Other Things

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities 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? InOther Things, Bill Brown explores this question by considering an 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.Brown 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, he ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Brown 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.
The humanities continue to ride a wave of interest in the material or phenomenological object world. Early in the boom in what we might call Thing Studies, Brown observed that “these days you can read books on the pencil, the zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat.” By now the list is a good deal longer. How should we understand the broad spotlight now being cast on the inanimate object world within various disciplines? This book sets out to answer that question by reference to objects as various as puppets and glass plate, writers ranging from Virginia Woolf to Philip K. Dick, and artists as various as Rodin and Man Ray. Taken together, the essays inOther Things explain modernism’s investment in disclosing an object world whose enchantment persists in the face of disenchantment. Working with conceptual tools derived from the work of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Lacan, Brown advances an object/thing distinction that grasps the unanticipated force of an object, no matter how banal that object may be. For Brown, gaining purchase on the world we inhabit requires theory to engage the everyday object world, just as it requires us to ask new questions of material culture, including the question of what we mean by materiality itself.