Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory

Things, edited by Bill Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 471. $49.50 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession, by Stephen M. Best. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 362. $69.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart. London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xi + 222. $115.00 hardcover, $40.95 paper.

Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, edited by Lorraine Daston. New York: Zone Books (MIT Press), 2004. Pp. 447. $34.50 cloth.

It used to be that "living things" were mainly found in eighteenth-century speaking-object narratives. Scholars interested in talkative objects might have stretched a point to include late-nineteenth-century "commodity fetishes" and horror films. No longer. What is coming to be called "thing theory" urges us to take our account of "things that talk" as far back as Hieronymous Bosch monsters (in Joseph Koerner's persuasive "Bosch's Equipment"), and as far afield as Rorschach blots and the exemplary soap bubbles (anatomized in Simon Schaeffer's "A Science Whose Business Is Bursting") by which late Victorian physicists demonstrated universal laws of molecular behavior to bedazzled audiences (both articles appear in Lorraine Daston's impressive new collection, Things That Talk).

Defining what one even means by talking about things can rapidly become an arcane dispute, especially when waged by scholars quoting and counterquoting Heidegger's chewy phenomenological account of the "thingness of things." But ordinary language can provide some useful guidance here. Harriet Beecher Stowe's original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin, "The Man Who Was a Thing," is meant to shock us far more than Uncle Tom's merely being an object might (a person can be, after all, the "object of admiration" or "object of my affection"). And Phil Harris's chart-topping 1950 song about an unnamable horror that is indicated only by an ominous drumming (e.g., "Get out of there with that—RAT-TAT-TAT—and don't come back no more") was called "The Thing Song" for good reason. "Thing" is far better than any other word at summing up imponderable, slightly creepy what-is-it-ness. "Thing" is the term of choice for the extreme cases when nouns otherwise fail us: witness the thingamagummy and the thingamabob.

Thing theory is at its best, therefore, when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theory highlights, or ought to highlight, approaches to the margins—of language, of cognition, of material substance. "Things" do not lie beyond the bounds of reason, to be sure (that would be absurd or paradoxical, or flat out impossible), but at times they may seem to. That seeming is significant: these are limit cases at which our ordinary categories for classifying signs and substances, meaning and materiality, appear to break down.

Thing theory, then, is not a theory about the cultural significance of objects. There is a familiar rationale for appraising evocative objects, the eloquent signifiers by which a culture makes itself known to itself. Anthropological discourse has systematically refined that approach, with some selective importations and, lately, more wholesale exportations of the concept, ever since Bronislaw Malinowski's accounts of "ka" exchange in the Pacific Islands—Nicholas Thomas, Marilyn Strathern, and Maurice Godelier being among the prime exporters. The logical objection to such work is that it generally hears the objects saying nothing that the ambient culture has not carefully instilled. From Mauss to Strathern, the aim has been to unpack what the culture meant objects to mean, rather than to reflect on failures of meaning, or on the slippages that occur between the intended meaning and the actually embodied substance of, let us say, a pair of fighting cocks in Balinese hands. Clifford Geertz sees no such slippage when he pins down the cock's poetic associations in his...