THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

Moving house while I was writing this paper, I have been working in an unusually intense way with physical things: sanding back wooden floors, shifting cartons of books, sealing a window frame with putty, tightening the rings on a washing machine hose... Callused on my fingers, this is a kind of knowledge different from intellectual knowing (which is, nevertheless, always a matter of paper and ink and electric currents running through machinery). Old skills of understanding the world with my hands come back to me. And I experience the sheer singularity of its things: this nameless, almost indescribable Odradek of a thing, for example, an asymmetrical grooved and slotted bit of fractionally cylindrical metal that ties two planks of bookshelf together around a projecting, greased metal screw. Someone designed it, gave it its mysteriously precise logic, perhaps even has a name for it; but to me it's purely strange.

That sense of strangeness is one kind of beginning to an essay on things, but it's one that can get caught up all too easily in a supposition of the thing's ontological purity and in the nostalgia for a world of simple objects that talk about things so often betrays. That nostalgia permeates almost all contemporary thinking about things. It is classically located in Heidegger's harkening to the things of a stable and preindustrial rural world ('a stone, a clod of earth, a piece of wood...Lifeless beings of nature and objects of use')1 and to the 'authentic experience' of thingness by the Greeks, an experience of 'the Being of beings in the sense of presence' which has been lost to Western philosophy in the process of translating Greek thought into the Latin categorization of thingness as the union of substance with accidents, or as the unity of a manifold of sensations, or as formed matter ('O', p. 23). If the impossible scope of this topic is in some sense imaginable, however, it's because it is narrowed by the way certain questions tend to press more urgently on us--to shape a certain corner of the amorphous space inhabited by the disciplines that think about cultural thingness. These questions have to do with our habitation of the aftermath of a theoretical paradigm which sought to imagine the world rigorously in terms of the play of representations and rigorously to exclude the sleight of hand by which a beyond of representation is posited in such a way that representation could be measured against it. Our problem is that beyond.

[...]

But this is just why there can be no neat distinction between cultural objects and naturally occurring objects. The pile of stones formed by a minor avalanche carries equally with it the possibility of being otherwise recognized; it can, for example, be taken for a cairn or taken to be beautiful. The condition of possibility is the same in each case. The stones, the pebble, exist within the realm of that possibility. Is there a difference, then, between the pile and the cairn? Yes, but it's one that, like that between humans and nonhumans, needs to be

See Also Lydia H. Liu: Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot (Summer 1999) Bill Brown: How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story) (Summer 1998)

flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being. It's a feature of our world that we can and do distinguish between piles of strewn stone and cairns, between pebbles and cameras, between trees and telegraph polesÑbetween unintended and intended things, things shaped and unshaped--just as we routinely and reasonably distinguish things from persons. But the sort of world we live in makes it constantly possible for these two sets of kinds to exchange properties, for the heap of stones to be read as an arrangement, for the dead matter of the camera to be understood as an inscription of human work and will. The difference that seems to be one of kind is one of use and recognition. Conversely, of course, persons are and can be read as things (as bodies, as flesh and bone, living or dead). A discarded camera lying broken at the roadside or discarded on a beach can seem like driftwood, like mere scattered matter. The conversion from simple to complex, functional to nonfunctional, can happen in both directions. Things are naturally shifty, and part of how we think about them should involve the processes of recognition and framing which govern their placing, their point, their uptake. (And it is here that we might begin to catch sight of the limits of the example of the arti fact that informs the network model of the being of things: the explanatory form to which it lends itself is that of an economy of uses, and it rarely adumbrates, except at the most general level,31 the historical dimensions of that economy.32 Rather, different models of the historicity of things are entailed by the example of the commodity, formed within a semiotic economy in which the mode of presence of things is deeply prestructured by the relation between model and series and between material things and their display or representation; or by the example of waste matter, formed by and formative of an economy of value for which it works as the exorbitant supplement that initiates change.)33

1. Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), p. 21; hereafter abbreviated 'O'.

31. Latour sketches out a genealogy of the modernist principle of 'purification' which radically distinguishes people from things. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

32. The beginnings of such a detailed history are being worked out in a number of studies of technological development, of which the most striking is still Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985).

33. See Frow, 'Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference, and Classy Stuff', UTS Review (forthcoming).

John Frow is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent books are Time and Commodity Culture (1997) and (coauthored with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison) Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (1999).