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Secret Life Things

1999 in Modernism/Modernity, Bill Life, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)”

Intro/Basics

• whether we have been “in the midst of an effort to think about the object, if not indeed to liberate material objects”
• Jean Baudrillard: “who denounces the way that the object, because it is considered ‘only the alienated, accursed part of the subject,’ has been rendered unintelligible, ‘shamed, obscene, passive.’ Undoing the privilege of the subject is not for him a matter of attending to the subject’s fraught, fragile, and divisive constitution. It is a matter of imagining how the ‘destiny of the subject passes into the object,’ of naming the object ‘sovereign,’ of celebrating the crystal’s revenge, indeed ‘crystal revenge.’Fatal Strategies
  • As opposed to Theodor Adorno warning against “allergies to entity,” when you don’t recognize that there can be no “primeval history of the object,” only a history “dealing with specific objects.” Adorno says to get to materialism, you have to see that subject/object is diff from “things.” which can’t be “exhausted” via subject/object
    • B/c sensation is the realm of the thing, while cognition is the realm of the object
    • Though Adorno later found a “somatic moment” when you do recognize things
• Where Brown ends up in this argument: subject/object is “where they can be narrated as the effect (not the ground) of an interaction at once physical and psychological, at once intimate and alienating. To the degree that the ‘thing’ registers the undignified mutability of objects, and thus the excess of the object (a capacity to be other than it is), the “thing” names a mutual mediation (and a slide between objective and subjective predication) that appears as the vivacity of the object’s difference from itself.”
  • thing is “sliding” from subject to object in the mind
• We should “Deauaratize” the thing, look at it in its banality
• Objects: within consciousness; construed
• Things: in their thingness: “a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is. Thingness is precipitated as a kind of misuse value. By misuse value I mean to name the aspects of an object—sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic—that become legible, audible, palpable when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes (in whatever time it is) for an object to become another.”
  • “the thing becomes manifest between multiple objectifications.” (using or seeing it in a diff way, as a diff kind of objects)
  • seems to me like he’s trying to get to ostranenie (defam): “for the first time” you understand their physical properties, and for the first time you understand the norms that were behind its use
  • yet he doesn’t want to sound like he’s unveiling or anything: “not a life behind or beneath the object but a life that is its fluctuating shape and substance and surface, a life that the subject must catalyze but cannot contain”

Woolf

• “1920s, the decade when things emerge as the object of profound theoretical engagement in the work of Georg Luk�cs, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, and which is the decade after objects and things are newly engaged by (or as) the work of art for Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Williams, Gertrude Stein.”
• Woolf, “Solid Objects”
  • “about the fluidity of objects, about how they decompose and recompose themselves as the object of a new fascination.” where they are “transvaluated”
  • “dislocating material—nothing but glass—from an instrumentalist teleology and into an aesthetic scene”
  • “private, inconspicuous display”
  • “A small, critical consensus, however, reads ‘Solid Objects’ as a cautionary tale warning against aesthetic absorption at the expense of the practical, the ethical, the political.”
    • Brown: sure, Woolf didn’t fall into what Clive Bell called “the cowiness of cows,” however she wasn’t so jazzed about Parliament so how can you read it as a tragedy?
  • “not just embedded within a trajectory of English aesthetics (John Ruskin to Roger Fry) or a genealogy of modernism (say T. E. Hulme’s ‘poetics of sensual immediacy and fragmentary vision’), but also embedded between the domestic crisis of wartime scarcity in London and the postwar industrial crisis provoked by the British commitment to free trade.”
    • Wow! Cool.
    • “a history of the senses fundamentally altered by the facts of wartime scarcity and postwar depression.”
      • Woolf couldn’t get her paints b/c oil was being used for gun manufacture, and paintings were being stuffed underground for safekeeping
    • “western world’s misuse of material for martial ends”
• “if Simmel was right to argue, circa 1900, that the increased access to things that characterizes modernity results in the loss of the thingness of things…” then how can literature “compensate” for this loss?
  • Simmel: “the ability to dominate things is coupled with the inability to establish contact with things”
• His Ultimate Points:
  • “might thus be read as moralizing against such materialist fascinations, if it does not rather, as I’ll suggest, investigate a different kind of fascination, indeed a kind of fetishism that seems like an alternative mode of inhabiting modern culture. By consecrating the valueless material object, such fetishism confounds political economy’s account of value, alienates itself from any enlightenment horror of waste, and settles happily into an unhuman (not antihumanist) history.”
    • Absolutely, I like how he pays attention to how people try to set up their own systems of value. But I hope he doesn’t say this too clearly so I’m allowed to say it again….
    • she shows the new opportunity as well as its risk
• Here’s how he shows that John’s desire is outside commodity fetishism, thus reminding us that not all desire for the object is desire for the commodity: “irreducible to consumer desire or the structure of cathexis described by psychoanalysis; it instead testifies to the enigmatic excess that characterizes the physical world”
  • esp b/c he wants the “bits and pieces”
  • ends by suggesting it’s a manifestation of the death drive

William James, Principles of Psychology

• We see things in their “full physicality” only out of habit
• Habitual objects “plough deep grooves in the nervous system,” ie we have a neural pathway that will work for us as grayness, thinness, and that’s what we “conjure up” when we look at an object
• However, at some moments we trade this easy comprehensibility for a precision and vividness of perception: “the colors grow richer and more varied, we don’t understand the meaning of the painting, but, to compensate for the loss, we feel more freshly the value of the mere tints and shadings”
  • perception and sensation are not the same, they’re two diff channels: “two distinct, dynamic, intertwined materializations” where sensation starts the process and perception picks it up
  • in daily life, perception takes precedence over sensation
• Objecthood: “apperceptive constitution of the thing”
• Thinghood: “emerges in the moment (and no doubt only as a moment) of reobjectification that is a kind of misuse—turning the picture bottom up, standing on one’s head”
• Sensation is thus more a a pattern of habit v disruption
• Apply to Woolf
  • “literal fragments become objects without any of the coherence or familiarity we associate with objects.”
  • John is a bricoleur, “speak[ing] not only with things . . . but also through the medium of things,” (That’s a Levi-Strauss quote)
  • As John re-experiences these things and actually has sensuous experiences, he begins using them to create fantasies
  • And the glass is less an object than John getting in touch with material (instead of a glass bottle, it’s just … glass)

A Short History of Modernists on Material

• Otto Wagner, 1895, on future architecture: “the prominent use of materials in a pure state”
• “Marinetti’s futurist cult of metals”
• Ernst J�nger’s “poems of steel,”
• Fry
  • “repeatedly argued on behalf of the aesthetic importance of compositional substance, singling out the fate of china. He objected to Wedgwood…because it set ‘a standard of mechanical perfection which to this day prevents the trade from accepting any work in which the natural beauties of the material are not carefully obliterated by mechanical means.’”
  • “Describing the inappropriate use of material to fashion all the Victorian objets that ‘gratify fatuous curiosity,’ and appeal to ‘social emotions’ rather than ‘aesthetic feelings,’ he concludes that ‘the use of material at this period seems to be the least discriminating, and the sense of quality feebler, than at any previous period of world history.’” (Athanaeum, “The Ottoman and the Whatnot”)
  • “The Artist’s Vision:” while children “look at things with some passion,” the adult “retains” (that’s Brown’s word) “something of this unbiological, disinterested vision,” like in collections where he sees that collector has been seeing things “which have some marked peculiarity of appearance that catches his eye.”
    • and “We were given our eyes to see things, not to look at them”
• Stuff in Orlando about collections, 18th c v. Victorian
  • And Woolf had commented before on “the English unaesthetic eye,” “a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes.”
  • And Woolf in Street Haunting: “within our rooms, we are ‘surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.’ Thus a whole morning spent in Italy, the iron table and the breeze and the vines and the pillars, ‘rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece,’ a bowl purchased during an Italian holiday.”
• His quote from Baudelaire picks up on my own curiosity about how the residual might actually in some ways, at least through fantasy, LOOK LIKE an emergent
  • “With a logic learned from The Eighteenth Brumaire, Benjamin imagines that the decorative use of iron, rather than its structural deployment, marks the way novelty first emerges in and depends on residual form, which is the way social dissatisfaction with the present expresses itself in a citational longing for the future, a longing that cites a past that is anterior to the recent past: ‘These tendencies direct the visual imagination, which has been activated by the new, back to the primeval past.’” (Paris essay in Reflections)
    • Brown also notes that Benjamin associated children with “interested” and “Spontaneous” vision, whereas adults have the “Disinterested” eye (interest and disinterest do have a history in aesthetics…what did Kant say?
    • also said collector’s responsibility is “the Sisyphean task of obliterating the commodity-like characters of things,” out of “the drudgery of being useful” (Paris essay)
    • also “a universe where, as Benjamin would have it, interiors are legible in traces left by their occupants, and where collected objects contain for the collector elaborate narratives of their collection.” (diff from what Stewart says about collections and their narr quality? yes no? investigate)
  • mark of the residual is wish to escape the present
  • “how a collective unconscious “thinks” forward by thinking back to a classless society”
  • me: did this ambiguity fool poor Marx into seeing the future in the past? and that this past will never happen? (ie he looked in the past at the communist societies, and he assumed we’d get there again, but really this is just him being nostalgic? I’m not trying to indict him shallowly on wanting the past, but instead for making signs of the wish for the past a literal visual for the apparent future)

Back to Woolf

• ”’Solid Objects’ answers the problem of mechanical perfection by introducing the imperfection wrought by accident”
• an example of how you think yourself out of anthropocentrism: the piece of iron: “The utterly ordinary, which is also otherworldly, can be pocketed and domestically displayed without ever being domesticated.”
  • a way of having “historical imagination” where he can look to the prehistorical past, the “cosmological” in the “daily”
• “archaelogy of the modern” makes him go outside modern temporality
• Basically, a way to look at things that’s NOT its history of use or appropriation into art

Getting to theses now…

• Description of modernity: “the intensification of a basic perceptual process, or as a perceptual process that has become a social logic.”
• Which in 1920s is theorized
  • Luk�cs: reification “conceals above all the immediate—qualitative and material—character of things as things” (History and Class Consciousness)
  • For Heidegger, arguments like this aren’t solving the problem of finding an actual way to get back to (unreified) Being (Being and Time)
  • Benjamin, One Way Street: “children’s engagement with the material world reveals the capacity to transform things, bits of cultural detritus, into new things—a kind of recycling that never replicates the world as it is, but rather reminds us…that things might be other than they are”
    • On Surrealism: “in dreams we touch objects ‘precisely where they are most worn,’ where they are ‘eroded by habit.’ The dreamwork fails to recapacitate us as children, who never (according to habit) ‘take hold of a glass but [instead] reach right in.’” (which Brown calls “misuse” “misapprehension”)
• Woolf’s story: his experience with the object gets psychologized (becomes changed as a thing of the mind) but gives him new mode of experiencing the city, one that makes him sensitive to form, move in a new way and go to new places
  • Like me, he sees reciprocal transformation in this, just like Raymond Williams’ explanation of what mediation truly means
• Consumer desire?
  • “The story’s ambiguity has everything to do with the proximity or specularity of, on the one hand, the life of things, and, on the other, commodity culture as usual. For John is in what would be recognizable as the throes of consumer desire…”
• What is the secret life of things? “a literalization of our alienation as Simmel described it, where, ‘by their independent, impersonal mobility,’ objects ‘complete the final stage of their separation from people.’” (Philosophy of Money)
  • Understanding this, working through the recognition of alienation is, as Adorno said, the first step to ethics (Negative Dialectics: thingness as “radical evil” will let you be “hostile to otherness” that is to alienation
• Simmel v Adorno
  • Simmel: it’s a problem that “objects and people have become separated from one another,” that objects can’t be “assimilated by the individual”
  • Adorno: this “will-to-assimilation” (Brown’s words) is the bad thing, damning the “imperialism of annexing the alien,” and saying it won’t work anyway b/c it will always be other
  • (Me: of course you can hold that these views are not mutually exclusive, if you see it in the right light, that is, that for Simmel objects need to be known in their place in social relations, which isn’t about imperializing all over things, but instead about uncovering the social)
  • He shows there’s a place between Adorno and Simmel b/c John’s collection in Woolf’s story collects but doesn’t assimilate: the fragment still has “a life of its own” (and indeed that’s the magic of the things for John)
• John liberates the objects by removing them from the narratives of the subjects who “owned” them: this means he’s escaping what Benjamin loves, and even what you see in some of Woolf’s other works, like Street Haunting, and esp. Jacob’s Room (metonymic room – which actually I’d say is a misnomer b/c you’re trusting the title!)
  • Ex: ambiguity of the meaning of thing either as action or things: “For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things—as indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware”
    • and “The overwhelming question for those left is what to do with the objects that linger…If, as Baudrillard would maintain, the subject’s destiny passes into the object, what is the object’s destiny beyond the life of the subject?”

This section I really need to think hard about and trace the sources for

• “Woolf came to believe that the birth of the novel as we know it, Robinson Crusoe, must be thought through the figure of the ‘large earthenware pot’ that she posits as an emblem of Daniel Defoe’s authority, which is fiction’s authority to overwhelm the reader with the wholeness of an imagined world, and to interrupt romantic fantasy with novelistic fact. ‘By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the universe into a harmony.’ In the power of the earthenware pot as Woolf imagines it, which is Defoe’s capacity to novelize the universe, there is something of Stevens’s jar on a hill in Tennessee, transforming the landscape around it, if not something of Heidegger’s jug, the thing that things the world”
• “Though the emphasis on the accidental shape of the china fragment might be said to ally the story with the dadaist and surrealist faith in the irrational and the contingent, the point is more that reevaluating the material world seems to depend on its re-use and on some violence that violates the coherence of the object.”

End, please

• War stuff: “In place of the dolorous voice of The Waste Land, shoring cultural fragments against the spiritual ruin of the cityscape, John serendipitously accretes material fragments within which he finds all the spirit he needs.”
  • And in the “glass famine” b/c of halted imports and b/c of conversion of factories for war use, and the fact that they were investigating glass production from British sand, which b/c of its composition would actually result in green glass, and the fact that John reaches into the sane and finds a lump of green glass, whoa!
  • So his “discovery” is actually “production”
    • what an amazing reconstruction
• “As Leonard Woolf revised this history, the industrial revolution and empire converged as an “intense preoccupation with material things,” a demand for raw materials, coupled with production technologies, that resulted in “the whole world [being] ransacked for mines and metals,” and in international competition for the control of resources.” (Imperialism and Civilization 1928)
  • Against this Virginia creates a counter-allegory: “the difference marked by the bricoleur’s confusion of ends and means, by an alternative economy where value results from a noninstrumental passion for things”
  • esp b/c the war had intensified the need for materials like scrap iron for more bombs, and steel…so the iron blob he finds is the “focus of a national and international obsession”
  • esp b/c government started campaign to get its citizens to gather scrap metal: a government-directed bricolage
    • Expanding this: “Duchamp first promoted his readymades when the making of any common object—a urinal, a bottle rack, a snow shovel—was threatened all over Europe by the requirements of martial manufacturing.”
    • Says that the surrealist attention to the abandoned had at least one of its inspirations in the GOVERNMENT attn towards it during wartime b/c scarcity of munitions materials
    • “In Argonauts of the Pacific, based on fieldwork done in New Guinea and North Melanesia during the war, Bronislaw Malinowski introduces ‘law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish’ by describing the function of apparently meaningless objects in the Kula. When Marcel Mauss revises those conclusions to emphasize the irrationality of such practices, he deliberately juxtaposes ‘irrational expenditure’ to the Western image of homo oeconomicus as ‘a calculating machine’ devoted to ‘frigid utilitarian calculation.’” (The Gift, 1967)
      • Mause: a gift economy just as stable as a competition economy (wow!)
      • Bataille celebrates this kind of “Depense”
• “alternative mode of experiencing scarcity”
• Mauss and Woolf:
  • “But Woolf’s image of reappropriating, valorizing, and aestheticizing waste, no less than his image of wasting valuable property, is underwritten by the sense that the economic reason of the West has been exhausted…the history of objects as we know it… will never challenge the Enlightenment’s history of itself. The challenge comes from the history of things, and from the histories in them.”
    • “to demonstrate how utterly pedestrian passions can be understood as a longing for the fragments of the West not to be reassembled as they previously had been.” (presumably, recycled as weapons)
• the opening zoom lens of the story is the change of sensation to perception
• “dynamizes the excess that characterizes any object”
• “he refuses to feel guilt about his new pleasure because rather than discovering one solid object or another, he in fact discovers some other desire.”

Method

• “discovering, in the history of objects, material desires, or the desire for material, that will forever be lost in the histories of consumer society or ethnographies of cultural exchange.”
• we can find a history of desire for the object (as he does via finding the story’s relation to the war – to historical events), but we shouldn’t believe that exhausts the object or its own history
• Types of materialism that we could look for for lit crit
  • how does material culture “impress” itself upon lit?
  • how does literature “imagine” materiality? esp insofar as our current modes of thinking marginalize it in favor of consumption, production etc?
    • “how, in history (how, in one cultural formation), human subjects and material objects constitute one another, and what remains outside the regularities of that constitution that can disrupt the cultural memory of modernity and modernism.”
    • this is the kind of work I’d do w/catalogic

Further Reading: the creation of value through coding and recoding

• The Social Life of Things (1986)
  • ie our daily exchanges have political valence that we need to recognize
• Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (1998)
• History from Things (1993)
• The Sex of Things (1996).
  • “responds to the imperative to know about material needs, wants, and desires.” – De Grazia
• Also, Stewart: souvenir keeps narrative in it, but the collection erases narrative from it

Me

• Should I write a modernist history of the critique of political economy?