Theory of every thing

They're also pretty simple things to place -- whether in our daily lives or in our understanding of history. In two recent collections of scholarly essays -- "Things" (Chicago), edited by Bill Brown, and "Things that Talk" (Zone), edited by Lorraine Daston -- we find more eccentric things, but things nonetheless: the Bialetti espresso maker; Renaissance gloves; the Russian constructivist flapper dress; glass flowers; soap bubbles; even a "defecating duck" constructed for an 18th-century French king as a thought experiment. Are we witnessing the birth of a new field -- thing studies? Do things lend concreteness to theory-weary literary criticism? Is this a kind of materialism a Marxist could love? Or is it only so much window shopping?

"Even the most coarse and commonsensical things," writes Brown, professor of English at the University of Chicago, "perpetually pose a problem because of the specific unspecificity that `things' denotes."

Whatever their unspecificity, their specificity is certainly interesting. Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, recounts some of the paradoxes of the famous glass flowers in Harvard's Museum of Natural History. They were crafted of glass rather than wax for the sake of permanence, which means that extraordinary care must be taken whenever they (rarely) travel. The flowers, which Harvard acquired from the Blaschka family over decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, found detractors among students of ferns and other asexually reproducing plants, who criticized what they saw as an unscientific emphasis on aesthetic (read: sex) appeal. And yet their fragile beauty has also won them friends.

The relationship between aesthetic beauty and utilitarian function -- and the friendly intimacy we have with things -- is a recurring theme in these two books. In her essay on the Russian flapper dress, Columbia University art historian Christina Kiaer shows how female artists in post-revolutionary Russia walked a fine line between fashion and utility in their dress designs, promoting dresses that appealed to consumer desires yet functioned comfortably for women working in factories. (Soviet theorists even imagined the dresses as quasi-animate "co-workers.")

In his essay "The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum," Stanford Humanities Laboratory director Jeffrey T. Schnapp tells us how the Bialetti Moka Express, made of Italy's "national metal," aluminum, came to prominence through the promotion of domesticity in the 1950s. Every home could be a cafe, and even the average husband could learn to make coffee with a simple stovetop espresso maker.

. . .

Scholars have written about things before, of course. Historians of science and technology have studied the life and times of the cotton gin and the Parisian Metro. And art history has always dealt with material objects -- from highbrow sculpture to the decoration of utilitarian bedspreads to the design of the Rolls Royce (subject of a classic essay by the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky). Duchamp's readymades and Warhol's Brillo boxes -- not to mention a whole exhibit at the Guggenheim devoted to motorcycles in 1998 -- have blurred the boundaries between humble thing and art object and made us more aware of the ways in which identity is interwoven with material objects.

While art history and the history of science are represented in "Things" and "Things that Talk," the two volumes also show that a preoccupation with things is reaching its tentacles into fields more commonly preoccupied with words. Many of the contributors are English professors and other literary types, and writing about physical objects, strangely, seems to make literary criticism more poetic rather than more prosaic. In a field frequently filled with abstractions and jargon, to write instead of a pebble or a jug seems crisp, eloquent, unpretentious.

But the authors of these essays, while taking pleasure in the physical qualities of their intriguing objects, aren't content simply to turn them over in their hands -- or not literally, anyway. The concrete quickly gives way to the theoretical. "Thing theory," as Brown calls it, helps explain a wide range of relationships between people and things. Much of this explaining involves animating things, making them "talk," in ways that seem to involve a good dose of what anthropologists call magical thinking. The point, however, is that our ordinary ways of dealing with material things are already imbued with this kind of magic.

Critics well-versed in Marx's ideas about the commodity might wonder whether "thing theory" amounts to anything more than a scholarly shopping trip. But they might also think it should be the thing theorist's job to pierce the mystery of the commodity by restoring an awareness of its origins in human labor. Most of these essays, it's true, fix their gaze far from the laborer's hands and the factory floor. But in some cases it's because the things themselves are anything but commodified objects of alienated labor. (Take the single-minded obsessiveness of the Blaschka family, who meticulously created each glass flower by hand and would sell them only to Harvard.) Besides, Marx had no problem with sensual enjoyment of things -- it was the commodity's meretricious aura, the desirable human qualities falsely attributed to it, not the material qualities of the object itself, that bothered him.

Via Heidegger, German philosophy also supplies the notion of the thing that becomes visible to us only when it stops functioning smoothly -- the hammer that only becomes visible to us in its hammer-ness when it's broken, for example. Or perhaps when we don't know how to use it: Might it only be intellectuals who are quite so fascinated with things, because we don't know how to get them to work, or find it quaint to be confronted with a hammer and nail?

So, are "thing studies" the next big. . . thing? Joking aside, it's almost impossible to write about a "thing" trend in scholarly writing without getting tangled in one's own words. "Thing" is almost maddeningly flexible. Colloquially, things are not just physical objects but ideas, words, fleeting thoughts, states of affairs, and actions. As a teenager's retort to a prying parental query, "things" might just as well be "nothing." And the next thing you know, there's the thing I like best about you, or that thing I always forget to do. Much as we might like things to lend their solidity and presence, their sensuality, to the airier realms of the humanities, "things" just keep dissolving into abstraction. But perhaps that's what makes them so fascinating.

Rebecca Zorach's book "Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance" will be published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.