‘For even the most coarse and commonsensical things, mere things, perpetually pose a problem because of the specific unspecificity that “things” denotes. Mind you, for Ponge, objects may seem substitutable for things, and by “siding with things” (le parti pris des choses) he meant to take the part of specified objects–doorknobs, figs, crates, blackberries, stoves, water. But the very semantic reducibility of things to objects, coupled with the semantic irreducibility of things to objects, would seem to mark one way of recognizing how, although objects typically arrest a poet’s attention, and although the object was what was asked to join the dance in philosophy, things may still lurk in the shadows of the ballroom and continue to lurk there after the subject and object have done their thing, long after the party is over.’ (3)
^ the irreducibility of things to objects speaks to Graham Harman’s OOO in the sense of objects not being fully knowable to the human – over and undermining
‘His “delight” in these objects was prompted not by any familiarity, but by the suddenly recognized peculiarity of the everyday, the fact that water “lies flat on its stomach” in a “hysterical urge to submit to gravity,” for instance, sacrificing “all sense of decency to this idiefixe, this pathological scruple”‘ (3) footnote 6
“Things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project.” That’s how Leo Stein schematically put it. Although the experience of an encounter depends, of course, on the projection of an idea (the idea of encounter), Stein’s scheme helps to explain the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut. These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you’re “caught up in things” and that the “body is a thing among things.”‘ They are occasions of contingency – the chance interruption – that disclose a physicality of things.’ (3-4) – the idea of the Real
^ my work aims to provoke a similar reaction to this ‘chance interruption’ – a sudden confrontation with a thingy-ness
‘In Byatt’s novel, the interruption of the habit of looking through windows as transparencies enables the protagonist to look at a window itself in its opacity. As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture-above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.’ (4)
^again what my work aims to do – blocking the usual object association but keeping traces of – the associations become ghostly, backgrounded and the thingness jumps forward – a mix of past lives and speculative futures
‘The word designates the concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday: “Put it by that green thing in the hall.” It functions to overcome the loss of other words or as a place holder for some future specifying operation: “I need that thing you use to get at things between your teeth.” It designates an amorphous characteristic or a frankly irresolvable enigma: “There’s a thing about that poem that I’ll never get.”’ (4)
‘things is a word that tends, especially at its most banal, to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable’ (4-5)
*could name piece some thing ?
‘As Georg Simmel said of telescopic and microscopic technology, “coming closer to things often only shows us how far away they still are from us.”’ (6) – could apply to my map/close up rock drawings
‘Among the various experimental “novelties” that would unify “thought with the object” through some “direct contact with the object,” Salvador Dali “dream[ed] of a mysterious manuscript written in white ink and completely covering the strange, firm surfaces of a brand-new Roll-Royce.” Although words and things have long been considered deadly rivals, as Peter Schwenger details (pp. 99-113), Dali had faith that they could be fused and that “everyone” would “be able to read from things.” When Andre Breton first dreamed up surrealism, he did so by trying to make good on a dream. He dreamed of finding a book at a flea market, a book with a wooden statue of an Assyrian gnome as its spine, and with pages made of black wool. “I hastened to acquire it,” he writes, “and when I woke up I regretted not finding it near me.” Still, he hoped “to put a few objects like this in circulation.”’ (11) – bringing words and things into direct contact as with brick bone glass stone and a pebble for your thoughts
‘Benjamin recognized that the gap between the function of objects and the desires congealed there became clear only when those objects became outmoded.’ (13)
‘the postwar era looks like an era both overwhelmed by the proliferation of things and singularly attentive to them’ (14) – a phrase I’d like to be able to apply to my own work – in this duality I hope to find something of the cyclical, unfinalized nature of things/matter – an ongoingness that means individual things are always part of a mass of material, yet equally that mass is made of a multitude of individual things
‘If these objects are tired, they are tired of our perpetual reconstitution of them as objects of our desire and of our affection. They are tired of our longing. They are tired of us.’ (15)
Claus Oldenberg’s green gallery exhibition vs his Typewriter Eraser – usable, timeless items collapsing in on themselves vs an obsolete object standing tall and shiny – ‘While the “timeless” objects in the Oldenburg canon (fans and sinks) have gone limp, this abandoned object attains a new stature precisely because it has no life outside the boundary of art – no life, that is, within our everyday lives. Released from the bond of being equipment, sustained outside the irreversibility of technological history, the object becomes something else.’ (15) – again what my assemblages aim to do – to take the fragments that have been ‘released from the bond of being equipment’ and create something else, a material resurgence – overwhelming but with a focus on constituent parts – in this way could this speak to the idea of hyperobjects and the Anthropocene – ideas that are so abstractly vast that they can only be accessed by the so-close or the so-far (see chapter 2 of dissertation)
‘As Lesley Stern puts it (pp. 317- 54), things can grab our attention on film; and they do so because they have become not just objects but actions.’ (16) – should consider doing more film/time-based work
‘If thinking the thing, to borrow Heidegger’s phrase, feels like an exercise in belatedness, the feeling is provoked by our very capacity to imagine that thinking and thingness are distinct.’ (16)
Anna Harris 