Bill Brown

Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny

175 This essay is a belated response to a question posed by Jay Fliegelman about object culture and thinghood in the U.S. For their responses to previous versions of the argument, there are audiences I should thank, and individuals I’ll thank here: Sara Blair, Eduardo Cadava, Edgar Dryden, Frances Ferguson, Jacqueline Goldsby, Scottie Parrish, Eric Slauter, Bärbel Tischleder, and Christina Zwang. 1. See Peter Schwenger, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis, forthcoming); Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York, 2004); Elaine Freedgood, Ideas in Things: Realism, Fetishism, Fugitive Meaning (Chicago, forthcoming); and “The Secret Life of Things,” touring exhibition sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts (2003), including work by Clare Baldwin, Elouise Brear, Jonathan Carson, and Rosie Miller. Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny

Objects, Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things)

George Stocking, the historian of anthropology, edited and published Objects and Others in 1985. That was the year after New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged its blockbuster show “‘Primitivism’ in TwentiethCentury Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” which provoked a steady, indeed roaring, stream of commentary. The essays Stocking collected on “museums and material culture” were historical, “institutionally oriented studies, focusing on what has been called the ‘Museum Period’ in the history of anthropology” (1880–1920) while raising decidedly broader issues—about the “relationship of humanist culture and anthropological culture, and of ethnic artifact and fine art; and most generally the representation of culture in material objects.”2 The Stocking collection was ask-

The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)

As a way of restaging certain questions about postmodernity (is it marked by rupture or repetition, or is it all illusory?), this essay imagines Fredric Jameson’s iconic disorientation at the Bonaventure Hotel as a reenactment of Dante’s crisis in the selva oscura. That imaginative act allows one to see how a nonmodern measure makes postmodernism visible (the concept of “cognitive mapping,” for instance, derives from Kevin Lynch’s appreciation of the urban fabric of Florence). And it allows one to perceive how Jameson’s response to our contemporary condition assumes a Dantean cast, becoming an incorporative act of totalizing, manifest stylistically and conceptually, that deploys allegory to transcode phenomena into the terms of the dominant system. To what degree does the internalization of such a hermeneutic enterprise (a medieval Christian legacy) render religion as such imperceptible, compelling us to perceive acts committed in the name of Islam as merely a displacement of (proper) politics?

Counting (Art and Discipline)

My title, “Counting,” is not meant to caption the phenomenon that sounds like this: 103,002 divided by 6 is 17,167. It is meant to caption a phenomenon that sounds more interrogative: How exactly am I supposed to count that? Are we expected to count that the way we count this? Should you really count those? For the moment, my mise-en-scene situates a relatively well-dressed dean (the requisite tweed, but a skinny striped tie) in a relatively wellappointed office (mahogany veneer) where two large black portfolios sit on a kind of credenza. There too sits a red three-ring binder containing fifteen sheets of slides, accompanied by one CD, and a slim folder of short but spirited reviews. This is work that needs to be evaluated in some relation to—and on the same grounds as—a cluster of articles on Aristotelian ethics in the medieval world, a monograph on Italian futurism and Italian film, and a study of experimentation, scientific and literary, in the English eighteenth century. Here, in this scene, the incommensurability of the practice of what we call scholarship and the practice of what we call art becomes abruptly conspicuous and demands to be overcome. It must be overcome within the political economy of higher education, wherein, of course, answering the question of what counts and how it counts turns into the sound of that other counting: assigning value in contractual, numerical terms— conferring an appointment, a promotion, tenure, a housing allowance, a raise, a research and travel account, one or two semesters of leave, technological support, better space. Crude as the scene may be, it is where, as Harry Harootunian puts it, departments and disciplines are pitted against one another in a zero-sum game, where the transgressions called theory and interdisciplinarity have come under siege, where the humanities has begun to chant its rediscovery

The Bodies of Things

Tertius Lydgate, the doctor who arrives in Middlemarch as an ambitious medical reformer, has been an obsessive reader of Rasselas as of Gulliver. Indeed, by the age of ten, the already precocious lad had read ‘Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk’.1 This is to say that he has read those adventures Wherein are Exhibited Views of Several Striking Scenes, with Curious and Interesting Anecdotes of the most Noted Persons in Every Rank of Life, whose Hands it Passed through, in America, England, Holland, Germany, and Portugal. The novel proved so popular that it was reprinted three times before Charles Johnstone expanded it into a four-volume edition in 1764, and so esteemed that it was collected in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library in 1822, just a decade before the events of Middlemarch (1872) take place. Though Jonathan Swift may buoyantly breach the human-nonhuman divide in Gulliver’s Travels, Johnstone’s guinea goes so far as to tell its own tale (and the tales of those humans through whose hands or pockets it travels), comfortably inhabiting a literary subgenre in which things become persons — or at least sound and behave rather like them. This is the subgenre of the object autobiography, popular in France as in England, and now widely designated the ‘it-narrative’, whose protagonists — shoes, quills, coats, cats, dogs, cork-screws, coaches, kites, canes, pins, and any number of coins, most famously the gold guinea Chrysal — assume not only authorship but considerable authority when it comes to assessing the lives of humans.2