Bill Brown, Things

Bill Brown (ed.): Things

Brown in his contribution refers to four interesting points:

(a)    (new scholarship should address the question of) how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects (p. 7). He later refers to Benjamin to argue that “subjects may constitute objects, but within Benjamin’s materialism things have already installed themselves in the human psyche.” (11) – refers to “Dream Kitsch” and “Several Points on Folk Art.”

(b)   Thingness of things discloses the othering of people (p. 12) – referring to Bruno Latour, who also “forcefully and repeatedly insisted that ‘things do not exist without being full of people’ and that considering humans necessarily involves the consideration of things. The subject/object dialectic itself (with which he simply has no truck) has obscured patterns of circulation, transference, translation, and displacement.” (p.12) “Latour has argued that modernity artificially made an ontological distinction between inanimate objects and human subjects, whereas in fact the world is full of ‘quasi-object’ and ‘quasi-subject’, terms he borrows from Michel Serres.” (p. 12) – refers to two works by Latour: “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. Graves-Brown (London, 2000) and We Have Never Been Modern.

(c)    Refers to Simmel: “Simmel’s earlier account of the gap between the ‘culture of thigns’ and modernity’s human subject” and “his insistence that the subject’s desire, and not productive labor, is the source of an object’s value” (p. 13) – refers to Simmel, “The Future of Our Culture” in Simmel on Culture (London, 1997). Also mentions that Lukacs, Bloch, Benjamin and Krakauer complicated Simmel’s analysis.

(d)   “Inanimate objects organize the temporality of the animate world.” (15) – refers to W. J. T. Mitchell’s contribution in this volume who explored how the discovery of a new kind of object in the 18^th century, the fossil, enablied romanticism to recognize and to refigure its relation to the mortal limits of the natural world.

W. J. T. Mitchell in “Romanticism and the Life of Things” explores how material things changed human perception of history. Refers to Foucault’s The Order of Things which explored “the historicity of things.”