By Kira Shannon
There is an unseen intersection between humans and the physical spaces and items they engage with, as they project themselves onto their surroundings, says sociologist and author Claudio E. Benzecry. This blurs the lines between individuals and the inanimate objects in our lives.
“In a place where things become subjects, people have to work hard to become objects,” Benzecry told a UCSB audience last week.
Sociologist and author Claudio E. Benzecry speaking about the intersection between humans and the objects they engage with, as a part of the IHC’s ‘Key Passages’ series.
Benzecry, who teaches in the School of Communication and the Sociology department at Northwestern University, joined UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center to discuss a rather unusual subject: passageways between things and humans.
This talk was part of the IHC’s ‘Key Passages’ series in which various scholars share their findings on processes of transition and experiences of transformation.
Benzecry is the author of the award-winning 2011 book The Opera Fanatic, as well as numerous academic journals articles discussing various cultural and social theories in politics and the arts.
He has spent the last six to seven years studying eclectic subjects — from shoe designs to opera culture and museum guards. More specifically, he has studied how these various people, items and concepts create a perceptual passage between objectivity and subjectivity for the people involved.
While his studies might appear confusing or obscure, Benzecry has established, through several case studies, that behaviors of different people allow them to achieve a sort of self-perceived objectivity.
Before writing his opera book, Benzecry spoke to many ‘opera fanatics’ as he calls them. These people don’t just like going to the opera, they love it. One of the sources Benzecry interviewed described the opera as “a trip with no return,” demonstrating the effect that this activity can have on a person.
Beyond simply going to the opera house and watching the show, opera lovers give themselves over to the performances they are consuming. “The newest forms of reflexivity are usually weaved in an impassive voice, especially in Roman languages that express a peculiar mode of being subject to something —where things are experienced or listened to,” Benzecry said.
Sociologist Claudio Benzecry described how opera fanatics engage with music on a deeper level.
In describing how people attach themselves to music, he outlined how an intense affiliation for the opera causes them to mentally separate as their senses are stimulated. In other words, opera lovers are able to reach a level of escapism that allows them to “let themselves go.” Benzecry displayed an image on the screen of a man standing on the ledge of a balcony in an opera house, entranced by what he’s seeing and hearing. No longer bound by the custom of staying seated, he is engrossed in the performance enough to leave his seat for a better view.
In another case study, Benzecry examined shoe models used for designing shoes around the world. He projected images of a woman’s foot in a sandal, labeling her as ‘Anna.’ He made a clear distinction between Anna and Anna’s foot. Anna’s foot is a working object, Benzecry explained, while Anna is the advocate or ‘megaphone’ for the foot, who is able to convey the foot’s imperfections and variation in style and quality of the shoes with which the foot interacts.
He described this communication technique as a feeling, “developing a particular kind of subjectivity, one that can only comprehend the reaction of their own foot with respect to a particular material.”
A shoe model is preferable to a mannequin or AI model, Benzecry stressed, in order for the designer to understand human-like quirks of the foot. Shoe designers who work with shoe models use the malleability of the human foot as a strength for their designs which is further explored in his 2022 book The Perfect Fit.
Northwestern University sociologist Claudio Benzecry compared museum guards to objects as he discussed their functions and behavioral patterns at a recent IHC talk.
Finally, Benzecry presented a study in which he observed behavior patterns of security guards at art museums, mainly at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“The different functions they perform are different kinds of furniture,” he said of their tendency to move or linger, sit or stand. He compared the guards to common objects such as “wallpaper,” as a metaphor to convey how they dwell in the background yet they are everywhere in the museum-goer’s subjective perception. Benzecry also described the guards as “turnstiles” because they manage capacities of people in individual rooms, and as “information booths” because they provide direction and knowledge regarding the museum and its functions.
As in the case of the shoe models, the guards have to balance their roles in the museum. “The guard is supposed to never be seen, is supposed to be a background object, but then they’re supposed to come and tell you how to behave,” he said. He calls this a “foundational tension,” in which the guards are “controlled yet sentient.”
The communications professor said that throughout his 26 visits to MOMA, any time he would pull out his camera to document one of the guards, they would move out of frame, automatically assuming that Benzecry wanted a picture of the paintings. But he found that when he asked about particular interests in art work or museum affairs, the guards were comfortable with receiving attention and relaying their knowledge to someone new. “The guards are the keepers of history,” Benzecry said.
The subject-object researcher now has plans to conduct in-home interviews with museum guards to understand more about the ways that the museum impacts them and what they take with them, off the clock. He said that when you give someone the platform to speak on something they are passionate about, something so infatuating that it blurs the lines between object and person, whether that be operas, shoe designing, or famous works of art, they are eager to tell you everything they know. “They’ll talk your ear off,” Benzecry said.
Kira Shannon is a second-year UC Santa Barbara majoring in Film and Media Studies. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.