Artifacts: How We Think and Write about Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake

Abstract

Reviewed by: Artifacts: How We Think and Write about Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake Samuel Diener Crystal B. Lake, Artifacts: How We Think and Write about Found Objects ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 272 4 b/w photographs. $34.95 paper. In Artifacts, Crystal Lake brings the methodological commitments of the new materialisms to the study of a set of things that in the eighteenth century were already old: coins, medieval manuscripts, weapons and armor, and the long-dead bodies of early English kings. These artifacts, she writes, were "shipwrecked in time" (43). Their history was a site of contestation. The artifacts' materiality—their "solids"—promised that they might "speak for themselves," communicating facts about the past. Yet the "empty spaces" of each object, its unknowns, rendered any knowledge that it yielded fragmentary and unstable (7). As a result, artifacts were repeatedly caught in contradictions. The first section of Artifacts, "Terms and Contexts," is divided into two chapters. The first, "Leaving Room to Guess," gives an account of the historical context in which Lake's artifacts made their interventions. Drawing on the work of John Rogers, Lake reminds readers that political theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were also theories of matter: revolutionary vitalism, for example, and royalist mechanism. Even after the compromises of 1688, these ideologies remained in uneasy and often violent tension. Amid such political crises, artifacts drew in interpreters of many kinds, who hoped to find evidence in them for theories of government and histories of the English state. In the second chapter, "Ten Thousand Gimcracks," however, Lake charts the ways that artifacts failed to deliver on these promises, or delivered too much. She considers various accounts of Don Saltero's London coffeehouse, with its extraordinary collection of bits and bobs both famous and obscure. In texts like Richard Steele's The Tatler and Lewis Theobald's The Censor, she finds Saltero's artifacts to be vibrant, re-enacting histories of political crisis. They were "tangled up" in "old philosophies" and "old politics," on the one hand promoting the sovereignty [End Page 461] of kings, and on the other recording histories of revolution and memories of Cromwell's rule (58–61). "Terms and Contexts" also outlines the stakes of Lake's work for the new materialisms as a field. By attending to artifacts, Lake contests a misconception that she suggests is all too typical of twenty-first century new materialist thinkers, from Bruno Latour to Jane Bennett: the notion that the intellectual movements of the eighteenth century privileged mind over matter, putting an end to the idea that things might act for themselves. By contrast, Lake's artifacts show that people in the eighteenth century had much more faith in the capacity of things to speak and act than the new materialists have imagined. Yet in drawing a similarity between eighteenth-century and twenty-first century theories of things, Lake also suggests that the new materialists think carefully about the political stakes they claim for their work. Artifacts, she asserts, remind us that the politics of things are profoundly ambiguous: "At best, artifacts exposed how a deference to their agency made it possible for human subjects to disavow political or moral culpability. At worst, they exposed how a deference to their agency made it possible for individuals to disguise their own polemical motives as the will of things" (43). While Lake's artifacts are vibrant, acting on their readers, they also instruct us to be cautious of the stories that they tell. The texts they inspired exemplify what she later calls "artifactual form": ambivalent, fragmented, and inviting readers to dig for more (201). The four chapters in Part Two, "Case Studies," further develop these themes. In "Coins: The Most Vocal Monuments," Lake shows how coins served as a kind of material shorthand for history, celebrated for their ability to render it portable and tangible. Yet just as coins proved susceptible to trimming and counterfeit, the stories they told could be manipulated. They might memorialize a grand progression of sovereign kings, or offer tangible reminders of Whig successes or even of the Interregnum. Chapter Four, "Manuscripts: Burnt to a Crust," uses the destruction of...