Other Things - Softcover

Brown, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022628302X ISBN 13: 9780226283029

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Synopsis

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo.

The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Other Things

By Bill Brown

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-28302-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Overture (The Shield of Achilles), 
One Things — in Theory, 
I The Matter of Modernism, 
Two The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf), 
Three The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray), 
Four Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick), 
II Unhuman History, 
Five The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour), 
Six Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/Harold Searles), 
Seven Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen), 
III Kitsch Kulchur, 
Eight How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story (Shawn Wong), 
Nine Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny (Spike Lee), 
Ten Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object, 
Coda A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard), 
Notes, 
Glossary, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Things — in Theory

In the opening pages of Falling Man, an unidentified consciousness struggles to apprehend the devastation of lower Manhattan, "a time and space of falling ash and near night," of "seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past," of "people running ... holding towels to their faces," of "otherwordly things in the morning pall." The man himself does not run. Glass in his hair, glass in his face, he walks. He walks slowly enough and consciously enough to encounter, consciously, the altered object world he inhabits — the things that the novelist, Don DeLillo, insistently tags as things: "In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them." The animation of the passage derives from the relays between some things and others: from a dynamic that moves — under the sign of things — from general to particular, abstract to concrete, vague to precise. Things are critically different. The cast-iron buildings and the loading platforms — those things are different. Something is wrong. What's wrong is manifest there, in those things — shop windows and paint-sprayed walls — but the thing that is wrong, everywhere, looms both within and beyond those things.

DeLillo exploits the ambiguity of things and an ambiguity in things — what Martin Heidegger referred to simply as the word's broader and narrower sense. For thing (Ding, chose, &c.) can designate merely something (ein Etwas) as opposed to nothing; it can refer to actions or conditions ("Let's get those things done now"; "things have been pretty shitty"); and it can name any quotidian object — a rock, a knife, or a watch, as he says. Heidegger himself persistently isolates and concentrates on the present-at-hand (das Vorhandene), "what is most immediate, most capable of being grasped." The scale of DeLillo's concrete things — walls and windows and streets — renders them less graspable. And they can hardly be extracted from (grasped out from) their condition; they thus dramatize how things remain tangled among other things, including the least graspable thin

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022628302X
• ISBN 13: 9780226283029
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448