mann accept the logical deduction that their “men in the street” cannot always
take “their reality” for granted; namely not in those instances that reality gets in
the way, i.e., becomes an object?
Men in the street can no longer take “their” reality for granted because this
reality objects to being taken for granted, perhaps in the same way as the wives of
men in the street object to being taken for granted as domestic servants (when at
home) or prostitutes (when on the streets). The figure of the “man-in-the-street”
is thus not at all innocent, even if Berger and Luckmann used as a conventional
expression for “ordinary person.” A man-in-the-street, as a figuration of an ordi-
nary person, might be on his way from home to work or vice versa, or might be
simply loitering. Both are generic entities of “society.” However, “man” is always
gendered. If we were to use the expression “woman in (of) the street,” we might
conjure very different figurations and strong, historically entrenched, patriarchal

1We have used “man-in-the-street” to refer to the idiom as intended by Berger and Luck-
mann, namely as figure of speech, and to men in the streets to highlight the actual empirical
corollary of this, to highlight the gender-blindness implied in the generic use of the idiom.
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 7

connotations that suggest that the public sphere (the agora of the polis) is no
place for women; that is, a woman loitering in the streets is not something one
would associate with the figuration of “ordinary person.”
The undifferentiated use of the category of “man-in-the-street” subsumes gen-
der to the generic conception of “ordinary person.” A principle feature of mascu-
linity consists in “the hypostasis of masculinity to the general human” and that
“the constitutive impact of gender as common ground is masked in homosocial
communities” (see Meuser 2001, p. 14). The relevance of gender therefore is
obscured through the use of the modes of being “ordinary” versus “sociological.”
Sociologists are not men in the streets, not because they are women of the streets
or men or women at home, but because they are not ordinary persons. The modal-
ity of “being sociological” is extraordinary.
Based on this, our second question is: Assuming that followers of Berger and
Luckmann understand both categories – i.e., men in the street and sociologists –
to be human beings, do they also assume that both categories are mutually exclu-
sive? That is, one is either a man in the street or a sociologist? Or is it by virtue of
their shared human nature that sociologists are also “men in the street”? And can
the reverse be true, too: Can men in the street be sociologists? If they are mutually
exclusive, then sociologists have no access to the modality of being associated
with “men in the street,” just as a lay people, i.e., men in the street, have no access
to the modality of being called “sociological.” One could also put it differently:
Is the difference between an ordinary person and a sociologist ontologically and
politically more essential as a modality of being than, for example, gender?
The extraordinary modality of being a sociologist, however, has been expli-
cated by Berger and Luckmann as the inevitability of the “systematic aware-
ness of the fact that men in the street take quite different realities for granted
as between one society and another” (ibid.: 14). It is rather safe to assume that
this systematic awareness is due to their very definition of what a sociologist is
(a sociologist is a human being who “forced by the very logic of his discipline”
(ibid.) has to work on the basis of a systematic awareness of the taking for
granted of different realities by different people) and not some mysterious bio-
logical trait or mental infliction.
In contrast to the man-in-the-street, the sociologist operates with two realities
at the same time: a) the (different) realities as taken for granted by men in the
street and b) the meta-reality (they call it a fact) that different men in different
streets take different realities for granted.
Ad 2) However, the sociologist will not go as far as to decide which particular
version of reality that has been taken for granted is more or less true; his meta-
reality does not include criteria for establishing the validity of particular realities
8 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

as taken for granted. That is delegated to the realm of philosophy. The question of
the validity of particular takings-for-granted (truths?) is a philosophical and not
a sociological one. That is, whereas according to Berger and Luckmann, philos-
ophers are concerned with truth; sociologists restrict themselves to truth claims
(for which they introduced the term “knowledge”).
“Sociological interest in questions of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ is thus initially
justified by the fact of their social relativity” (ibid.: 15). Unfortunately, this sen-
tence came completely out of nowhere on the third page of the introduction. Until
then, there was merely a whiff of the notion that the “taking for granted” might be
some kind of social event. That is, what is being taken for granted as reality a by
person A and reality b by person B, is not the consequence of individual experi-
ences, perceptions or choices by A and B – which, after all is quite a plausible
explanation of why different men in different streets take different realities for
granted – but “to be understood in relation to various differences between the two
societies” (ibid.: 14). That is, the streets (may) matter.
Two paragraphs later, all doubt has been removed: Streets do matter and there-
fore the taking for granted of a reality differs between person A and person B
because both are in different streets (dubbed “social contexts”). “It follows that
specific agglomerations of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ pertain to specific social con-
texts, and that these relationships [sic] will have to be included in an adequate soci-
ological analysis of these contexts” (ibid.: 15). It is not clear what agglomerations
of “reality and “knowledge” might be concretely and how they differ from what
is referred to as “social contexts,” but in the same paragraph, the authors refer to
the “taking for granted” of “realities as known” (ibid.). As these “pertain to” social
contexts, we have stumbled across the famous Durkheimian edict that “the task for
sociology should be to explain the social through the social” (Durkheim 1894).
This mysterious adjective “social” gathers different realities and knowledges
into “aggregates.” Social, context and agglomerations of reality/knowledge thus
seem to become equivalents and can be replaced with “social construction.”
These do not originate from singular, isolated individuals, but from the commu-
nication of shared experiences. Hence, the street (rather than the home) is such
an important trope, as it is the place of haphazard encounters between individuals
(which is less likely in the home), who despite their singularity (and an absence
of intimacy) engage with a “shared context.”
Of course this is what Berger and Luckmann had in mind all along. There is
no need for sociology if different constructions of reality are simply the conse-
quence of individual opinions (“free will”). The relativistic base line, that there
are different constructions of reality existing alongside each other, was never
thought to be a completely random occurrence, instead it has a structure and logic
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 9

that resides beyond individual opinions. This “beyond” of individual opinions is

what Durkheim had dubbed “society” 70 years before the appearance of “The
Social Construction of Reality.” Berger and Luckmann have simply adopted the
same formula without critically reflecting on the baggage that has thereby also
been imported.
Within the span of two paragraphs, “the social” becomes the epistemological
backup of how to consider constructions of reality as being a suitable object of
scientific analysis. Just as Durkheim (1894) did all those years ago in his “Rules
of Sociological Method,” Berger and Luckmann also justify the relevance of soci-
ology by means of a tautology: Sociology is necessary and sociological analysis
is justified because of the constitutive primacy of the “social.” The task for sociol-
ogy is thus to explain the social socially.
A shift has already taken place between “the street” (where ordinary persons
(at least men) can be found) and “the social” or “society,” as streets are still tied
to concrete places, whereas society is an abstraction and therefore imagined. The
difference between “ordinary man in the street” and “sociologist” as mentioned
under (1) is thus also a shift in the location of practices of knowing. The knowl-
edge of the man-in-the-street has close ties with concrete experiences of concrete
places. The knowledge of the sociologist depends on abstraction: Just as streets
can be seen as part of a wider constellation called “society” (for example when
considering their names), so can the knowledge of the street (“street credit”) be
seen as part of the wider knowledge of society.
Can the difference between the sociologist and the philosopher be understood
analogically? Here we could perhaps invoke echoes of the work of Comte as he
declared the modern age to be the age of positivism (and of sociology), in con-
trast to the age of metaphysics (and of philosophy). For Comte the difference
was simply an extension of Kant’s critique of pure reason. Kant located the criti-
cal faculty of pure reason within the human mind, which was the location where
empirical experience and conceptual reflection were attuned in relation to each
other. Kant’s call for “sapere aude” was a call for heroic individuals to free
themselves from the shackles of prejudice and obedient, mindless imitation (tak-
ing for granted). Hegel had already pointed out that such a heroic move requires
historical as well as intellectual preconditions and thus a dialectical engagement
between subjectivity and objectivity, rather than raising the awareness of a moral
obligation to do so. Comte’s critique however went in a different direction: The
objective historical and intellectual preconditions for developing the courage
to think critically reveal themselves as the inevitable location for enabling each
moment of individual awareness. It is in the multiplication of cogito that the
social becomes itself the location of truth. Berger and Luckmann were far more
10 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

Comtean than Hegelian in relation to their understanding of the epistemological

primacy of the social.
The retreat to the position between men in the street and philosophers can also
be described in relation to one of the oldest analogies in European philosophy:
Plato’s cave. Unlike the ordinary men-in-the-cave (there were no streets) who are
chained to the wall and forced to accept the shadow-play on the wall as reality –
which, one may presume, they have developed interactively – both the sociolo-
gist and the philosopher are able to free themselves from the chains, by virtue of
their courage (sapere aude) or intellect (cogito ergo sum). Stumbling in the dark
towards the light of the fire, both begin to realize that the shadows on the wall
are in actual fact constructions of another kind (perhaps to be understood as an
early form of a culture industry). However, whereas the philosopher carries on to
explore the cave further and discover the exit and the light of truth, the sociologist
remains with the fire inside the cave and attempts to find out what functions this
deceptive shadow-play might have.
Why did Plato carry on? Why do Berger and Luckmann remain near the fire?
One logical explanation might be, that unlike the latter, Plato realized that there
might be more than one layer of deception; after all, he escaped one to stumble
across something that was clearly also deceptive (in a performative rather than
a representative sense). The only way Plato could end the infinite regression of
deceit was to escape from the cave. Berger and Luckmann were perhaps not as
courageous or as intelligent as Plato, and were happy to have escaped one layer of
deception. The second-order deceptions are perhaps for them not as bad as those
of the first-order because at least we now know deceptions are taking place.2
However, if we follow the tradition of the German sociology of knowledge
(“Wissenssoziologie”), then we can see that there might be another reason why
Berger and Luckmann believed that sociologists should not complete their jour-
ney from the cave. For sociologists, the shadowplay on the walls, performed by
the manipulators and rhetoricians, still matters somehow. Whereas Plato sim-
ply rejected the simulated reality as irrelevant for the pursuit of truth (but not,
as Socrates tragically discovered, for the attempt to share this truth as this led to
his death), Berger and Luckmann were interested in the effectiveness of certain
displays, their development, their fine-tuning, their transformations. Occasionally,
they might have wanted to go back to the prisoners and observe them during their

2One could simply replace the term “deception” with “social construction” and apart from
the loss of the moral condemnation, there are no differences in the logic of the argument.
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 11

social construction work or even interview them about their social constructs.
They might also go back up again and tell the spin-doctors what their findings
were, for example, when sociology is applied to market-research.
The return of the sociologist to research social constructs is what Berger and
Luckmann see as the main objective of their brand of sociology of knowledge: to
understand social constructs as embedded in the everyday life worlds of “men in
the street.” The culture industries cease to be manipulative agents of some sinister
conspiracy, but become neutralized as “society” and each society has produced
its own shadow-play. “The Social Construction of Reality” is an ambitious title;
especially since reality is defined as that which occurs as something exterior to
the cogito.
For most lay people, the idea that reality is socially constructed is ludicrous.
For example, a sceptic would point to the sun and ask the social construction-
ist, whether she had constructed this entity by herself. Of course, sensing the
risk of solipsism, the social constructionist would answer “no” and then faces
a choice: either it was constructed by us together (this would still qualify as a
social construction, since the social is usually thought of as a human collective)
or she might pull “a Weber” and admit that the sun itself is not a social construc-
tion, that it is in fact a natural object, but that the “social construction” pertains
“only” to our understanding or notion of the sun. The first option is the more radi-
cal as it would mean that everything we experience as real is the product of col-
lective hallucination, a bit like the Matrix or the cyberspace of William Gibson’s
­Neuromancer. The second is therefore more likely to be what social construction-
ists would adhere to: Our understanding of what we perceive to be real is socially
constructed.
Now that is not saying much. It is merely stating that how we understand the
world has been learned from others or in communication (negotiation?) with oth-
ers. By pointing out to the close affinities between “understanding,” “knowledge”
and “language,” the analytical attention of social constructionism then quickly
shifts to semantics, as the more tangible and practical and thus empirically more
accessible “surface” of social constructions. As Heidegger (1978, p. 208), once
stated: “language (as the “house of the truth of being”) is always ahead of (i.e.,
before) us.”
For Berger and Luckmann, language – logos – belongs to the same realm as
knowledge – episteme – and it is therefore not surprising that on most occasions
the two could be used interchangeably without making much of a difference.
The reality that is socially constructed is not the full reality, but the house of the
truth being in which the human being dwells. It is the reality that makes sense
and is meaningful in contrast to the reality-as-such, which remains inaccessible.
12 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

Just as Kant had separated experience from “Dinge-an-sich” and proclaimed

that philosophy should only concern itself with the former, so have Berger and
Luckmann left Plato to venture on out of the cave by himself and turned back
to the functional question of how things are projected as shadows and how the
prisoners (men-in-the-street) make sense of such shadows. That is to say, the
social construction of reality focuses on the way in which logos and episteme are
held together, by human beings as they collectively (socially) make sense of that
which lies before them as the house of the truth of being. The social construction
of reality is thus not the social construction of the whole of reality, but the social
construction of social reality.
Now if this sounds tautological it is because it echoes the same tautological
trick that Durkheim had turned into the cornerstone of his version of sociology:
to explain the social exclusively through the social. Knowing that social construc-
tionists are often very clever people, we cannot assume they have been blind to
this. Then the question becomes: How did they manage to continue this proceed
in spite of this?
The first and most important part of the trick consists of the separation
between pure matter and pure ideas. By making ideas ontologically independ-
ent from matter, they are believed to be of a different substance (res cogitans)
and have a different origin (the mind). Being independent allows the realm of the
ideal to encounter the realm of matter (res extensa) on its own terms. However,
unlike Descartes, whose meditation was based on trust in God, social construc-
tionists follow Kant, who deployed a conception of experience as the encounter
between subject and object, which still maintained their fundamental ontological
difference, whilst allowing them to interact. Here, matter became socialized mat-
ter or – in Kant’s terminology – the human experience of matter.
The second step of the trick was separating the subject-object encounter
(experience) from the realm of pure ideas (concepts). This principle constitutes
the difference that Hans-Georg Soeffner invoked between first- and second-order
“experiences” as the baseline of his version of hermeneutic sociology of knowl-
edge and which can also be found in Schütz’ as well as Berger and Luckmann’s
separation between lay and sociological knowledge. At this point, matter was
reduced to the position of object in human interaction. Sociomateriality was born
out of the bundling of human actions with nonhuman artefacts.
The third step of the trick is to conflate the two to one term: subjective expe-
rience, knowledge, language, interaction, consciousness, intentionality, mean-
ing, sense-making, interpretation, or understanding. They all have in common
that they conflate a subjective encounter with something that is not subjective
to the subjective itself. By using different terms, for ontologically very similar
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 13

phenomena, a chain of analytical tools has been invoked which suggest a logical
unfolding. With this, the primacy of mind was established as a matter of course.
Sense-making was thereby understood as the intentional act of ascription of
meaning, i.e., the Husserlian “noesis.” In contrast to this, the Husserlian “noema,”
the content which is ascribed, was made dependent on the human subject. Matter
scarcely had an effect on “noema.”
The fourth step of the trick is to collectivize the subject. The conflation
between subjective experience and pure ideas takes place in the realm of interac-
tion, communication, i.e., the intersubjective. This is one-to-one equated with the
social. The same realm is created by the aforementioned chain of equivalences
and is usually referred to as “civilization,” “culture” or “society” or the “socio-
historical pre-given of symbolic associations.” Here, the primacy of mind still is
powerful because collectivization is explained on grounds of the mental life of
actors. “Civilization,” “culture” or “society” are tied to consciousness. If matter
becomes a “social” issue, there are good (human) reasons for it.
The fifth and final step is to reverse the logical order and assert that it is the
social that generates both individual experiences of reality and its “objectified”
working as a reality that we collectively take for granted. By extending the chain
of concepts, the fact that it is based on a circular logic fades away.
What they still cannot claim, however, is that the things-as-such have been
socially constructed. The only reality that is socially constructed is our collective
understanding of reality, i.e., a social reality. That is, as we have already seen,
Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge concerns itself with the social
construction of social reality. But what exactly is social reality?
The book itself gives us very few concrete clues, but it does talk a lot about
“everyday life,” which of course perfectly fits the vernacular notion of the “man-
in-the-street.” In other texts, Luckmann has referred to the concept of “life world”
which was seminal to the work of Alfred Schütz (see Schütz and Luckmann
1975). It originally stems from Edmund Husserl (1954) and has been refined
through the introduction of the so called “pragmatic motive.” Thus, life world
does not only refer to reality as it is experienced by a single subject, but it also
designates the alterations of reality fulfilled by the acting human. Here, matter
comes into play insofar as the alterations of reality are material, too. However,
this notion of materiality is restricted to “sociomateriality” or what we call social-
ized matter.
It is often neglected that Husserl’s idea of life world was also further developed
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In contrast to social constructivism, Merleau-Ponty
does not conceive it as tied to subjective consciousness. In the “Phenomenology
of perception” (Merleau-Ponty 2012) he follows Husserl’s motto of “turning to
14 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

things”, on the one hand, and refuses his turn to the individual mind, on the other
hand. What counts for Merleau-Ponty’s notion of life world is how things present
themselves in the lived fusion of “me”, “like me”’ and “the world.” Merleau-Ponty
draws upon Husserl’s quote of Saint Augustine, but transforms it into: “Truth does
not merely ‘dwell’ in the ‘inner man’; or rather there is no ‘inner man,’ man is
in and toward the world, and that is in the world that he knows himself. When I
return myself from the dogmatism of common sense or science, I do not find a
source of intrinsic truth, but rather a subject destined to the world” (ibid.: XXIV).
He conceptualizes a “me” that is in and toward the world. In French, Merleau-
Ponty uses the notion of “être au monde” in order to convey that the subject is
merged with the world. Matter becomes accessible through fleshly behavior and
not through the mind. In the above mentioned Schützean pragmatic motive, sub-
jective consciousness always is the center point of life world. Alterations of things
are solely conceived from that perspective. In contrast to this, Merleau-Ponty’s
idea of life world does not have a single center point. A variety of fleshly “me”
and “like me” equally are “in and toward the world.”
The “everyday” of “everyday life” suggests recurrence, repetition, frequency,
rhythm. Be referring to the realm everyday life or life worlds, social constructiv-
ists are thus enabled to ignore deploying the extraordinary, the spectacular, the
controversial, and above all the explicated as building blocks of their theoreti-
cal framework (of course they could still serve as objects of analysis). That is to
say, even if a sociologist working in the tradition of Berger, Luckmann or Schütz
would be dealing with an extraordinary event (e.g., disorder), the tools of analysis
would all be drawn from a sociology of generic ordinariness (order). The social
is common, ordinary and orderly. Social explanations of the social are thus con-
cerned with the ordinariness of (dis)order. As opposed to social constructivism,
Merleau-Ponty did enable a sociological conceptualization of life world that can
explain situations of order as well as disorder, respectively. The idea of “être au
monde” does not rely on recurrence and repetition. The latter notions each draw
upon activity of the human mind whereas Merleau-Ponty’s fleshly “being in and
toward the world” is characterized by passivity. Sensing does not become insti-
tutionalized as “stock of knowledge” through regular and frequent occurrence.
Instead, fleshly sensing is pre-reflexive and spontaneous. Merleau-Ponty’s theo-
retical framework is not drawn from generic ordinariness and, therefore, better
equipped to explain the controversial.
There is of course a huge pragmatic advantage to focusing on developing
social explanations of the implicit, the unremarkable and the taken-for-granted:
Such analyses are immune to falsification, which might also explain their endur-
ing popularity. If you focus on the unremarkable, you are touching upon some-
thing that by its very definition evades our attention; even if someone might
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 15

object to being “socially explained,” he or she would simply be stuck in first-

order social constructions. For example: A believer might reject a social expla-
nation of his religious belief as the deployment of rituals that were interactively
established centuries ago and innocuously habitualized over the generations
through socialization, by insisting he has direct experiences of divine interven-
tion, he would have no leg to stand on as social constructionists “know” that God
is a social construction. The same could be said of a “criminal” rejecting the
social constructionist definition of her being situated life world in which alterna-
tive norms have been established, by stating that she is a unique individual who
only follows her own principles.
The social constructionist “knows” that such first-order constructions of – for
example – divine experience or individuality are “in fact” nothing but ordinary
and regularly occurring forms of reasoning, that have been deployed by many
others and thus have a social rather than an individual origin. What Durkheim
referred to as “culture” are the “associations-of-meaning” or “stocks of knowl-
edge” of social constructionism, “norms” have been translated into “expecta-
tions” and “value” has become “relevance.” That social constructionists have
adopted the very same notion of institution as Durkheim’s furthermore testifies
to the fact that the groundstrokes of Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowl-
edge are the same as those of Durkheim’s sociology of the social and this is why
the concept of life world is the same as Durkheim’s society. The ordinary orderli-
ness of society is the socially constructed social reality.
Hence, the slippage from reality into social reality and from social reality into
everyday life world is not innocent or careless; it is a deliberate attempt to col-
onize a domain at the exclusive disposal for sociological analysis that has been
disabled to speak against it. Disputes are always disputes between different life
worlds, different interpretations, different beliefs, but stem from the fact that peo-
ple are unable to go beyond first-order social constructions.
Returning to the kitchen rather than the street as a paradigmatic place of eve-
ryday life, we are perhaps better able to understand how a social constructionist
might ascertain the actual (that is second-order) meaning of cooking. The first-
order meaning is that which adheres to the lay, or participant perspective. Immedi-
ately we can see a huge range of different situations. A parent cooking a meal for
the family constitutes a very different social construction from the bachelor trying
to impress a woman he has invited over for a meal, and again this is very different
from a student cooking for his roommates, or a daughter trying to show her mother
in law that she is up to the job, or participants in a cooking contest trying to win a
prize. The social constructionist (rightly) states that all these practices constitute
different social realities. Yet, simultaneously, they are all grouped together under
the label of cooking as a paradigmatic phenomenon representing everyday life.
16 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

Imagine in all these situations, that one part of the meal being cooked con-
cerns rice and – to be more precise – it concerns exactly the same type of rice.
Can it be expected, that – on the basis of what we know regarding the social situ-
ations – the rice does not matter? Of course it matters. The rice requires to have
a certain texture to be edible; if undercooked it is not. The rice requires a cer-
tain texture to be recognized as rice rather than as rice pudding; if overcooked
it is not. In all those situations, the rice makes certain demands, which need not
be exactly the same, but they still need to be taken into account when cooking a
meal. Would those adhering to the social constructionism of Berger and Luck-
mann boil their rice irrespective of these demands? Not if they are preparing a
meal. To put it differently, the rice is not “mere matter,” it makes certain demands
or – in a language more familiar to social constructionists – it has affordances.
Those criticizing new materialism as a reversal of Descartes would make us
believe that this example shows that those claiming that matter-as-such matters
(which is not what we, Barad or Latour are claiming) confuse vernacular expres-
sions such as “the rice demands” with analytical ones. The rice is not demanding
anything; it cannot prevent being overcooked or undercooked; it are those doing
the cooking that decide how long the rice is to boil and thus how hard or soft it is
going to be. However, even such defenders of the primacy of social cannot deny
that the changing nature of the texture of rice is not the product of a social con-
struction, but simply the effect of the duration of it being boiled. Learning how
to cook well means that one learns from the rice; the rice tells us when and how
its texture changes and when we are to stop boiling it. This is not some trans-
fer of human language onto a physical process, but – in the words of Whitehead
(1978) – a prehension. Hence it makes perfect sense – in a non-metaphorical way
– to state that the rice demands. Being able to understand the demands of rice is
referred to as “cooking experience.”
Our considerations can be summarized as follows:

1. The claim that “matter matters” was merely borne out of the realization that
the significance of physis has been by and large neglected during the first
100 years after the birth of what Foucault referred to as “the human sciences.”
2. The claim that matter matters can be understood in two different ways:
Either as a devaluation of the relevance of the non-material (either under-
stood as “ideas,” “representations” or “the social”) or as a critique of the
dualism underlying the platonic/cartesian dualism of eidos/physis or res cog-
itans/res extensa.
3. The first is labelled a turn to ontology which is then also a turn away from
other branches of philosophy such as epistemology and ethics.
New Materialism and Its Methodological Consequences … 17

4. Those advocating their critique in terms of an alleged turn away from ethics
criticize new materialism for its allegedly a-political and often pragmatic sci-
entism, for its complicity in the destruction of ecology and humanity and its
impotence in developing a critique of injustice.
5. Those advocating their critique in terms of an alleged turn away from episte-
mology criticize new materialism for its alleged lack of concern for subjec-
tivity, perception and interpretation.
6. Both forms of critique of the turn to ontology require a dualist metaphysics
that separates issues related to being from those related to meaning/sense.
7. This usually manifests itself in a defence of the exceptional status of the
human being as it is only the human being that can escape the necessity of
being and engage with the contingency/possibility of sense-making. Thus,
only humans are granted the privilege of the capacity of subjectivity as only
the subjective can generate alternative possibilities of sense in relation to a
singular ontological force.
8. New materialism understood as a critique of a dualist metaphysics cannot be
referred to as a turn to ontology because it addresses its very core in terms of
its constitutive elements ontos and logos.
9. It can only do so by taking apart the necessity for the question of being as
embedded in logos, that is, being as derived from an a priori set of rules and
principles that are themselves beyond history as for example professed by
Comte, Feuerbach and Durkheim.
10. Instead of a focus on being or reality, such forms of new materialism advocate a
focus on impact or practice that could perhaps be best conceptualized as “having.”
11. A focus on “having” rather than “being” turns the tables on the traditional
sociological conception of the adjective “social” as intersubjective. Those
adhering to the Weberian notion of the social as that which emerges between
(exclusively) human beings do have an implicit ontological understanding of
the social as being an (exclusively) human substance. The notion of “socio-
materiality” is then nothing but “human substance.”
12. What does sociomateriality achieve that materiality does not achieve? The
prefix “socio” suggests that there are different substances of materiality
(human versus nonhuman). A feminist critique of the turn to ontology can-
not find solace in appropriating a concept of sociomateriality because the lat-
ter masks the constitutive impact of gender as common ground. Any concept
of sociality as (exclusively) human entails a problematic notion of gender as
secondary to the ontological difference between human and nonhuman. The
hierarchy of difference enables the naturalization of human as masculine; the
feminine is then derivative of the masculine. Hence, invoking the notion of
sociomateriality negates the historical unfolding of patriarchy.
18 U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon

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 Part II
Postphenomenology and
Actor-Network-Theory
What Makes Sensation of a Sentient
Thing Possible: The Concept of Time
in the Work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann

1 Introduction

Time is conceived in the sociology of, for example, Max Weber as a linear course
of events. Within this framework, the present becomes the past and the future
turns into the present. The linear structure of time was long considered as a pre-
condition for action and causality. However, in the current discussion of “new
materialism” this concept of time is questioned by authors such as, for exam-
ple, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1997), Bruno Latour (e.g. 2005, 2008) or
Karen Barad (2007). The former authors each draw upon the sociology of Gabriel
Tarde in order to develop a concept of nonlinear time. In this perspective, time is
understood as imitation and differing repetition. In particular, Tarde’s approach
gave rise to the conceptualization of agency within Actor-Network Theory that
emphasizes the trajectories or networks of organisms “which define what they
have been and what they might become if they manage to persist by exploring
enough differences” (Latour 2008, p. 17). This example shows that the con-
cepts of time and agency are intrinsically linked to each other. In this contribu-
tion, I will analyze under what circumstances Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept
of fleshly temporality offers the theoretical ground to equate humans and non-
humans from a methodological point of view. Drawing upon “the immemorial”
as “impossible past” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 123), I will show that the notion
of originary pastness constitutes a concept of fleshly agency that can explain how
“we experience the sensation of a sentient thing, the volition of a conating thing

U. T. Kissmann (*)
University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
E-Mail: ulrike.kissmann@uni-kassel.de

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 21
U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon (ed.), Discussing New Materialism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22300-7_2
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of I bring fresh
flowers
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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eBook.

Title: I bring fresh flowers

Author: Robert F. Young

Release date: December 12, 2023 [eBook #72390]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing

Company, 1963

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I BRING

FRESH FLOWERS ***
 I Bring Fresh Flowers

By ROBERT F. YOUNG

A touching tale of an Astronette—and why the

gentle rain from Heaven has the quality of mercy.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories February 1964.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
You know Rosemary Brooks. You have known her for many years.
It is said that when she was a little girl her favorite poem was
Barbara Frietchie, and it is told how she would sometimes poke her
pretty head out of her bedroom window, survey the suburban street
with her blue-sky eyes, and cry, "Shoot, if you must, this old gray
head, but spare your country's flag!"
Yes, you know Rosemary. You know her very well.
Like all little girls, Rosemary grew up. But Rosemary did not change.
This is not to say that she did not turn into an attractive young lady.
She turned into a most attractive one indeed. Fragilely beautiful, airy
of tread, she should have been the reigning rose of every dance she
went to, but she was not. Rarely did the young men of her
acquaintance ask her to dance, and never did one of them approach
her and say, "Come into the garden, Rosemary, for the black bat,
night, has flown." She did not go to very many dances in any event,
and looking back, one realizes that the few she did attend, she
attended primarily to please her mother. The reason behind
Rosemary's wallflowerhood is simple: the young men of her
acquaintance knew that with her, God and the United States of
America came first, and that accompanying her through life, or even
accompanying her home from a dance for that matter, meant being
relegated to a back seat. It is alright for little girls to be Barbara
Frietchies, you see, but not for big ones.
During her short and dedicated life, Rosemary poked her pretty head
out of quite a number of windows. After the Barbara Frietchie
window came the Girl Scouts of America window, and after the Girl
Scouts of America window came the Young Peoples' Civil War
Society window, and after the Young Peoples' Civil War Society
window came the Citizens for Patriotic Progress window. Last of all
came the Astronette Training Center window.
Set up by Project Rain Dance in 1969 after prejudice against women
going into space had abated, the Astronette Training Center had for
its purpose the finding, training, and conditioning of six female pilots
for a series of six manned weather-control satellite shots, the first of
which was scheduled to take place some time in February of '71.
After exhaustive screening, one hundred volunteers were accepted.
Fifteen of them passed the exacting physical and psychological
tests, and from the ranks of the fifteen, the six astronettes were
chosen. Incredibly, when one considers her delicateness (and fails to
consider her patriotic fervor), Rosemary not only made the grade but
was selected to accompany the first weather-control satellite to be
placed in orbit.
All of this is history now—faded words on newsprint, old
photographs, a dozen dusty articles in as many magazines—but at
the time, it captured the attention of the whole wide world. It is said
that Madison Avenue nearly went out of its mind trying to circumvent
the regulation that prohibited astronettes from underwriting
testimonials to toothpaste, cosmetics, and cigarettes. This is not to
be wondered at. If Rosemary could have been legally enticed, for
example, into letting her picture appear in a cigarette ad, cigarette
consumption probably would have doubled overnight. It is one thing
to be an obscure Barbara Frietchie and quite another to be a famous
one, and the patriotic devotion shining in a person's eyes can,
through the thaumaturgy of photography and touch-up, be
transmuted into a sensual gleam.
February of '71 arrived at last, as all months must, and a specific
date was set for the launching. Psychological winter had come and
gone, but no singing of birds could be heard. Even as far south as
Canaveral, gray skies were the rule, and gray rain fell intermittently.
Countdown was begun regardless. And then, miraculously it
seemed, the skies cleared, and the day of the launching dawned
bright and clear. There is a photograph of Rosemary standing in her
snow-white spacesuit at the base of the gantry, her space helmet
resting in the crook of her arm. The photograph is in color, and the
blueness of her eyes is not one whit different in shade and texture
from the blueness of the sky behind her. This is as it should be.
Looking at her hair, one thinks of sunrises and sunsets. This is as it
should be too. When remembering Rosemary, it is fitting that one
should think of the sun and the sky. It is equally fitting that one
should think of the snow and the rain. For Rosemary is nothing if she
is not all of these things.

The launching was a good one. The Rainbow 6 rode its Saturn
booster like a bird on jet-fire wings, and the bright star of its passage
seemed to linger in the morning sky long after the booster had fallen
away. The television cameras caught the action beautifully, and the
American public, reminded once again that the noblest thing a
person can do is to risk his life for his country, looked on in awe and
admiration. The orbit was a good one too: apogee—203 miles;
perigee—191 miles. Rosemary radioed back that she was A-okay.
She was supposed to complete three orbits, then climb into the
escape capsule, jettison it and herself, re-enter the atmosphere, and
parachute into the Atlantic. There, a task force waited eagerly to pick
her up. Her mission was to orientate the satellite's weather-factor
instruments to the existent cloud patterns and jet streams. Once this
was accomplished, the telemetric readings would, through the
medium of the Main Weather Control Station in Oregon, dictate
future weather. Weather control had been in effect since the middle
sixties, but the telemetric readings of the unmanned weather-control
satellites, owing to faulty orientation, had fallen far short of the one-
hundred percent accuracy needed to make the regulation of rain and
sunshine something more than a half-realized dream, and it was
hoped that the present satellite, given a human boost, would bring
the dream to fruition.
One can picture Rosemary high in the sky, faithfully carrying out her
assignment. One can see her sitting there before the instrument
panel of the Rainbow 6 looking at dawns and sunsets and stars. One
can see the slow drift of cloud and continent beneath her. Australia
now, and now the vast blueness of the Pacific ... and now the west
coast rising out of mists of distances and air, and beyond it, the vast
green blur of the land that gave her birth. Little Barbara Frietchie
riding on a star.... Far beneath her now, highways wind; rivers run
down to seas. Patternings of field and forest blend into pale blue-
greens. Fresh-water lakes look up at her with blue and wondering
eyes. Now the sea of night drifts forth to meet her. Bravely she sets
sail upon the dark waves in her little silvery ship. Brief night, soft
sunrise, new day.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.

Little Barbara Frietchie riding on a star....

Jettisoning took place exactly on schedule. The weather-control
satellite continued on its orbital way, and Rosemary plummeted
earthward in the escape capsule. That much, at least, is known. But
what took place during re-entry—whether the retro rockets failed to
fire, whether the attitude controls malfunctioned, or whether the heat
shield proved to be defective—is not known and never will be known.
All that is known is that Rosemary became a falling star.
The nation mourned. The whole wide world mourned. Project Rain
Dance was discontinued. It would have been discontinued in any
event, for Rosemary had obviated any further need for it. She had
done her job well, Rosemary had, and in the doing of it, she had
placed the weather in the palm of mankind's out-stretched hand.

That spring, the rains were soft and warm and the flowers grew
riotously upon the face of the earth. Grass knew a greenness it had
never known before, and trees dressed each day in lovelier and
lovelier dresses. The rains fell in the cities and on the plains. In
valleys and in little towns. On fields and forests and lawns. And when
the land had drunk its fill, the sun came out as warm and as bright as
Rosemary's hair, and the sky turned as blue as her eyes.
Yes, you know Rosemary, and you are in love with her in a way. If
you are not, you should be. She is the sun coming up in the morning
and the sun going down at night. She is the gentle rain against your
face in spring. She is the snow falling on Christmas Eve. She is
every glorious rainbow you see in the rain-washed sky. She is that
pattern of tree-shade over there. Each morning, when you are lying
fast asleep in your trundle bed, she tiptoes into your room, her
golden sandals soundless on the bedroom floor, and wakes you with
a golden kiss. Sunlight is her laughter, her voice the patter of the rain
—Soft you now!—she speaks:

I am the daughter of the earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die....
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I BRING
FRESH FLOWERS ***

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