Things+(Wilcox)

What are things? How do they come into being? Where do they come from and where do they go? What do they do? Who do they affect and in what ways? These seemingly silly and naïve questions reflect the diverse preoccupations and propositions of a storied literature ranging from philosophy to social theory to empirically-grounded social science: the “thing” has been theorized and understood in many different ways. For Marx, things are congealed social (and natural) relations, reified, commoditized, and fetishized, [i] while for Heidegger, ‘das ding” is not a socially-defined phenomenon, but a point of gathering at which elements meet in a process of revealing (i.e. the thing as thing). [ii]

The “(re)turn to things” reverberates through science and technology studies, anthropology, sociology, and back to philosophy, as scholars grapple with different ways of coming to terms with William Carlos Williams’s observation that “there are no ideas but in things” and making sense of a world shot through with reification and commodity fetishism. [iii] Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume //The Social Life of Things// exemplifies this shift, analytically positioning global commodities and other things at the center of the anthropological analysis of global cultural flows. [iv] Bruno Latour’s claims of equivalence between human and nonhuman “actors” have also gained in influence and notoriety, as has his methodological prescription to “follow the actor” (who may or may not be human). [v] Recognizing these approaches share a willingness to centralize “things,” Marcus links them with other multi-sited, anthropological work foregrounding the social stories of materials in his methodological call to “follow the thing.” [vi] This call is echoed and elaborated on by critical literary scholar Bill Brown, who coins the term “thing theory” in the introduction to a special issue of //Critical Inquiry// devoted to things in 2002. [vii]

More recently, the group of philosophers known as the speculative realists, influenced significantly by Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), have begun to explore the metaphysical ontologies of things independently of human experience (hence the modifier //speculative//). Harman’s project enlists Latour as its foundational metaphysician, taking Latour’s pronouncements on non-human agency heterogeneous actants, and radical irreduction in a more extreme direction. [viii] In parallel, philosophers of technology and design like Peter Paul Verbeek are continuing to explore different types of things in terms of user experience and user engagement. [ix] Though very different projects, Verbeek and Harman both seek novel recombinations of, moves through, or vaults beyond Marx and Heidegger’s social/ontological figurings of things.

The status of things is very much an open question. Are they only significant in relation to other things, ideas, or forces? Or is their true nature that they can never truly interact with others, infinitely receding into a cryptic ontological zone unto themselves? What is at stake, in either case? For Jane Bennett, the ontological status of things is very much a political question, and she theorizes the material as alive with a vibratory energy, yet reticent to truly interact with others. Bennett takes the obligations humans have to the things with which they share the world seriously, perhaps as seriously as our obligations to other humans.

Are things lumps of matter, transformed into items of value by human making, and disfigured into warped fetish objects by the alienating practices of capitalism? Are things bundles of relations in uneasy alliance, as Latour might argue? Or are they, as Harman would claim, unknowable implosions of dark, radical ontological difference? Perhaps they are all, some, or none of the above.

[i] Marx, K. Capital, Vol. 1. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm [ii] Heidegger, M. (1971). The thing. //Poetry, Language, Thought//. (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. pp. 174-82. [iii] Williams, W. C. (1951). //Paterson//. New York: New Directions. [iv] Appadurai, A. (1988). //The Social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective//. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. [v] For example, see Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. in Bijker, W. E., & Law, J (Eds.). Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change. (pp. 225-258). Inside technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Or: Latour, B. (2005). //Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory.// Oxford: Oxford University Press. [vi] Marcus, G. (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. //Annu. Rev. Anthropol.//, //24//, 95-117. [vii] Brown, B. (2001). Thing theory. //Critical Inquiry, 28//(1), 1-22. [viii] Harman, G. (2009). //Prince of networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics//. Melbourne: re.press. [ix] Verbeek P. and P. Kockelkoren. (1998.) The things that matter. //Design Issues//. //14//(3), 28-42.