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06/29/2004 Archived Entry: "Things"

Via a Edbauer citation, read Bill Brown's "Thing Theory" today, actually, right after reading through a found 1999 piece by Francis Davis on Bob Dylan. The two in juxtaposition work well regarding material rhetoric.

If thing theory sounds like an oxymoron, then, it may not be because things reside in some balmy elsewhere beyond theory but because they lie both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable yet illegible remainder or as the entifiable that is unspecifiable. Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects. If this is why things appear in the name of relief from ideas (what's encountered as opposed to what's thought), it is also why the Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates.

Things pose a great deal not just for popular culture like Bob Dylan songs (quick aside): from "Highway 61 Revisited" - "I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done" and
"I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things."

Things also comprise the Web in a Benjamin Arcades sort of way - a gallery of material objects linked to in complex assemblages, a network of fragmented moments, concepts, images, and "things." The topic sentence, too, is based on a thing - a reference to something specific thus marking the project we identify as literacy - but it's something else. It's a forced thing. A thing that isn't there and then considered, but artificially constructed out of an assignment's imagination, and not the writer's. But the digital thing – what I like to call the “whatever” – is based on elusiveness, like Barthes’ punctum, or Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”:

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "NOW"
And you say, "For what reason?"
And he says, "How?"
And you say, "What does this mean?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home"