Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science

Daston, Lorraine

ISBN 10: 1890951439 / ISBN 13: 9781890951436

Published by Zone Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2004

About this Item

Hardcover, black cloth lettered in gold on spine, in publisher's unclipped and non-priced dust-jacket. 488 pages. Notes and Index. Illustrated throughout in black and white. First edition. A collection of essays seeking to explain, or at least understand, the subject/object distinction which exists between man and the inanimate physical world in which he lives. From my own limited understanding Daston and her colleagues reject Martin Heidegger?s postulate that objects are things whose meaning and relevance only derive from the agency of man. Sorry, but I have to go with Heidegger, if memory serves I believe he called it thinking. No previous ownership marks. A clean, fresh, unmarked and near like new copy in a like dust-jacket. Jacket now protected by clear Brodart cover. Fine in a fine dust-jacket.

Seller Inventory # 021756

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science
• Publisher: Zone Books, Brooklyn, New York
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890951439
• ISBN 13: 9781890951436
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, explain, remark on, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would, in short, stop speaking; we would become as mute as objects are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. Things That Talk aims to escape the opposition between positivist facts and cultural readings that bifurcates the current historiography of both art and science.

Confronting this impasse from an interdisciplinary perspective, each author singles out one object for close attention: a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock. Each object is revealed to be a node around which meanings accrete thickly.

But not just any meanings: what these things are made of and how they are made shape what they can mean. Neither the pure texts of semiotics nor the brute objects of positivism, these things are saturated with cultural significance. Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning; they lapse into speechlessness when their matter and meanings no longer mesh.

Each of the nine evocative objects examined in this book had its historical moment, when the match of this thing to that thought seemed irresistible. At such junctures, certain things become objects of fascination, association, and endless consideration. Things That Talk fleetingly realizes the dream of a perfect language, in which words and world merge.

Essays by Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Anke te Heesen, Caroline A. Jones, Joseph Leo Koerner, Antoine Picon, Simon Schaffer, Joel Snyder, and M. Norton and Elaine M. Wise.

About the Author

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the coauthor (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 and (with Peter Galison) Objectivity and the editor of Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, all three published by Zone Books.