Behavioural Interaction with Objects PDF

6 Behavioural interaction with objects Susan M.Pearce This short piece from Pearce picks up on the two preceding pieces, and offers a behavioural perspective which helps to show how objects and people interact. This process of interaction has already been described in a...

6 Behavioural interaction with objects Susan M.Pearce This short piece from Pearce picks up on the two preceding pieces, and offers a behavioural perspective which helps to show how objects and people interact. This process of interaction has already been described in a slightly different way through the use of Iser’s terms in relation to the Waterloo jacket. The way in which the New Englanders related to the gravestones described in the previous piece could also be put in these terms. Together, the papers give perspectives on how objects acquire historical meaning, and how this is part of the process of social change. Let us try to demonstrate the process of this interaction in more explicit and concrete terms, using a deliberately simple scheme to represent the behavioural framework within which social action takes place. Within this we shall set a fashion-conscious woman in her late teens as the acting individual, and the clothes of the late 1980s as the acting objects (Fig. 6.1). The framework sets out the main parameters within which action happens, giving us the environment both physical and social, the individual, and the psychological or cognitive processes of perception and learning which form a continuous cycle and link the whole together. The physical environment is straightforward enough, and for our example will be southern urban England with the normal English climate. The social environment is broken down into three groups, all fairly standard in social science: primary groups like family, peer groups comprising people of the same age and background who may or may not be friends, and reference groups who for our woman are likely to be members of the youth culture scene. The individual, the woman herself, is presumed to have a personality, sets of attitudes, beliefs and values, and motives, all of which derive from her nature and nurture. The Punk style of dressing (and incidentally, it is interesting that it had to look back to the subculture diction of seventeenth-century England where ‘punk’ meant ‘ruffian’ or even ‘goblin’, to find itself a name) had caught the attention of the public by 1976. It has been described as a classic case of avant-garde shock tactics. An assault on all received notions of taste, it is significant in being almost the only one of the post-war youth/culture/ music movements fully to have integrated women. The style alluded to sadomasochism, porn, sleaze and tawdry glamour and inscribed itself by means of shaven or partially shaven heads and a sort of anti-make-up (reddened eyes, black lips, make-up painted in streaks across the face or in a pattern) on the surface of the body. Punks created an alienated space between self and appearance by means of these attacks on their own bodies; this was truly fit wear for the urban dispossessed, constructed out of the refuse of the material world; rusty razor blades, tin cans, safety pins, dustbin bags and even used tampons. (Wilson and Taylor 1989:196) 38  Behavioural interaction with objects The style was, not surprisingly, actually worn only by a few, but by the late 1980s it had modified the mainstream of young fashion. Bright lipstick and heavy black eye make-up, ‘ugly’ short hair, shaved necks, sometimes spiky hair stiffened with gel, together with black leather, short black skirts and black tights became the normal metropolitan uniform for young women in the late 1980s. These fashions and the life style, for both men and women, that went with them were encouraged by the new style magazines of the 1980s, like The Face, i-D and Blitz. As Wilson and Taylor say, The newly glamorous, male style setter of the eighties became as familiar in magazines and advertisements as his female counterpart, with his hair, short at the back, long at the front, sleekly gelled, his looks mean and tough, yet simultaneously blankly narcissistic. This new man is the empty object of anyone’s desire, his sexuality ambiguous. It is unclear whether this beauty is destined for men or for women. (1989:204) Fig. 6.1 Behavioural action: young woman and clothes 39 Susan M.Pearce We can see what is happening in terms of the behavioural model. There is a large range of clothes available for wear, but our teenage woman learns in relation to her own personality and motives, that the pressure of her peer group, and of the reference groups which they admire, will lead her to buy and wear the fashionable black clothes and the look that goes with it, in opposition probably to some primary groups and rejected reference groups (e.g. parents). Once she has done this, however, she is herself perceived differently by all the groups to which she relates. This perception may for some take the form of greater acceptance and admiration, but it may suggest to others that the black clothes are now old hat, and that the time has come to turn into, say, a Laura Ashley milkmaid. So the cycle of learning and perception is matched by a cycle of old and new clothes, and the two interact at the level of actual individuals to produce the particular kind of social change which we call fashion, and all that this implies. This paper first appeared in S.Pearce (1992) Museums, Objects and Collections, Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 214–17. REFERENCE Wilson, E. and Taylor, L. (1989) Through the Looking Glass, London: BBC Books. 40