Shifting things: Objects as contradictory partners in life writing

Abstract

Evocative objects, suggests Sherry Turkle (2007), demonstrate the inseparability of thought and emotion in our relationships to certain objects. This is even more the case with objects that have become things, untethered from and exceeding their everyday use. There is a comforting solidity about things that offers a contrast to the shifting consciousness of the writer. But then things, too, begin to morph and shift: childhood objects opening an infinity of stories, the cracked teacup conjuring another time and place, people now dead. Life writing from and through things both dramatises and contests dualities such as self and other, order and chaos, exposure and concealment. This essay follows things and draws on thing theory and contemporary material culture studies to explore the way evocative objects become contradictory partners in life writing.