Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (review)

Collected essays about “things” has lately become almost a genre. To declare an interest, I attended one meeting of the group that put together the materials that Lorraine Daston has now edited, and I later endorsed it to the publisher. Things That Talk is a collection of essays by art and science historians, writing in very different tones on a series of very different things: a drawing by Bosch (J. L. Koerner), the Glass Flowers at the Peabody (L. Daston), early photographs used as judicial evidence (J. Snyder), Rorschach blots (P. Galison), soap bubbles (S. Schaffer), clippings (A. te Heesen), the freestanding column (A. Picon), some Pollocks as seen by Greenberg (C. Jones), and Peacock Island in the Havel (N. and E. Wise). This collection is unusual, in its almost-genre, in that the contributors do not seem to believe their own pet concerns are parroted by hapless lumps of matter. (That materialist notion was formerly known as Idealism.) As Daston suggests, “what these things have in common is [that] they give rise to an astonishing amount of talk.” One could wonder why, though. A good answer might be: because they are important and meaningful, at least to those who feel compelled to talk about them. Talk is, then, one of the possible compliments paid to the roles that certain bits of matter, made or found, play in the lives of certain people—and art and science historians are in this no different from other mortals.