Thing Theory: On Humble Objects and Wild Things

Things are a time-honored interest of Western culture and its philosophical, historical, and social debate—from the Kantian/transcendental “Ding an sich” and its repercussions in the works of Nietzsche, Adorno, and Heidegger, to Michel Foucault's poststructuralist critique in Les mots et les choses (1966) or the postmodern sociology of Jean Baudrillard in Le système des objets (1968). In more recent years, things have triumphantly reemerged in the wider field of cultural studies. The angles and disciplines from which scholars tackle the phenomenon are manifold. Anthropology, the field traditionally associated with material culture studies, has seen publications such as Daniel Miller's (2005) Materiality, which replenished the discipline's well-established discussion of “the social life of things” (Appadurai 1986). Other productive areas of research are found, for example, in the history of science, with Lorraine Daston's (2004) Things That Talk. Gathering “object lessons from art and science,” Daston proposes a “thinking with things,” instead of a mere thinking about things (20; emphasis added).