THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

But 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: Dr. Seuss's Thing One and Thing Two.13

On the one hand, then, the thing baldly encountered. On the other, some thing not quite apprehended. Could you clarify this matter of things by starting again and imagining them, first, as the amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject, the anterior physicality of the physical world emerging, perhaps, as an aftereffect of the mutual constitution of subject and object, a retroprojection? You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects--their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems. Temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects). But this temporality obscures the all-at-onceness, the simultaneity, the object/thing dialectic and the fact that, all at once, the thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it names some thing else.

See Also Daniel Cottom: On the Dignity of Tables (Summer 1988) Rudolf Arnheim: Art Among the Objects (Summer 1987)

If thing theory sounds like an oxymoron, then, it may not be because things reside in some balmy elsewhere beyond theory but because they lie both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable yet illegible remainder or as the entifiable that is unspecifiable. Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects. If this is why things appear in the name of relief from ideas (what's encountered as opposed to what's thought), it is also why the Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates.14

13. By hastily tracking some of the ways we use things to both mark and manage uncertainty, I am specifically not deploying an etymological inquiry to delimit and vivify the meaning of things. But see, most famously, Marcel Mauss, who finds in the best etymology of res a means of claiming that res "need not have been the crude, merely tangible thing, the simple passive object of transaction that it has become" (Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls [1950; New York, 1990], p. 50); and Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), pp. 174-82. I should add that 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 (p. 175). In turn, Michel Serres complains that such etymology--wherein objects exist "only according to assembly debates" shows how "language wishes the whole world to derive from language" (Michel Serres, Statues: Le Second Livre des fondations [Paris, 1987], p. 111).

14. See Jaques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960,volume 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1992), p.139. The Thing can only be "represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else" (p.129). For useful commentary, see Slavoj Zizek, "Much Ado about a Thing," For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor(London, 1991), pp. 229-78. Doctrinaire Lacanians may tell you that the Thing names only one thing in Lacan, but in fact it has different meanings and different valences in different texts and withing single texts.

Bill Brown, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago.