Reconstruction 5.2 (Spring 2005)

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Bill Brown. A Sense of Things: The Object of Matter in American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 260 pp. Softcover. $16.00. ISBN: 0226076296

Bill Brown, ed. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 380 pp. Softcover. $25.00. ISBN: 0226076121

<1> If he were not already well-established within the academic world (George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, co-editor of Critical Inquiry), Bill Brown’s 2003 and 2004 might begin to look like Jacques Derrida’s 1967. A Sense of Things comes equipped with jacket praise from Simon During of Johns Hopkins, Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University, Julia Stern of Northwestern University, and Michael Taussig of Columbia University. Not surprisingly, two of these individuals (in addition to Bill) appear in the edited volume Things, based on a Critical Inquiry special issue devoted to the topic. I bring up these interconnections for a reason: they remind me of Hamlet’s observation that “The King is a thing.” Indeed, I would argue that the King is the absent thing at work in this literary cabal, hidden by its very conspicuousness. Here is a list of universities represented by the Things volume: University of Chicago (3); Columbia (3); USC-Los Angeles (Daniel Tiffany); Stanford University (2); Mount St. Vincent University (Peter Schwenger); École des Mines (Bruno Latour); University of Pennsylvania; Smith; Princeton; MIT; University of Edinburgh; Brown; UC-San Diego (Lesley Stern); Yale.

<2> I don’t want to sound petty here, just to point out a symptom of which almost everyone who is not affiliated with these universities is aware. The university is a thing which, as Brown explains of things in general in his intro to Things, is “excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects. . . the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems” (5). University fetishism, a topic not addressed by the Things volume, is an underlying theme that is hard for the rest of us not to notice. Indeed, the sheer excess of jacket praise for both volumes leads one to wonder, not about the quality or interest of the volumes, but about a potential anxiety over the value accorded to universities and university presses in particular. As Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out as former president of MLA, there is a “crisis” in universities related to university presses as regards the criteria of promotion of faculty and the solvency of the presses themselves. Simply put, it is harder to publish “scholarly” books now than ever before, particularly as presses dream up ways to turn themselves into moneymaking operations. Some of the sillier books/series recently published by Routledge and MIT testify to the lengths which presses will go to in promoting style over substance.

<3> That said, so-called “thing theory” is a serious affair. In Brown’s introduction to Things, he suggests many potentially illuminating and even subversive elements related to this new interdiscipline, of which I have chosen four:

1) “Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects.”

2) “Heidegger believes that it is the English word thing that has preserved the ‘semantic power’ of the original Roman word res, which is to say its capacity to designate a case, an affair, an event.”

3) Thing theory “depends on a certain ‘methodological fetishism’ that refuses to begin with formal ‘truth’ that cannot, despite its truth, ‘illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things.’”

4) “In one of his neglected, slightly mad manifestos, Jean Baudrillard sanely declares that ‘we have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object.’”

All of these points are provocative instances of the idea that “thing theory” benefits not so much from being a theory as a research disposition, a willingness to confront the contingent event, disruptive materiality, and related threats to overarching theoretical systems. It must also be said, however, that these points have been made already by so-called “New Historicism,” which is sometimes hard to distinguish from Brown’s “sense of things.”

<4> One of the most disturbing things missing from the otherwise indispensable collection is any extended discussion of virtual things, particularly as manifested by contemporary digital technology. With the exception of Bruno Latour’s insightful paragraphs on Allan Turing, the essay’s topics begin to sound like a Surrealist’s Christmas list: “Shadows and Ephemera,” “The Glove,” “The Flapper Dress,” “The Camera,” “The Automaton.” Is there a certain nostalgia haunting thing theory, a longing for what one can touch, taste, and smell as well as conceptualize, even a refusal to acknowledge the virtuality of all things? Furthermore, does this oversight betray a certain bad faith regarding the virtuality of the fetishized university, a desire to believe that the Ivy League springs from the only firm and fertile ground? Doesn’t the authority of the old university in fact rely (at least conceptually) upon its solid, thing-like quality, while in the virtual university all bets are off? I once posed the question of the university’s possible virtualization (and dissolution) to a recently tenured Marxist scholar at Duke, who looked at me with a certain horror at the thought I might relish this updated version of the lunatics running the asylum. It suggested to me the deeply ingrained authoritarianism in academia, a structure seemingly immune to the most radical of ideologies. Indeed, nostalgia for the university seems to be coincident with its language, of which Derrida observed: “What this institution cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper with language. . . . It can bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of ‘content,’ if only that content does not touch the borders of language and of all the juridico-political contracts it guarantees.”

<5> But for that matter, Things seems lacking in revolutionary content as well. Surrealism (an obvious precursor as suggested above ) receives scant if delightfully anecdotal acknowledgment in the introduction. Marxism makes an appearance in Charity Scribner’s discussion of the fate of East German art at the hands of capitalist ideology, a tale that could read like a parable for the collection as a whole:

In August 1989, West German curators had organized “SED: Stunning Eastern Design” at the Habernoll Gallery near Frankfurt am Main. But this show merely lampooned the “pallid universe” of démodé East German consumer goods. The selection of GDR products depicted in the exhibitioon catalogue—from faded packets of vulcanized rubber condoms to cartons of Sprachlos (speechless) cigars—appears aimed to confirm the superior tastes of sophisticated Westerners. Later, in the early nineties, the Museum of German History on East Berlin’s Unter den Linden underwent a massive overhaul that entailed the closeting of displays such as one that juxtaposed Hegel’s spectacles with the first television set manufactured in the GDR. In 1996 the Museum of Working-Class Life packed up and relocated from the center of East Berlin to the peripheral district of Marzahn. To this day, most of its collection remains warehoused. (338)

If, as Scribner reminds us, fetishism as traditionally theorized involves a disavowal of some kind, then perhaps Marx is one of the major disavowals of the “methodological fetishism” of thing theory. Symptomatically, Brown’s introduction refers to the “Marxian script” and ends with a discussion of Claes Oldenburg’s gigantic sculpture of a typewriter eraser which “gleams in the new sculpture garden outside the National Gallery in Washington D.C.”(15).

<6> A similar erasure occurs in Brown’s A Sense of Things, where Marx’s Capital is disparaged in comparison to George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty! The opening chapter of Capital, with its discussion of the “sensuous” properties of the table, is described as “an especially poignant contradiction” in Marx’s thought (27). Marx is willfully simplified to provide a springboard for Brown’s “new” theory of the thing, which is always sensuous, often mysterious and magic, but never really abject. His book (and perhaps all books at this point) is made possible through a denial of abjection, of the object that is not really an object, whose most pressing form is digital technology, that world so threatening to the university and its hierarchical traditions. The praise on the dust-jacket of this very praiseworthy book, the elite field comprising the Things collection, seems almost like a closing of ranks at a time when that gesture may soon be futile. At the very least, it seems inimical to the kind of “thing” that Brown has chosen to valorize, which, as Latour points out, citing Heidegger, ceases to be a thing the moment it ceases to be a gathering.

<7> For the most part, both A Sense of Things and Things remain fascinating gatherings, valuable interventions in an academic world where theories are always dead on arrival. So, thing theory’s vitality depends on its resistance to the sort of theorization practiced by the Humanities and its openness to a variety of practices. I myself have tried to treat these to works in a manner analogous to what Brown would recommend (what does a dust-jacket say about a book and the ideas it contains?), which is in itself a testimony to my sympathy with the strategies represented by the thing theory. For every erasure Brown & Co. commit (usually erasures of things that, to be fair, are profligate enough to be found elsewhere), they pencil in a hundred other things of interest, and at least a dozen of such importance that we would be ill-advised to apply our own erasers too liberally.

Alan Clinton

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