Some Things on Some Things

Thing theory, as it has come to be known, constitutes a dialectical counterpart to Martin Heidegger’s seminal 1951 essay “The Thing.” Whereas Heidegger pursues the question of what a thing “is,” thing theory explores what things are not, or are no longer, namely objects. If an object denotes a useful entity for an owner or subject—a toothbrush, a coin, a backstage pass—a thing designates an object that has broken down or otherwise become useless—a busted monitor, a badge to last year’s academic conference, an old copy of Heidegger essays. Alright, so that last example isn’t exactly a thing, but neither are things as thing theory explains them. This is because a thing supposedly represents an object that, no longer in use, has become uncanny and thus divulges the strangeness of the process that produced it and the subject that desired it. But thing theory renders things useful the moment it declares them uncanny; it restores a defamiliarizing purpose to things; it enlists things in narratives (of how we became posthuman or post-postmodern, say); it restores things to eminent objecthood by shielding us from what Heidegger would call their sheer “thingliness.” “Thing theory” is a metaphysical puzzle, an oxymoron.

In certain respects, Jonathan Lamb’s thoughtful new book catches itself in the webbing of this paradox. How could any book purporting to tell us what “things say” avoid doing so? But Lamb’s book is also a probing, self-reflexive account of the deep history of this quandary by which things become useful by becoming representable. As Lamb has it, representation, particularly in print, is a profoundly “thingly” phenomenon. It sits on the border between literature and aesthetics on the one hand and civil society on the other—between Addison and Steele here and Hobbes and Locke there. By returning recurrently to Hobbes and Locke (and to David Hume, another key thinker for this book), Lamb underscores the literary logic of the social contract and hence of the philosophical foundations of modern society. In Lamb’s view, however, literature is no medium of a peaceable republic of letters. Instead, and in a manner reminiscent of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s classic The Literary Absolute (1988), the quandaries of representation underwrite a host of instabilities—legal, fiscal, political—that haunt the public sphere.

Key here is the figure of the author, which Lamb distinguishes from the category of persons, or subjects. In the political philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, a person constitutes the imagined basis of the modern state. Supposedly entering into an original contract while in the state of nature, the person (or normative human subject) becomes the concept on which the idea of civil society rests. The state of nature, of course, is a fiction, making “persons” retrojections that explain and legitimate the legal origins of the state. In the terms of Lamb’s book, persons are political “objects.” By contrast, an author is “a solitaire endowed with undefended natural rights occupying a vulnerable condition outside or on the rim of civil society,” an inventor of patently fictive worlds and thus an agent unto herself. “Authors are to the civil subject what things are to objects.” What Lamb uncovers here is a rift between two conceptions of fiction, one conceived around persons “that obeys the laws of probability and serves our purposes, and another that is neither probable nor useful,” a thing-like romance “that is told in contempt of our ideas of personal identity, moral consequence, and truth.” As one would expect, the first mode of fiction veers into the second, and Lamb’s ten chapters essentially document the complexities of how this occurs in eighteenth-century literature. He ranges widely here across such canonical figures as Swift and Sterne, and more currently “hot” topics like “it-narratives” (a popular eighteenth-century sub-genre in which coins, rodents, trinkets, and other minutiae tell their own stories) to political categories, slave narratives, and material Lamb has discussed before in different contexts (like Captain Cook...