Other Things

Bill Brown

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226283166
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

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.

Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 357n50

Abraham, Karl, 181, 188

Absalom! Absalom! (Faulkner), 240

Abulafia, 187

Acconci, Vito, 321n27

Achilles, Shield of, 1–8, 296

actants, 171, 251, 340n59

actor network theory, 171–72

Adorno, Theodor: on alienation, 65; on allergies to entity, 50; critics of mass culture influenced by, 228; on cult of the thing, 31, 309n27; on false afterlife of surrealism, 80–81, 112–13; on kitsch, 10, 218–19, 276; Minima Moralia, 234; on natural history, 349n44; on play, 234–35, 241; “Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” 219; on pseudo-individuality promised by culture industry, 276; on Simmel, 271–72, 346n11; on somatic moment, 313n2

Adventures of the Rupee, The (Scott), 170, 257

aesthetics: Dada rejects the aesthetic, 88; Duchamp’s Fountain and, 356n46; of everyday life, 9, 116; material, 83; of meaning, 83; and politics, 56, 82; Simmel on aesthetic and utilitarian value, 30, 31; transcultural, 347n24

Aesthetics (Hegel), 122

African Americans: black collectibles, 219, 251–60, 262, 269; black dolls, 265–66; slavery, 247–50, 257, 254, 260, 263, 264, 360n24; in Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age, 263–64

African artifacts, 212–13, 254

After Finitude (Meillassoux), 164

“Afterthoughts by the Author” (Dick), 332n29

Agamben, Giorgio, 277

agency: abandoning subject-object dichotomy and locating human, 168; actants, 171, 251, 340n59; freedom of, 7–8, 171; Latour on, 172; of the nonhuman, 135; object, 7, 132, 135, 137, 165, 171; of object world, 167, 226; proliferation of new agential objects, 13; of slaves, 248; of things, 6, 32; in Woolf’s “Solid Objects,” 59

Air Jordan sneakers, 210, 213–14, 215, 217

Air Native N7 sneakers, 350n55

Ai Weiwei, 295

alienation: Adorno on, 65; Arendt on Descartes and, 163; and the uncanny, 261

allohistory, 128

altern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Overture (The Shield of Achilles)
• One Things—in Theory
• I The Matter of Modernism
• II Unhuman History
• III Kitsch Kulchur
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index