COMM/FILM/PCUL 2F00: New Media Literacy Assignment Two (A2) - 25%

INTRODUCTION: THE THINGS THAT MATTER SherryTurkle Igrew up hoping that objects would connect me to the world.Asa child, Ispent many weekends at my grand­ parents' apartment inBrooklyn. Space there was lim­ ited, and all of the family keepsakes-including my aunt's and my mother's books, trinkets, souvenirs, and photo­ graphs-were stored ina kitchen closet, ~t high, just below the ceiling. I could reach this cache only by stand­ ing on the kitchen table that Imoved in front of the closet. This Ihad been given permission to do, and this is what Idid, from agesixtoage thirteen or fourteen, over and over, weekend after weekend. Iwould climb onto the table in the kitchen and take down everybook, every box. The rules were that Iwas allowed tolook at anything in the closet, but Iwas always to put itback. The closet seemed to me ofinfinite dimensions, infinite depth. Each object Ifound in the closet-every keychain, postcard, unpaired earring, high school textbook with its marginalia, some ofit my mother's, some of it my aunt's-signaled anew understanding of who they were and what they might be interested in; every photograph ofmy mother on adate or at adance became aclue to my possible identity. My biological father had been an absent figure since Iwas two. My mother had left him. We never spoke about him. Itwas taboo to raise the sub­ ject. Jdid not feel permitted to even think about the subject. My aunt shared the small apartment with my grandmother and grandfather, and sometimes one of them would come into the kitchen to watch me at my in­ vestigations. At the time I didn't know what Iwas look­ ing for. I think they did.I was looking, without awareness, for the one who was missing. Iwas lookingfora trace of my fAlher. But they had been there before me and got­ ten rid of any bits and pieces he might have left-an address book, a business card, arandom note. Once I found a photograph of aman standing on aboardwalk with his face cut out of the picture. Inever asked whose face itwas;Iknew. And! knew enough never to mention the photograph, for fear that it too would disappear. It was precious tome. The image had been attacked, but itcontained so many missing puzzle pieces. What his hands lookedlike. That he wore lace-up shoes. That his pants were (weed. If being attentive to the details ofpeople's lives might be considered avocation, mine was born in the smell and feel of the memory closet and its objects. That is where Ifound the musty books, photographs, corsages, and gloves that made me feel connected. That is where Idetermined that Iwould solve mysteries and that fwould use objects as my clues. Years from then, in the late 1960s, Istudied in Paris, immersed in the intellectual worldof French struc­ turalism. While fwas away, my grandparents moved out of their apartment, where the contents of the memory closet had been so safely contained. Much of the closet's contents were dispersed, sent to an organization that col­ leeted bookstobe read to the blind. Far away from home, I was distressed at the loss of the objects but somewhat comforted torealize that Inow had a set of ideas for thinking about them. In Paris, Iread the work of the an­ thropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who described brice­ lage as a way of combining and recombining aclosed set of materials to come up with new ideas. IMaterial things, for Levi-Strauss, were goods-to-think-with and, following the pun in French, theywere good-to-think-with as well.

While in France, Irealized that during my many hours with the memory closet I had done more than daydream ideas intoold photographs. When Ifirst met the notion of bricolage, it already seemed likeachildhood friend. 4 SherryThrkle Ideas about bricolage were presented to me in the cool,cognitive lightof French intellectual life. But the ob­ jects Itried to combine and recombine as achild had been clues for tracing my lost father, an experience of brico­ lage with ahigh emotional intensity. So, from my first introduction to the idea in the late 1960s, Ibegan to can· sider bricolnge as apassionate practice. We find itfamiliar to consider objects as usefulor aes­ thetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion ofevocative objects brings together these {{vo less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feelingin our relationship tothings. We think with the objects we love; welove the objects we think with.

In this collection ofQutobiographical essays, sci­ entists, humanists, artists, and designers trace the power of objects in their lives, objects that connect them to ideas and topeople. Some of the objects described in this book are natural: an apple. Some are artifacts: a train. Some were made by the author: aknot. Others were presented ready-made: The World Book Encyclope­ dia. Certain authors reflect on an object's role in asig­ nificant life transition-an object serves as amarker of relationship and emotional connection. In other essays, the balance shifts to how an object tied the author to in­ tellectuallife-to building theory. discovering science or art, choosing avocation. Inevery case, the object brings together intellect and emotion. Inevery case, the au­ thor's focus is not on the object's instrumental power­ how fast the train travels orhow fast the computer calculates-but on the object as acompanion in life ex­ perience: how the train connects emotional worlds,how the mental space between computer keyboard and screen creates asense oferotic possibility. TheThinga That Matter S This collection begins with essays on the theme of discovery and learning, and then, following the arc of the lifecycle, the essays discuss the opportunities and challenges of adulthood-the navigation of love and loss-and finally, the confrontation with transcendent issues such as spirituality and the sublime. Life, of course, is not lived in discrete stages, nor are the rela­ tionships with objects that accompany its journey. Ob­ jects have.liferoles that are multiple and fluid. We live our lives in the middle of things. Material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity. Yet only recently have objects begun toreceive the at­ tention they deserve.

The acknowledgment of the power ofobjects has not come easy.Behind the reticence to examine objects as centerpieces ofemotional life was perhaps the sense that one was studying materialism, disparaged as excess, or collecting, disparaged as hobbyism, or fetishism, dispar­ aged as peJVersion. Behind the reticenceto examine ob­ jects as centerpieces of thought was the valueplaced, at least within the Western tradition, on formal,proposi­ tional waysofknowing. In thinking about science,cer­ tainly, abstract reasoning was traditionally recognized as astandard, canonical style; many have taken itto be syn­ onymous with knOWledge altogether.

Indeed, sohighly valued was canonical abstract thinking, that even when concrete approaches were rec­ ognized, they were often relegated to the status of infe­ rior ways of knowing, or as steps on the road to abstract thinking. It is poignant that Claude Levi-Strauss and the psychologist Jean Piaget, who each in their way con­ tributed to a fundamental revaluation of the concrete in the mid-twentieth century, also undermined the con­ crete thinking they promoted. 2Piaget recognized that young children use astyle of concrete reasoning that was too efficacious tobe simply classified as ·wrong." His response was to cast children's "c1ose-to-the-object­ approach as astage ina progression toaformal think- 6 Sherry l\"kle ing style. 3Levi-Strauss recognized the primitive's brico­ lage as a science of the concrete that had much in com­ mon with the practice of modern-day engineers. He said he preferred tocall it"prior" rather than "premature"; yet itwas not fully equal. 4 Beginning in the 1980s, concrete ways of thinking were increasingly recognized in contexts that were not easily dismissed as inferior,even and perhaps especially in the world of science, the very place where the abstract style had been canonized. Scientific laboratories were shown to be places where discoveries are made ina con­ crete, ad hoc fashion, and only later recast into canoni­ cally accepted formalisms; Nobel laureates testified that '.. they related to their scientific materials in atactile and playful manner. STo this testimony from science studies was added the work of feminist scholars who docu­ mented the power of concrete, contextual reasoning in a wide range of domains. 6Indeed, there has been an in­ creasing commitment to the study of the concrete in a ronge ofscholarly communities.? To this conversation, Euoca.tive Objects contributes adetailed examination of particular objects with rich connections to daily life as well as intellectual practice. Each author has been asked 10 choose an object and follow its associations: where does ittake you; what do you feel; what are you able to understand? Ajeweled pin, simple, European, clearly of the old country, tiesa daughter to her mother and her mixed feelings about their immigrant status. An immersion in the comic books of youth teaches aman how to read the lessons of superheroes in midlife. Alonely graduate stu­ dent is comforted by her Ford Falcon. The car feels like her "clothing" in the world of the street, asignal of her taste and style. When she becomes amother, it'stime for a trade-in and aBMW station wagon. Some objects are experienced as part of the self, and for that have aspecial status: ayoung child believes her stuffed bunny rabbit can read her mind; adiabetic The Things That Matter 7 is at one with his glucometer. Other objects remind us of people we have JOSLe An artist dies, his collectionof Chinese scholars' rocks isleft behind. Arock of medita­ tion, "The Honorable Old Man" becomes apresence in the lifeof his widow, who describes itas she would her artist~husband-"obsession, looking, openness to being surprised and moved, dignity." Most objects exert their holding power because of the particular moment and circumstance in which they come into the author's life. Some, however, seem intrin­ sically evocative-for example, those witha quality we might call uncanny. Freud said we experience as un· canny those things that are "known ofold yet unfamil­ iar. "9 The uncanny is not what is most frightening and strange. It is what seems close, but "off," distorted enough tobe creepy. Itmarks acomplex boundary that both draws us in and repels, as when, in this collection, a museum mummy becomes an author's uncanny "double." Other objects are naturally evocative because they remind us of the blurry childhood line between self and other-think of the stuffed bunny whose owner be­ lieves it can read her mind 1°_or because they are as. sociated with times of transition. Transitional times (called "liminal," or threshold, periods by the anthropol­ ogistVictor Turner) are rich with creative possibility.ll In this collection, wefollow a young man from the Aus­ tralian outback as he boards the Melbourne train, fi­ nallya passenger on along-imagined journey. On the train, poised between states of being, everything solid and known can becalled into question Evocative objects bring philosophy downto earth. When wefocus on objects, physicians and philosophers, psychologists and designers, artists and engineers are able tofind common ground in everyday experience. Each narrative in this collection is paired witha short excerpt drawn from philosophy, history, litera­ ture, or socialtheory. The authors of these excerpts 8 Sharrytl.ulli. range fromLewis Thomas to Umberto Eco,from William James to Susan Sontag. These texts begin to describe the kinds of connections that help us investi­ gate the richness of objects as thought companions, as life companions.

The excerpted theorists engage the essays across awide runge of ideas. 1have already noted some. There is the power of boundary objects and thegeneral prin­ ciple thatobjects areactive lifepresences. Uvi-Strauss speaks of tinkering; Jean Piaget, of the child as scien­ tist.With different metaphors, each describes a dy­ namic relationship between things and thinking. We tie a knot and find ourselves in partnership witlf-string in our exploration of space. Objects are able to catalyze self-creation. When IgorKopytoff writes about the "biog­ raphy ofthings," he deepens our understanding of how a new car becomes anew skin, ofhow a change ofjewelry can become its own voyage toa new world. Objects bring together thought and feeling. In particular, objects of science are objects of passion. Essayists who raise this issue are paired with writings from philosophy (1m· manuel Kant and Edmund Burke, on nature's sublime) and also from anthropology (Mary Douglas, on the pas­ sion behind our need to classify).

I have also touched on the idea that we often feel at one with ourobjects. The diabetic feels at one with his glucometer, as increasingly wefeel at one with the glowing screens of our laptops, our iPods, and our BlackBerries. Theorists as diverse as Jean BaudriUard, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Karl Marx, and D. W. Winnicott invite us to better understand these object in­ timacies.

Indeed, in the psychoanalytic tradition, both per· sons and things are tellingly called"objects" and suggest that we deal with their loss in asimilar way. For Freud, when weJose abeloved person or object, webegin apro­ cess that, ifsuccessful, ends in our finding them again, The Thing' That Maller 9 within us. Itis, in fact, how we grow and develop as people. When objects arelost. subjects arefound. Freud's language ispoetic: "the shadow of the object felI upon the ego." The psychodynamic tradition-in its narrative of how we make objects part of ourselves-offers alan­ guage for interpreting the intensity of our connections to the world of things, and for discovering the similari­ ties in how we relate to the animate and inanimate. In each case, we confront the other and shape the self.

For me, working with these ideas, editing this book, combining the narratives with literary and theo­ retical texts, and seeing them refracted through differ­ ent prisms, became its own object discipline, my own practice of bricolage. In this sense, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With became for me an evocativeobject.

Its elements were new, but the activity of working on it was familiar, as familiar as carefully handling the ob­ jects in the memory closet Iknew as achild. Walt Whitman said: "A child went forth everyday/ and the first object he look'd upon, that object he be· came." With generosity of intellect and spirit, the au­ thors in this collection engage with the objects of their lives. For every object they have spun aworld. They show us what they looked upon and what became the things that mattered. 10 Sherry Thrkle Objects of Design and Play .'f"~'