Summer 1998
Volume 24, Number 4

What fallacy do we risk when we pause to grant a text some extratextual dimension? What hazards do we chance (naiveté, banality, empiricism, humanism?) when we read a literary text to write a history of the referent? What fetishism do I commit? Or, more important, what fetishism am I trying to overcome? For only an unseemly investment in the object of reference, perhaps, can explain that object as a precipitate of other investments. Perhaps only an analytic overvaluation of the object allows literature to teach not just a history of things but also the history inthem.

If the history ofthings can be understood as their circulation, the commodity's "social life" through diverse cultural fields, then the history in things might be understood as the crystallization of the anxieties and aspirations that linger there in the material object.1 And such a history might yet be explored, however provisionally and problematically, between two critical formations where things have (very differently) disappeared: between a poststructuralist epistomology that insists on dispensing with "things" and a Marxian phenomenology that insists that we have no things to dispense with, that the "thingness of things" is precisely what modernity and its aftermath deny us.2 Here, then, "things" will come to designate less the unalterably given material object world then that which becomes visable or palpable only in (or as) its alteration. Things and the history in things become conspicuous in the irregularities of exchange--in the retardation of the primary circuit of exchange whereas man establishes objects insofar as he is established by them. 3 The question of things, even the question of whether they are, is inseperable from a question about what they do, or what can be done with them. For things compel our attention and elicit our questions only in their animation, their alternation between one thing and another. Literature might then serve as a mode of rehabilitative reification--a resignifying of the fixations and fixities of thing-ification that will grant us access to what remains obscure (or obscured) in the routines through which we (fail to) experience the material object world.

Consider what follows is a materialist dream. It is a dream about the 1950s, the point of which is all but magical: if not to hear things speak for themselves, then to imagine a history of things as something other than the exiled other of language.

1. On the social life of things, see the essays collected in the The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York, 1960), in particular Igor Kopyoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," pp. 64-91. Roland Barthes understood the history in things to be the political trace of the human act of production; see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), pp. 143-44. Walter Benjamin understood the history in things variously: as such a trace (Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth, ed. Gary Smith [Cambridge, Mass., 1986], p. 123); as the impression of social life recorded on the surface ("On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York, 1968], pp. 155-200); as the record of the subject's structural formation in modernity ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, p. 236); and as the trace of a collective and unconscious utopian longing ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz [New York, 1986], p. 148).

2. Needless to say, all sorts of things (let alone things in themselves) appear to have been disappearing for a very long time. They've done so in different ways within different analytics, where either the lingering presence of things is regretted or the loss of things is lamented. Martin Heidegger complained that "not only are things no longer admitted as things [as opposed to objects], but they have never yet at all been able to appear to thinking as things" (Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York, 1971], p. 171). In a Heideggerian lament, Gadamer complained that "talk of a respect for things is more and more intelligible in a world that is becoming ever more technical. They are simply vanishing." HIs effort to recover the thing's autonomy, its "unalterable givenness" discovered only when we "suspend any consideration of persons," is an effort to sense "the nature of things" in language--to hear how things bring themselves to expression in the language of the poet (Hans-Georg, Gadamer, "The Nature of Things and the Language of Things," Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge [Berkeley, 1976], pp. 71, 70). The following pages, which do not ask the Heideggerian question (about how the thing things, and how it things in the world), address not the "nature of things" but the "culture of things," however the latter may thought to domesticate or neutralize the former. The original dates of Heidegger's and Gadamer's essays (1951, 1960) locate them squarely within the chronological frame of my argument, but Heidegger is explicit about the historical occasion of his question: "The bomb's explosion is only the grossest of all gross confirmations of the long-since-accomplished annihilation of the thing: the confirmation that the thing as a thing remains nil" (Heidegger, "The Thing," p. 170).

3. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York, 1992), p. 389.

Bill Brown is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. He has recently published The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephan Crane, and the Economics of Play (1997) and Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (1997). He is currently at work on the The Secret Life of Things.