Other Things

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences 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? __Other Things__ explores this question by considering a wide 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. The book 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, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, __Other Things__ 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. 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? In Other 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 Contents 8 List of Illustrations 10 Acknowledgments 14 Overture (The Shield of Achilles) 16 1. Things鈥攊n Theory 32 I. The Matter of Modernism 60 2. The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf) 64 3. The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray) 94 4. Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick) 140 II. Unhuman History 168 5. The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour) 170 6. Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/Harold Searles) 190 7. Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen) 212 III. Kitsch Kulchur 232 8. How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story(Shawn Wong) 236 9. Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny(Spike Lee) 284 10. Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object 310 Coda A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard) 330 Notes 342 Glossary 410 Index 414