A sense of things : the object matter of American literature
01 Jan 2003-
TL;DR: Brown's "A Sense of Things" as mentioned in this paper explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century.
Abstract: In May 1906, the "Atlantic Monthly" commented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves. Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism, "A Sense of Things" will be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.
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08 May 2012
TL;DR: In this article, Hodder used the quote from Gibson that an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer, and showed how the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life.
Abstract: ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM
889 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that to understand important aspects of past and present societies, we have to relearn to ascribe action, goals and power to many more "agents" than the human actor.
Abstract: Why have the social and human sciences shown such disinterest in material culture? How has this neglect affected archaeology? How do things and materiality at large relate to human beings and ‘social life’? These questions are addressed in this article which also critically examines social constructivist and phenomenological approaches to material culture Arguing against the maxim that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, it is claimed that to understand important aspects of past and present societies, we have to relearn to ascribe action, goals and power to many more ‘agents’ than the human actor — in other words, to re‐member things
392 citations
Cites background from "A sense of things : the object matt..."
...This intimacy is nicely captured in a scene in Henry James’s novelThe Spoils of Poynton,where Mrs Gerets explains to her son how her attention to objects is mediated: ‘They’re living things to me, they know me, they return the touch of my hand’ (cited after Brown 2003:149)....
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...But has my mise-en-scène thus mortified the quartz, drained it of any material vitality, its very shimmer dulled by being subjected to an archaeological epistemology where its role, within this too harmonious scene we call history, is never to be itself but always, always to represent something else? (Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (2003))...
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...…studies became more and more narrowed towards shopping, the exchange of goods, the desire for objects, their aestheticization and the media image of them (cf. Miller 1998b), rather than their uses and the ways material objects arelived with(Dant 1999:37, cf Attfield 2000:136ff., Brown 2003:4)....
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TL;DR: The idea of the metropolis in European thought has always been linked to that of "civilization" (a form of existence as well as a structure of time) and capitalist rationalization as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: If there is ever an African form of metropolitan modernity, then Johannesburg will have been its classical location. The idea of the metropolis in European thought has always been linked to that of “civilization” (a form of existence as well as a structure of time) and capitalist rationalization. Indeed, the Western imagination defines the metropolis as the general form assumed by the rationalization of relations of production (the increasing prevalence of the commodity system) and the rationalization of the social sphere (human relations) that follows it. A defining moment of metropolitan modernity is realized when the two spheres rely upon purely functional relations among people and things and subjectivity takes the form of calculation and abstraction. One such moment is epitomized by the instrumentality that labor acquires in
298 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors make five points about human-thing entanglement: (1) Things depend on other things along chains of interdependence; (2) Things are not inert.
Abstract: In exploring human-thing entanglement I wish to make five points. (1) Humans depend on things. In much of the new work in the social and human sciences in which humans and things co-constitute each other, there is, oddly, little account of the things themselves. (2) Things depend on other things. All things depend on other things along chains of interdependence. (3) Things depend on humans. Things are not inert. They are always falling apart, transforming, growing, changing, dying, running out. (4) The defining aspect of human entanglement with made things is that humans get caught in a double-bind, depending on things that depend on humans. (5) Traits evolve and persist. When evolutionary archaeologists identify lineages of cultural affinity, they claim to be studying cultural transmission. Transmission may be involved in such lineages, but it is the overall entanglement of humans and things that allows success or failure of traits.
Resume
Par l’exploration de l’intrication entre humains et choses, l’auteur souhaite soulever cinq points. (1) Les humains dependent des choses. Pourtant, dans une grande partie des nouveaux travaux en sciences sociales et humaines dans lesquels les humains et les choses sont co-constitutifs, les choses sont, curieusement, peu considerees. (2) Les choses dependent d’autres choses. Toutes les choses dependent d’autres choses, au fil de chaines d’interdependance. (3) Les choses dependent des humains. Elles ne sont pas inertes. Elles passent leur temps a tomber en morceaux, a se transformer, a pousser, a changer, a mourir, a s’epuiser. (4) L’aspect definissant l’intrication des humains avec les objets fabriques est que les humains sont pris dans un double bind, dependant des choses qui dependent d’eux. (5) Certains traits apparaissent, evoluent et persistent. Quand les archeologues evolutionnistes identifient des lignees d’affinite culturelle, ils affirment etudier la transmission culturelle. Bien que la transmission puisse etre a l’œuvre dans ces lignees, c’est l’intrication globale des hommes et des choses qui permet aux traits de prosperer ou de disparaitre.
185 citations
Cites background from "A sense of things : the object matt..."
...4) between clay, temper, fire, hearth, food, and so on, what Bill Sillar and Michael Tite (2000) call ‘embedded technologies’, archaeologists conduct experiments that replicate past cooking and firing practices....
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...More generally, the approach is based on the foregrounding of things and thus can be seen as part of a wider ‘thing theory’, with apologies to Bill Brown (2001; 2003)....
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TL;DR: In this article, a long-term archaeological perspective shows that our attempts to fix things by finding technological solutions have led to an exponential increase in material entanglements, and the power of things to entrap and trap the more vulnerable.
Abstract: This article retreats from an entirely relational treatment of matter, to rediscover the object nature of things. The thingly relations of things include object relations; materials provide affordances or potentialities to humans. The brute matter of things has effects on us that go beyond social networks. We cannot reduce things solely to the relational, to a semiotics of things. To do so undermines the power of things to entrap, and particularly to trap the more vulnerable. In the modern world, we have come to see that we need to use things sustainably and responsibly, to care for things. But this care and sustainability themselves too frequently involve further management and control of animals, plants, landscapes, resources, and humans. A long-term archaeological perspective shows that our attempts to fix things by finding technological solutions have led to an exponential increase in material entanglements. It is in our nature as a species to try and fix our problems now by fiddling and fixing, but such responses may have their limits.
137 citations