Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory

Abstract

It used to be that living were mainly found in eighteenth-century speaking-object narratives. Scholars interested in talkative objects might have stretched a point to include late-nineteenth-century commodity fetishes and horror films. No longer. What is coming to be called thing theory urges us to take our account of that talk as far back as Hieronymous Bosch monsters (in Joseph Koerner's persuasive Bosch's Equipment), and as far afield as Rorschach blots and the exemplary soap bubbles (anatomized in Simon Schaef fer's A Science Whose Business Is Bursting) by which late Victorian physicists demonstrated universal laws of molecular behavior to bedazzled audiences (both articles appear in Lorraine Daston's impressive new collection, Things That Talk). Defining what one even means by talking about things can rapidly become an arcane dispute, especially when waged by scholars quoting and counterquoting Heidegger's chewy phenomenological account of the thingness of things. But ordinary language can provide some useful guidance here. Harriet Beecher Stowe's original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Man Who Was a Thing, is