Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents more

Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. Spectral  Objects:  Material  links  to  difficult  pasts  for  adoptive  families     Steven  D.  Brown,  Paula  Reavey  &  Helen  Brookfield     Introduction   Whilst  analyzing  the  data  from  a  study  of  adoptive  parents  engaged  in  the   practice  of  maintaining  a  ‘life  story’  book  for  the  children  in  their  care,  we  were   struck  by  the  repeated  references  made  by  parents  to  objects  that  had   accompanied  children  from  their  former  care  placements:  photographs,  shoes,   hats,  a  pooh  bear,  a  battered  snoopy  dog,  plastic  toys.  Our  analysis  concentrated   on  the  first  of  these  objects  –  photographs  –  since  these  are  particularly  potent   artefacts  around  which  the  work  of  remembering  former  carers  and  biological   parents  is  done,  and  are  central  to  the  creation  and  maintenance  of  life  story   books  (see  Brookfield,  Brown  &  Reavey,  2008).  We  described  how  these  images   presented  dilemmas  to  adoptive  parents.  Some  photographs  depicted  former   carers  to  whom,  parents  feared,  adopted  children  might  still  be  overly  attached.   Other  photographs  showed  children  in  states  all  too  easily  readable  as  neglect,  or   worse.  In  both  cases  adoptive  parents  were  torn  between  the  need  to  preserve   for  the  child  the  past  that  was  legible  in  the  photographs,  and  the  corresponding   need  to  manage  and  ‘tame’  that  past  within  a  narrative  and  practice  of  building  a   ‘new  home’.  More  difficult  still  were  cases  where  photographs  simply  did  not   exist,  leading  some  parents  to  specially  construct  new  images,  sometimes  at  the   behest  of  the  child,  to  assist  in  filling  out  the  gaps.     But  we  continued  to  be  fascinated  by  these  other  object  –  the  clothes,  the  toys.   Clearly  these  objects  have  considerable  significance  for  the  relationship  between   adoptive  parents  and  their  children,  yet  they  also  appear  to  be  ambiguous,   difficult.  Parents  described  some  objects  in  disparaging  terms,  detailing  their   efforts  at  hiding  them  whilst  feeling  unable  to  actually  get  rid.    How  best  to   understand  this  complex  sets  of  meanings?  What  is  the  power  these  objects  have   over  parents?  We  found  an  echo  of  this  in  a  recent  newspaper  article.  ‘Diary  of  a   separation’  is  a  weekly  account  of  a  relationship  breakdown  that  provides   forensic  descriptions  of  the  practical  and  emotional  problems  involved  in   separation  and  shared  childcare.  In  an  article  entitled  ‘Where  have  the  all  the   trousers  gone?’i,  the  author  describes  a  frantic  search  for  clothes  for  the  children   before  school:     "Why  are  there  no  trousers?"  I  mutter.  I  kick  aside  an  abandoned  bag  of   swimming  gear,  damp  and  mildewed.  "Why  are  there  no  trousers?"  I  shout   this  time.  The  children  ignore  me.  They  are  watching  TV.  The  eldest  looks   up,  momentarily,  confused.  "What?"  "Why  can't  I  find  any  trousers?  How   is  it  even  possible  that  you  have  no  trousers?"  …  X  must  have  them  all,  I   think,  irritably.  Of  course,  that  isn't  possible,  really.  The  eldest  can't  be   stockpiling  trousers  at  his  father's  house.  Common  sense  dictates  that  he   must  leave  here,  and  return,  with  one  pair.  I  frown.  I  suspect  what's  really   happening  is  that  he  leaves  here  with  what  I  consider  a  decent  pair  of   trousers  and  comes  back  with  something  I  don't:  shorts,  tracksuit   bottoms  with  holes  in  the  knees,  trousers  that  only  reach  his  shins.     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. Nothing  he  can  decently  wear  to  school.  I  call  X,  trying  to  keep  the  note  of   complaint  out  of  my  voice.  "I  haven't  got  any  trousers  for  the  eldest,"  I  say.   "Have  you  got  them?"  "But  ...  surely  I  can't  have  them  all?"  he  reasons,   correctly.  "That  makes  no  sense."  "No,  I  know,  but  ..."  I  trail  off.  "But   somehow  I  don't  have  any  decent  ones.  And  last  weekend  he  came  back  in   his  karate  trousers."  Wow,  I  sound  amazingly  petty.  "Fine,"  he  says.  "You   can  come  and  get  some  if  you  need  to."  He  sounds  appropriately  bored  by   the  discussion,  which  is,  indeed,  very  boring.  No  one  cares  except  me.     The  author  consciously  reflects  upon  why  exactly  she  is  so  upset  with  such   apparently  trivial  matters.  Surely  if  one  has  been  through  the  process  of  agreeing   the  separation  of  the  ‘big  stuff’  such  as  finances,  housing  and  child  custody,  a   missing  pair  of  trousers  ought  to  count  for  very  little?  And  yet  they  do.  They   provoke  anger  and  suspicion  about  the  inferred  actions  of  the  ex-­‐partner  (‘X’).   They  lead  the  author  to  behave  in  ways  that  she  herself  sees  as  unreasonable  and   ‘petty’.  Lurking  behind  it  all  is  a  sense  of  lacking  control  in  one’s  own  daily   affairs,  and  of  sneaking,  rising  guilt  at  the  shortcomings  of  one’s  newly  single   parenting.  All  of  this  arises  from  a  missing  pair  of  trousers.       We  might  be  tempted  to  view  both  the  possibly  purloined  trousers  described   above  and  the  sorts  of  objects  discussed  by  the  adoptive  parents  in  our  study  as   symbols  around  which  psychic  processes  of  desire,  investment  and  displacement   are  being  played  out.  The  notion  that  soft  toys  function  as  transitional  objects  for   children  during  times  when  there  is  a  shift  in  family  relationships  is  particularly   apt  when  that  change  involves  either  parental  separation,  or,  in  the  case  of   adoption,  the  movement  from  one  set  of  adult  carers  to  another.  A   psychoanalytic  reading  of  the  ‘holding  power’  of  objects  would  then  seem   appropriate  (Bollas,  2008).  However  in  this  chapter  we  deliberately  resist  such   an  approach  for  a  number  of  reasons.  First  of  all,  as  part  of  a  wider  general   cultural  saturation  of  post-­‐  and  neo-­‐  Freudian  ideas  (see  Parker,  1997),  this  kind   of  psychoanalytic  thinking  is  already  a  part  of  the  practice  of  adoption  itself  (at   least  in  the  UK).  Adoptive  parents  already  recognize  the  psychological  and   emotional  significance  of  the  objects  that  travel  with  adoptive  children  between   care  settings  –  a  further  layering  of  psychoanalytic  description  does  little  to   clarify  how  this  sensitivity  is  practically  managed.  Second,  attending  to  psychic   process  rather  than  physical  engagement  with  objects,  or,  perhaps  more   precisely,  reducing  the  complexities  of  the  space  in  which  parents  and  children   interact  with  these  objects  into  a  purely  mental/psychic  space  seems  at  best  to   be  foreclosing  on  the  range  of  possible  understandings  and  at  worst  to  be   downright  reductive.  Finally,  in  line  with  many  of  the  contributions  to  this   volume,  we  want  to  suspend  automatic  recourse  to  the  kind  of  established   subject  (i.e.  agent)  /  object  (i.e.  acted  upon)  binary  prevalent  in  neo-­‐Freudian   thinking  as  the  starting  point  for  our  analysis.     In  previous  work  we  have  followed  the  analytic  move  popularized  by  Michel   Serres  and  Bruno  Latour  of  treating  objects  as  ‘participants’  in  the  work  of   forging  relations,  including  those  that  are  commonly  taken  to  define  family   relationships.  Rather  than  divide  up  the  empirical  field  under  the  headings  of     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. subjects  and  objects,  this  approach  posits  an  assembly  of  relations  where  the   qualities  and  capacities  of  each  ‘actor’  (i.e.  what  is  taken  to  be  an  entity  within   the  given  empirical  field)  are  relationally  determined.  Such  an  assembly  can  be   ‘summed  up’  or  ‘condensed’  in  ways  that  distribute  agency  and  its  lack.  For   example,  in  accounts  given  by  survivors  of  child  sexual  abuse  of  the  spaces   where  abuse  happened,  we  have  treated  some  of  the  objects  described  –  such  as   locked  doors,  wardrobes,  roads  which  were  crossed  –  as  lending  a  shaping  force   to  how  survivors  are  able  to  articulate  their  own  agency  both  at  the  time  and  in   subsequent  recollections  (see  Reavey  &  Brown,  2009).  Objects  do  not  just   mediate  human  actions,  they  are  critical  to  efforts  to  establish  the  nature,  effects   and  significance  of  those  actions  (e.g.  the  locking  of  a  door  has  implications  for   attributions  of  intentionality  and  forethought).  We  can  then  speak  of  the   affordances  (Costall  &  Dreier,  2006)  or  propensities  (Jullien,  1999)  of  objects  as   emerging  from  the  assembly  of  relations  to  form  potential  trajectories  or   tendencies  along  which  action  can  unfold  (and  which  can  be  rearticulated  in  the   work  of  remembering).  For  example,  crossing  a  road  and  going  towards  a  house   where  abuse  will  occur  may  be  retrospectively  constructed  as  a  conscious   decision  because  of  the  spatial  organization  of  the  activity  (see  Reavey  &  Brown,   2006)     If  we  use  this  analytic  tack  to  understand  the  current  problem,  then  we  would   begin  from  the  position  that  the  adoptive  family  constitutes  an  assembly  of   relations  that  is  in  flux.  One  of  its  ‘tendencies’  is  to  condense  itself  around  an   enclosed  space  of  belonging,  where  adoptive  children  are  constructed  as  having   legitimate  participation  in  the  family,  all  of  whom  share  in  a  notion  of  a  joint   future.  But  there  are  other  tendencies  which  may  be  actualized  where  this   enclosure  is  widened  or  dilated  to  incorporate  other  relations,  such  as  with   former  carers,  biological  parents  or  perhaps  entire  cultural  or  ethnic  lineages,   either  real  or  imagined.  Blood,  love  and  memory  intertwine  in  opening  out  the   family  to  other  forces  and  relations.  Sometimes  this  can  prove  unsustainable   altogether  and  the  enclosure  dissipates,  relations  come  apart.  We  might   characterize  these  tendencies  using  Sloterdijk’s  (2011)  image  of  ‘bubbles’.  The   tendency  towards  producing  the  family  as  an  enclosed  sphere  of  intimacy  and   belonging  is  opposed  by  the  tendencies  towards  over-­‐expansion  and  dissipation.       Our  question  then  becomes  that  of  the  role  that  these  mundane  objects  play  in   condensing  relations  into  the  ‘bubble’  of  the  family.  What  propensities  do  they   contribute  to  this  process?  How  do  they  assist  in  enclosing  the  family?  And  how   at  the  same  time  do  they  act  to  threaten  or  dissipate  the  bubble?     Spectral  objects   Over  the  course  of  a  life,  each  of  us  typically  accumulates  a  sizeable  number  of   possessions.  Some  objects  ‘travel  with  us’,  becoming  important  markers  of   identity  –  a  much  loved  and  re-­‐soled  pair  of  shoes,  a  mask  bought  on  a  trip  to   Africa,  a  ornament  that  used  to  stand  on  a  grandparent’s  fireplace.  These  objects   may  be  tied  to  particular  periods  of  our  life,  and  can  thus  serve  as  the  means   through  which  the  past  can  recalled  and  put  to  work  in  the  present.  Radley   (1990),  for  instance,  describes  how  the  act  of  rediscovering  some  forgotten  and     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. misplaced  object  can  surface  contrasts  between  past  and  present    -­‐  ‘a  silver   lighter  from  one’s  smoking  days,  a  cribbage  board  from  times  when  the  family   came  round  to  play  cards’  (p.51).  This  is  particularly  acute  in  circumstances   where  the  contrast  is  between  a  desired  past  which  is  irrevocably  foreclosed  and   a  present  which  is  dissatisfactory  or  found  wanting,  such  as  in  Said’s  (1989)   description  of  the  importance  of  objects  as  markers  of  a  lost  homeland  in   Palestinian  homes.  The  value  of  such  objects  lies  in  their  ability  to  make  that  past   present.  Hence  when  elderly  people  faced  with  the  move  from  independent  to   sheltered  accommodation  are  asked  to  give  up  or  ‘clear’  a  significant  number  of   their  possessions,  this  is  experienced  as  a  threat  to  memory,  to  the  ability  to   narrate  one’s  past  (Marcoux  2001).     It  is  not  really  sufficient  to  describe  such  possessions  as  merely  cues  to  memory,   since  both  the  process  and  the  content  of  what  can  be  remembered  appears  to   depend  on  the  propensities  of  the  objects  themselves.  Elena  Bendien’s  study  of  a   ‘reminiscence  museum’  located  in  an  elderly  care  home,  for  example,   demonstrates  that  the  kinds  of  recollections  elderly  visitors  produce  are   thoroughly  interdependent  with  and  shaped  by  the  particular  objects  (e.g.  old   washing  machines,  bathtubs)  with  which  they  interact  (see  Bendien,  2009;   Bendien  et  al,  2010).  Remembering  is  a  practice  that  is  collective  not  simply  in   that  it  involves  people  supporting  one  another’s  efforts  at  recall,  but  also  in  that   objects  lend  their  forces  and  propensities  as  constitutive  of  the  practice  itself.   For  example,  Bendien  et  al  (2010)  describe  an  episode  where  the  exposed   working  parts  of  a  washing  machine  give  rise  to  a  recollection  by  an  elderly   woman  of  an  incident  from  forty  years  ago  where  her  son  risked  injury  by   playing  with  a  similar  machine  in  the  kitchen  of  the  family  home.  The  son  had   recently  died  –  an  event  that  is  woven  into  the  recollection  as  it  discussed  by  the   woman  with  her  adult  daughter  and  a  volunteer  in  the  museum.       To  argue  that  objects  such  as  the  washing  machine  above  are  integral  to   remembering  pushes  at  the  boundaries  of  how  we  typically  define  the   psychological.  In  Sherry  Turkle’s  (2007)  collection  of  autobiographical  sketches   drawn  around  ‘everyday  things’,  for  instance,  the  contributors  follow  in  the   longstanding  anthropological  tradition  of  ‘thinking  with  things’.  Here  ‘thinking’  is   undoubtedly  conditioned  by  the  individual  artefacts  that  are  described  in  each   chapter,  but  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  the  ‘investigations’  and  personal  journeys   of  each  author  which  are  central,  rendering  the  objects  as  literary  ciphers  for   bildungsromans  in  miniature.  Similarly,  Steven  Connor’s  (2011)  essays  on  objects   opens  with  the  image  of  an  infant’s  ‘researches’  with  an  object  dangling  over  its   head.  In  both  cases  the  properties  and  qualities  of  artefacts  are  certainly   important,  but  what  is  really  at  issue  is  the  drama  of  the  thoughts,  feelings  and   activities  that  arise  when  a  lone  subject  explores  a  given  object  and  finds  a  place   for  it  in  their  life.       Whilst  we  might  reject  the  ‘subject-­‐centered’  approach  taken  by  Turkle  and   Connor,  they  are  equally  insightful  in  their  delineation  of  the  particular  sorts  of   objects  that  are  of  concern.  Turkle  speaks  of  ‘evocative  objects’  that  have  the   power  to  give  rise  to  powerful  attachments  and  emotional  experiences.  Connor     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. similarly  points  to  objects  that  appear  to  have  a  life  of  their  own,  one  which   exceeds  their  mundane  material  appearance.  These  ‘magical  objects’  enable  an   exchange  of  qualities  with  the  subjects  who  engage  with  themii.  We  want  to   follow  this  analytic  suggestion  by  proposing  a  definition  of  our  own  which  gives   us  a  purchase  on  the  objects  which  are  prove  troubling  for  adoptive  parents:   ‘spectral  objects’.  These  objects  make  possible  memorial  practices  that  inflate   particular  versions  of  the  past  in  such  a  way  as  to  both  unsettle  the  present  and   to  render  projected  visions  of  the  future  as  uncertain.  Their  qualities  project  a   sense  of  ‘unfinished  business’  that  can  be  experienced  as  threatening  and   requiring  ongoing  management.  Spectral  objects  point  the  way  to  a  difficult  past,   but  do  so  in  a  way  that  renders  that  past  as  something  that  cannot  be  simply   erased  without  considerable  cost.       Our  choice  of  the  word  ‘spectral’  arises  directly  the  way  this  term  sometimes   appeared  in  the  talk  of  adoptive  parents:     B  …  there  was  a  great  deal  of  fear  about  the  father  within  social  services   and  that  permeated  through  all  of  the  file  and  through  all  of  the,  um  all  of   the  discussions  we  had  with  social  workers  throughout  there  was  this   great  spectre  um  and,  and  he  remained  a  spectre  didn’t  he  I  think  until  we   got  a  letter  from  him…     Biological  parents  and  former  carers  are  clearly  important  figures  in  any  account   of  the  life  of  an  adopted  child.  Yet  they  can  also  give  rise  to  tremendous  anxieties   about  how  this  early  life  can  re-­‐appear  in  the  present.  This  is  particularly  so   when  these  figures  are  not  directly  present,  but  are  experienced  at  a  remove  –   such  as  through  case  file  details  in  the  example  above  and  in  the  traces  of  them   which  appear  to  be  woven  into  the  objects  we  will  go  on  to  discuss.  Spectral   objects  are  then  not  objects  in  the  usual  sense  of  the  term  in  that  they  appear  to   have  a  kind  of  agency  of  their  own,  which  arises  in  part  because  of  the  residue  of   absent  or  phantom  subjectivity  left  upon  by  the  actions  or  choices  of  former   carers  or  biological  parents.  There  are  parallels  here  with  the  pun  which  Miller   (2001)  makes  on  ‘estate  agency’  to  refer  to  the  ways  that  houses  seem  to  be   ‘haunted’  by  the  subjectivity  of  former  occupants  who  have  left  their  mark   through  the  aesthetic  and  practical  decisions  they  have  written  into  the  property.   However  in  Miller’s  example  the  spectrality  is  made  present  through  the  relative   solidity  and  longevity  of  the  property  into  which  new  occupants  move.  The   spectal  objects  we  will  discuss  –  toys  and  clothes  –  travel  with  the  adoptive  child.   It  is  their  displacement  from  a  past  life  and  the  precarious  way  in  which  they   have  survived  to  accompany  the  child  that  gives  them  their  unsettling  holding   power.  To  dispose  of  such  an  object  is  to  choose  to  break  that  fragile  link  to  the   child’s  past,  however  difficult  it  might  have  been.       Memorial  boundaries     In  one  of  the  very  earliest  discussions  of  collective  memory,  Maurice  Halbwachs   (1950)  clearly  articulated  the  role  of  object  as  markers  of  the  shifting  boundary   between  past  and  present  within  a  community  of  rememberers.  If  we  consider   the  family  as  particular  instance  of  such  a  community,  then  our  attention  rapidly     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. falls  to  the  diverse  range  of  memorabilia  that  adorns  a  typically  family  home,   from  treasured  objects  that  have  passed  between  generations  to  souvenirs  of   travel  or  important  events  and  ‘prized  possessions’.  The  generic  term  ‘stuff’   seems  best  to  capture  the  heterogeneity  of  these  objects  and  the  way  in  which   they  seem  to  point  out  constitutive  relationships  of  ownership  and  experience  –   ‘this  is  our  stuff’,  ‘she  still  has  a  lot  of  her  stuff  here’,  ‘going  through  all  that  old   stuff  really  reminded  me  of  how  things  used  to  be’.       Adopted  children  move  into  a  space  that  is  already  populated  with  objects  that   speak  to  a  particular  past.  Entering  this  space  means  both  a  break  with  the  past   and  the  incorporation  into  a  new  present.  The  delicacy  of  this  transition  can  be   handled  in  part  by  exchanging  the  properties  of  the  child  with  the  ‘stuff’  that  they   are  travelling  with.  In  the  following  example,  C  describes  how  contact  with   former  carers  during  this  transitional  period  was  assisted  by  the  movement  of   objects:     C:  And  that  was  really  helpful.  Um,  because  they  were  fostering  other   children  and  she  went  there  and  the  bed  that  had  been  her  bed  was  now   somebody  else’s  bed,  somebody  else’s  posters  were  on  the  wall  and  it,  it   really  clicked  with  her  that  all  her  stuff  was  now  at  ours  and,  and  that  was   it,  you  know,  that,  that,  that  was  completed  and  the  reason  that  she’d  been   there  was  as  they  had  said,  that  she  was  waiting  for  a  permanent  family   and  um,  that  had  happened.     Visiting  her  former  home,  the  child  sees  that  the  space  that  defined  relations  of   care  has  now  been  reshaped.  What  was  her  bed  now  belongs  to  someone  else.  Or   more  properly  speaking,  the  bed  that  she  had  thought  was  hers  is  now  revealed   as  belonging  to  no-­‐one  in  particular,  as  a  marker  of  a  transitional  space  that  is   temporarily  occupied  by  a  string  of  fostered  children  in  turn.  What  is  permanent   is  ‘her  stuff’,  the  objects  that  she  has  accrued  in  her  life  to  date  and  which  travel   with  her.  They  are  now  in  place  in  the  new  family  home.  The  sense  of  this  home   having  stood  there  waiting  to  receive  the  adoptive  child  is  communicated  by  the   physical  organization  of  the  home  space  as  being  receptive  to  the  depositing  of   the  child’s  ‘stuff’.       This  sense  of  the  ‘destining’  of  the  child  to  be  with  the  adopting  family  –  the   ‘completion’  of  the  transition  to  the  ‘permanent  family’  –  is  not  straightforward.   Permanent  placements  can  break  down  through  the  rejection  of  the  arrangement   by  the  child,  adoptive  parents  or  other  parties.  Here  again  ‘stuff’  can  be  referred   to  as  the  material  token  in  which  this  complex  affective  atmosphere  is  registered.   In  the  extract  below,  C  describes  another  adoptive  child  who  oriented  to  the   placement  process  in  a  different  way:     C.  Um,  and  he,  he  was  then  told  the  judge  has  ordered  him  (laughs)  to  be,   placed  with  us  and  he,  he  again  got  this  image  you  know,  that  sort  of  out   of  the  blue,  um,  he  was  picked  up  and  carried  off  and  he  always  sold  his   stuff  and,  and  he,  he  stayed  overnight  with  people  on  the  streets  without     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge.   The  child  here  treats  the  boundaries  between  past  and  present  as  one  reflecting   the  subordination  of  his  own  agency  into  the  formal  will  of  the  law  –  a  judge   legally  bound  him  to  a  future  that  was  not  of  his  choosing  and  he  was   transported,  much  like  a  commodity,  to  a  new  home  where  he  was  ‘imprisoned’.   Interestingly  his  rebellion  against  this  supposed  commodification  takes  the  form   of  divesting  himself  of  all  the  things  that  travelled  with  him  and  which  he   subsequently  accrued  in  the  new  family  setting  –  ‘he  always  sold  his  stuff’  and   ‘stayed  overnight  with  people  on  the  streets  without  clothes’.  It  is  as  though  it  is   the  stuff  itself  which  holds  him  to  the  adoptive  family,  and  conversely,  from  the   perspective  of  the  adoptive  parent,  that  it  is  stuff  which  expresses  the  relations   of  care  which  the  child  has  rejected.       In  the  previous  two  examples,  ‘stuff’  was  comparatively  undefined,  referring  to   the  heterogeneous  array  of  materials  that  travel  with  the  child.  Whilst  stuff  is   invested  with  a  kind  of  spectrality  –  a  residue  of  the  past  in  the  present  that   makes  this  boundary  an  ongoing  concern  –  the  particular  things  which  we  would   characterize  as  spectral  objects  have  more  ambiguous  and  complex  qualities.  In   the  following  example,  two  adoptive  parents  discuss  an  episode  in  which  a   particular  soft  toy  –  Pooh  Bear  –  is  mislaid:     W.  F  has  got  a  Pooh  Bear     B.  That  she  got  from  the  foster  parents     W.  That  she  got  from  the  foster  parents,  that  is  a  true  transitional  object,   that  we  nearly  lost  in  the  woods  once.     B.  And  we  both  nearly  killed  ourselves  when  we  crossed  the  road   searching  for  him.     W.  Pooh’s  jumper…     B.  She’s  asleep  in  the  buggy     W.  Oh  it’s  Pooh  Bear,  my  god!  Ohhh     B.  We  found  him,  on  the  side  of  the  road,  just,  life  would  not  have  been   worth  living…     It  is  worth  pointing  out  that  the  parents  here  use  the  psychoanalytic  language  of   ‘transitional  object’  to  refer  to  the  toy.  But  this  does  not  entirely  capture  the   emotion  that  is  generated  around  the  possible  loss  of  Pooh  Bear.  The  child   mentioned  is  an  infant,  one  small  enough  to  still  need  to  be  pushed  in  a  buggy,   and  therefore  one  who  might  presumably  have  very  little  by  way  of  memories  of   her  life  before  adoption.  Whilst  it  might  be  unfortunate  to  lose  Pooh  Bear,  over   clothes,  staying  out  all  night.  He  always  felt  he  needed  to  break  free  from   us,  because  he  feels  we  took  him  and  imprisoned  him.     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. time  it  might  be  replaced  with  other  objects  that  become  more  important  as   durable  markers  of  caring  relations.  However,  this  particular  toy  is  not  simply   transitional.  It  is  a  link  to  a  past  –  to  the  former  foster  parents  –  which  is   constitutive  of  the  present.  Whilst  this  may  now  be  the  permanent  home  for  the   child,  it  cannot  be  formed  on  the  basis  of  a  rejection  of  everything  that  came   before  without  risking  at  some  point  in  the  future  that  this  child  may  place   importance  on  this  early  period.  The  past  must  then  be  accessible,  it  must  be   given  a  place  within  the  adoptive  family  such  that  the  family  does  not  seal  itself   off  in  a  way  that  would  make  a  desire  to  connect  with  the  past  impossible  to   address.  Pooh  Bear  is  not  a  symbol  of  the  past  –  it  is  that  past  made  manifest  in   the  material  form  of  the  toy,  whose  safekeeping  is  simultaneously  the   preservation  of  a  conduit  to  an  early  past  in  the  ongoing  work  of  making  the   present  of  the  permanent  family.     The  stakes  involved  in  such  safekeeping  become  considerably  heightened  when   the  past  which  is  marked  out  by  the  spectral  object  are  problematic.  In  the  next   extract  the  parent  F  talks  of  a  toy  whose  material  state  threatens  to  make  a   particular  version  of  the  past  inescapable:     F.  R,  at  three,  she  came  with  a  tiny  little  white,  like  Snoopy  Dog  and  that   was  from,  that  was  from  birth  mother  era  and  that  has  a  cigarette  burn  on   it,  the  same  as  she  has  a  cigarette  burn,  she  has,  um,  and  then  she  paid  no   attention  to  it  whatsoever.  You  know,  they  accumulate  so  many  toys  and   things.  I’ve  always  kept  that  in  her  room  but  it’s  hidden  at  the  back  of  the   pile.     The  Snoopy  Dog  described  here  has  been  burned  with  a  cigarette,  which  F   compares  directly  to  a  similar  injury  inflicted  on  the  child  during  the  ‘birth   mother  era’.  In  memorial  terms,  the  past  is  unfolded  from  the  burn  mark.  To   examine  the  damaged  toy  is  to  be  drawn  immediately  to  the  scalding  hot  tip  of   the  cigarette  which  inflicted  the  mark,  the  hands  which  held  that  cigarette,  the   action  itself  (intentional?  incidental?  a  moment  of  fury?  regretted?  or  enjoyed?).   A  whole  set  of  deeply  troubling  worlds  seem  to  spring  from  or  grown  out  of  the   burn  mark,  in  a  way  akin  to  the  unfolding  origami  image  that  Proust  offers  in  the   famous  Madeleine  example,  or  the  worlding  of  the  peasant’s  labour  that   Heidegger  articulates  in  his  analysis  of  Van  Gogh’s  A  Pair  of  Shoes  (see  Middleton   &  Brown,  2005).  And  if  F  can  do  this  work,  what  is  implied  here  is  that  the  child   might  themselves  also  do  the  same  work  at  some  point  in  the  future.  So  why  not   simply  throw  away  Snoopy  Dog?  Because  like  Pooh  Bear  it  is  a  surviving  link  to   the  past,  one  that  almost  triumphantly  survived  the  precarious  transition  from  a   problematic  early  life  to  the  projected  settlement  of  the  present.  To  get  rid  of  the   toy  is  to  break  that  link.  If  Snoopy  Dog  has  survived  the  horrors  which  led  to  the   cigarette  burning,  then  so  too  will  the  child.  That  narrative  needs  to  be   preserved.  But  Snoopy  Dog  must  nevertheless  stand  waiting  to  do  that  –  for  now   at  least  –  from  the  relative  solitude  of  being  ‘hidden  at  the  back  of  the  pile’.         Trajectories     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. Spectral  object  point  a  way  to  versions  of  the  past  that  make  manifest  a  range  of   figures  and  actions  which  are  either  already  significant  for  the  child  or  may  yet   come  to  matter.  This  work  of  attending  to  the  boundary  between  past  and   present  in  which  adoptive  parents  engage  has  its  corollary  in  the  concern  to   anticipate  the  future  needs  of  the  child.  In  our  data,  adoptive  parents  routinely   describe  their  anxieties  about  how  adopted  children  make  sense  of  their  past  in   relation  to  anticipated  futures  as  they  grow.  For  example,  a  child  might  see   himself  or  herself  as  having  inherited  ‘bad  blood’  which  they  imagine  to  destine   them  to  a  life  of  criminality.  Other  children  may  report  having  witnessed  acts  of   violence  that  they  come  believe  will  inevitably  recur  in  their  adult  life.  Whether   these  memories  are  ‘actual’  in  the  strict  sense  or  not  matters  less  than  the  power   of  these  images  to  indicate  to  the  child  and  to  adoptive  parents  the  possible  life   trajectories  that  the  child  live  out.       In  the  following  long  example,  we  see  how  a  particular  piece  of  clothing  is   fraught  with  significance  for  these  anticipated  trajectories.  Beginning  with  a   mention  of  a  play  costume  owned  by  her  daughter,  C  articulates  how  the   costume  poses  the  risk  of  opening  up  a  discussion  of  a  particularly  dramatic   episode  from  her  daughter’s  early  life,  when  her  birth  mother  accidentally   started  a  fire  in  her  home:     C.  My  daughter’s  obsessed  with  fire  and  um,  we  don’t  talk,  we  don’t  um,   she’s  actually  got  a  fireman’s  costume,  a  firefighter’s  costume,  a   firefighter’s  kit  you  know,  age  appropriate  children’s  things  but  I  don’t   talk  about  fires  and  there  was,  you  now  the  New  Town  fireiii.  Of  course  we   haven’t  mentioned  it,  haven’t  shown  her  pictures  but,  um,  today  she  was   out  visiting  a  friend  who  has  a  younger  child  and  doesn’t  realize  how  big   ears  she’s  got  and  talking  about,  you  know,  those  explosions  there  and  the   sky  so  she’s  heard  about  it  and  we  …  and  then  um  M  had  promised  to   show  her  a  newspaper  picture  because  she’s  obsessed  with  it  it.  She  just…     B.  Amazing  what  they  take  in,  isn’t  it  you  know?     A.  Its  amazing  …  when  she’s  three     C.  Yeah     W.  It’s  quite  unsettling     C.  Oh,  but  also  you  sort  of  think  its  alright  because  there’s  this  huge   picture  of  like,  like  a  mushroom  and  there’s  three  um  firefighters  in  the   picture  and  the  main  interest  was  one  didn’t  have  his  hat  on!  (Laughter)   You  have  to  think,  you  know     A.  You’re  building  this  up,  yeah     C.  Well,  it’s  like,  well  it’s  like,  you  know  what  do  I  do  when  she’s,  you   know,  talking  to  her  about  this,  this  sort  of  thing  about  what  her  mum  did     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge.   The  firefighter’s  costume  is  a  thoroughly  ambiguous  object.  C  reports  that  her   daughter  is  ‘obsessed  with  fire’.  The  costume  is  then,  on  the  one  hand,  an  ‘age   appropriate’  way  of  entertaining  the  child’s  interests.  It  is,  we  might  say,  a  way  of   normalizing  these  interests,  of  framing  them  as  innocent  childish  concerns  with   the  dangers  of  the  adult  world,  in  the  same  way  that  other  children  might  be   bought  doctors  or  soldiers  play  outfits.  But  what  C  is  aware  of  is  that  this   obsession  has  roots  in  an  actual  episode  from  her  daughter’s  early  years  that  the   child  is  apparently  unaware  of.  There  is  a  secret  –  her  birth  mother’s  role  in  a  fire   –  that  will  be  revealed  at  some  point,  most  likely  by  siblings.  C  has  apparently   spent  some  considerable  time  imagining  or  ‘visualising’  how  this  story  will  be   framed,  the  kinds  of  images  and  resources  that  she  will  need  to  draw  upon  to  do   so.  The  firefighter  costume  then  stands  as  the  centre  of  a  future  effort  to   recapitulate  a  past  that  is  continuously  reiterated  by  the  child’s  current   obsession  with  fire.       It  is  the  future  revelation  of  this  shared  secret  that  is  written  into  the  costume.   To  refuse  to  allow  her  daughter  to  engage  with  her  obsession  would  be  for  C  to   stand  accountable  at  some  later  date  of  having  mis-­‐directed  her  daughter,  of   having  deliberately  steered  her  away  from  having  gotten  onto  the  path  which   would  eventually  lead  her  to  a  confrontation  with  this  particular  aspect  of  her   past  and  her  relationship  to  her  birth  mother.  Allowing  her  to  have  the  costume   gives  C  the  resource  of  being  able  to  present  herself  as  having  merely  delayed   rather  than  dismissed  the  possibility  of  this  confrontation.  And  indeed  this   choice  appears  to  have  worked  to  the  extent  that  the  daughter’s  interest  in   images  of  fire  seems  to  be  age-­‐appropriately  skewed  (e.g.  whether  hats  are  being   worn  properly  by  firefighters  rather  than  on  the  consequences).  The  costume  is   then  something  akin  to  Poe’s  famous  ‘purloined  letter’  discussed  by  both  Lacan   and  Derrida.  It  is  a  secret  or  mystery  whose  quality  is  both  intensified  and   managed  on  account  of  it  being  hidden  in  plain  sight.  To  stretch  a  metaphor  we   might  say  that  this  future  confrontation  with  the  past  is  hidden  in  the  folds  of  the   costume,  waiting  to  be  unfolded  and  opened  up  at  any  point.     As  spectral  objects,  what  is  afforded  by  both  the  firefighter  costume  and  soft  toys   we  have  previously  described  is  a  means  for  adoptive  parents  to  anticipate  a   range  of  future  life  trajectories  for  their  child.  Some  trajectories  are  the  desired   outcomes  that  follow  from  the  child’s  integration  in  the  new  family.  Other  less   desirable  trajectories  are  those  where  the  child  seems  fated  to  return  to  the   you  know,  I  suppose  it’s  quite  hard  to  talk  to  her  without  having  an   example  apart  from  the  drugs,  having  pictures  and  things  like  that,  you   know  that  sort  of  thing,  other  sorts  of  scenarios  but  um,  she  will  hear   about  that  because  siblings,  you  know  will,  will  tell  her.  Anytime  really,   but  anytime  and  it  is  so,  and  I  know  that  I’m  doing  it  myself,  I’m  sort  of   visualizing  it  and  I  know  I  have  to  talk  it  down,  the  fact  that  she  wasn’t  an   arsonist  she  had  started  a  fire  by  mistake,  you  know,  um  it  was  the  fact   that  she  went  much  longer  into  distress,  you  know  but  the  flat  got  burned   down  and  the  fact  was  she  went  to  prison  because  of  it  and  had  a  long   sentence,  so  that’s  unfortunate  but  you  have  to  sort  of  try  to  work  out     Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. circumstances  and  kinds  of  life  experience  that  dominated  their  early  years.   Spectral  objects  play  an  ambiguous  role.  On  the  one  hand,  they  are  a  visible  link   to  a  difficult  past,  a  material  means  by  which  that  past  continues  to  exert  an   influence  over  the  present  which  threatens  the  effort  to  sustain  a  stable  life   trajectory  for  the  child.  But  on  the  other,  they  represent  one  of  the  few  means   through  which  an  emotional  link  to  the  past  can  be  sustained  for  the  child,  and   through  which  she  or  he  might,  at  some  future  date,  be  able  to  reflect  upon  and   place  that  past  in  the  context  of  their  subsequent  life.  The  spectral  object  is  a   threat  and  a  promise,  an  affectively  charged  medium  through  which  the  past   continues  to  act,  and  the  means  by  which  it  might  be  tamed.     Summary   Objects  do  not  offer  a  simple  gateway  to  the  past.  Their  power  to  link  past  and   present  comes  from  the  contingent  and  situated  manner  in  which  they  are   encountered  in  acts  of  remembering.  It  is  this  complex  work  of  handling  the  past   in  adoptive  families  which  has  been  our  focus  in  this  chapter.  Although  the  toys   and  clothes  –  the  ‘stuff’  –  we  have  discussed  here  are  affectively  highly  charged   and  certainly  rich  interpretatively,  we  have  deliberately  chosen  not  to  treat  them   as  symbols  or  as  psychoanalytic  ‘objects’.  We  feel  such  an  approach  would   overlook  the  material  affordances  of  the  objects  that  enable  them  to  become   participants  in  the  ongoing  dilemmas  of  managing  the  past.  For  example,  the   choices  made  in  the  burying  of  Snoopy  Dog  in  the  pile  or  toys,  or  the  work   around  the  ‘open  secret’  contained  in  the  firefighter  costume  is  what  concerns   us,  rather  than  any  psychic  drama.       Ownership  and  agency  are  at  the  very  centre  of  the  problem.  For  the  bubble  of   adoptive  family  to  survive,  it  is  necessary  for  the  difficult  past  of  the  child  to  be   tamed,  despite  its  ongoing  manifestation  in  the  present,  by  way  the  stuff  that  has   come  with  the  child.  In  a  mundane  sense  the  child  ‘owns’  the  objects,  and  the   choice  to  dispose  of  them  is  therefore  not  properly  speaking  that  of  the  parents   to  make.  But  more  importantly,  that  ownership  is  simultaneously  an  owning  of   the  past  that  is  affectively  mediated  through  the  spectral  object.  If  the  object   survives,  then  so  too  does  the  possibility  of  the  child  being  able  to  assert  some   sense  of  agency  in  relation  to  the  past  at  some  later  point  and  find  a  place  for   early  difficult  experience  in  their  ongoing  life  trajectory.  Curiously  then,  the   adoptive  parents  here  need  to  attribute  quasi-­‐subjective  status  to  spectral   objects  –  to  let  them  live,  so  to  speak  –  in  order  to  avoid  the  risk  of  reducing  the   child  to  the  status  of  a  commodity  who  has  been  traded  between  adult  carers.   This  complex  exchange  of  properties  adds  to  the  semi-­‐magical  patina  that   accrues  on  the  object,  or  as  we  have  called  it  using  the  terms  of  our  participants   ‘spectrality’.  It  is  this  property  which  adoptive  parents  fear  (as  seen  in  the   desperate  search  for  Pooh  Bear)  and  on  which  their  ongoing  efforts  to  maintain   the  bubble  of  adoptive  family  ultimate  come  to  depend.     References       Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. 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(2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge. Turkle,  S.  (Ed)  (2007)  Evocative  objects:  Things  we  think  with.  Cambridge,  Mass:   The  MIT  Press.                                                                                                                   i  The  Guardian,  Saturday  11  June  2011   ii  Connor  (2011)  draws  here  upon  Michel  Serres’  notions  of  the  quasi-­‐object,   which  reappear  in  the  work  of  Latour  and  Actor-­‐Network  Theory  (see  Brown,   2002).   iii  Actual  name  replaced  with  pseudonym.