Things

by Bill Brown (Editor)

This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry beads; Cuban cigars; why we no longer wear hats that we can tip to one another and why we don't seem to long to; what has been described as bourgeois longing. It is an invitation to think about the fetishism of daily life in different times and in different cultures. It is an invitation to rethink several topics of critical inquiry—camp, collage, primitivism, consumer culture, museum culture, the aesthetic object, still life, "things as they are," Renaissance wonders, "the thing itself"—within the rubric of "things," not in an effort to foreclose the question of what sort of things these seem to be, but rather to suggest new questions about how objects produce subjects, about the phenomenology of the material everyday, about the secret life of things.

Based on an award-winning special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry , Things features eighteen thought-evoking essays by contributors including Bill Brown, Matthew L. Jones, Bruno Latour, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jessica Riskin, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Peter Schwenger, Charity Scribner, and Alan Trachtenberg.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction

380 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Bill Brown's Thing Theory article in Critical Inquiry several times, I finally decided it might be worth reading this whole anthology of essays about things (some portions of which were adapted from the same CI issue). There were many highlights, including an essay on a defecating duck (aka the first android), and Bruno Latour's late career lament about how politicians mobilize post-structuralism to do things like deny global warming. On a theoretical level, the compilation also drew my attention to the philosophical difference between objects and things (thanks Heidegger and friends!) and had some useful essays that helped my thinking in re: commodity fetishism and its possible relationship to my project. Broadly, I'm not sure that the idea of "thing theory" is different enough from material culture studies to justify is inauguration as a new field (or subfield), but Brown makes a good and compelling argument, and his own essays on this are always compelling, lucid, and helpful as far as thinking about, through, and with objects goes.

[Erika Schoeps · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much fun for a book of critical analysis. Blends together philosophy, history, cultural studies, anthropology, and even some literature. I skipped two or three essays, but all in all, fantastic.

My favorite essay was "The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress." The longest read in here, but it quickly became the quickest one. Communism, history, aesthetics.