#thingtheory

“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, how- ever 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.

Thing theory is a branch of critical theory that focuses on human–object interactions in literature and culture. It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, which claims that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer serve its common function.

Heidegger’s main interest was ontology or the study of being. He claimed philosophy and science since ancient Greece had reduced things to their presence, which was a superficial way of understanding them. Heidegger discusses this matter through the example of a handmade ceramic jug. What he want to know is what this thing is? What is a jug? The jug as we use it, as an object, is made of a specific material (ceramic material), and has a function. But do these qualities define the jug as a thing? Heidegger argues that these are derived from a fundamental ‘thingness’, and that the jug’s ‘thingness’ is in fact the void inside it. The jug shapes the void, which in turn shapes the jug. He is saying that the “thing” in this case in the negative space in the jug. 

In Bill Brown’s essay he wrote for Critical Theory he writes “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets 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 relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”