Le sujet nait de l'objet. —Michel Serres

Is there something perverse, if not archly insistent, about complicating things with theory? Do we really need anything like thing theory the way we need narrative theory or cultural theory, queer theory or discourse theory? Why not let things alone? Let them rest somewhere else—in the balmy elsewhere beyond theory. From there, they might offer us dry ground above those swirling accounts of the subject, some place of origin unmediated by the sign, some stable alternative to the instabilities and uncertainties, the ambiguities and anxieties, forever fetishized by theory. Something warm, then, that relieves us from the chill of dogged ideation, something concrete that relieves us from unnecessary abstraction.

The longing for just such relief is described by A. S. Byatt at the outset of The Biographer's Tale (2000). Fed up with Lacan as with deconstructions of the Wolf-Man, a doctoral student looks up at a filthy window and epiphanically thinks, "I must have things." He relinquishes theory to relish the world at hand: "A real, very dirty window, shutting out the sun. A thing."

In the last century, this longing became an especially familiar refrain. "Ideas," Francis Ponge wrote, shortly after World War II, "give me a queasy feeling, nausea," whereas "objects in the external world, on the other hand, delight me." If, more recently, some delight has been taken in historicism's "desire to make contact with the 'real,"' in the emergence of material culture studies and the vitality of material history, in accounts of everyday life and the material habitus, as in the "return of the real" in contemporary art, this is inseparable, surely, from the very pleasure taken in "objects of the external world," however problematic that external world may be—however phantasmatic the externality of that world may be theorized to be. These days, you can read books on the pencil, the zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat. These days, history can unabashedly begin with things and with the senses by which we apprehend them; like a modernist poem, it begins in the street, with the smell "of frying oil, shag tobacco and unwashed beer glasses. "Can't we learn from this materialism instead of taking the trouble to trouble it? Can't we remain content with the "real, very dirty window"—a "thing"—as the answer to what ails us without turning it into an ailment of its own?

Fat chance. For even the most coarse and commonsensical things, mere things, perpetually pose a problem because of the specific unspecificity that "things" denotes. Mind you, for Ponge, objects may seem substitutable for things, and by "siding with things" (le parti pris des choses) he meant to take the part of specified objects-doorknobs, figs, crates, blackberries, stoves, water. But the very semantic reducibility of things to objects, coupled with the semantic irreducibility of things to objects, would seem to mark one way of recognizing how, although objects typically arrest a poet's attention, and although the object was what was asked to join the dance in philosophy, things may still lurk in the shadows of the ballroom and continue to lurk there after the subject and object have done their thing, long after the party is over. When it comes to Ponge, in fact, the matter isn't so simple as it seems. Michael Riffaterre has argued that the poems, growing solely out of a "word-kernel" (mot-noyau), defy referentiality; Jacques Derrida has argued that, throughout the poet's effort "to make the thing sign," the "thing is not an object [and] cannot become one." Taking the side of things hardly puts a stop to that thing called theory.

"Things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project." That's how Leo Stein schematically put it. Although the experience of an encounter depends, of course, on the projection of an idea (the idea of encounter), Stein's scheme helps to explain the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut. These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're "caught up in things" and that the "body is a thing among things." They are occasions of contingency-the chance interruption—that disclose a physicality of things. In Byatt's novel, the interruption of the habit of looking through windows as transparencies enables the protagonist to look at a window itself in its opacity. As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture—above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things." We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.

excerpted from "Thing Theory" by Bill Brown, Critical Enquiry 28 (Autumn 2001)