The Thing Itself

Abstract

ion My references to India and Indian society in the previous section could be taken to be quaintly anthropological, even Orientalist, in the sense that they appear to exceptionalize India as a kind of bazaar of thingness, as a civilization enamored of the Borgesian endlessness of its own object world. So let me suggest that I speak about India because I know a bit more about the luxuriance of objects in India. Of course, there are many societies, both contemporary and historical, which may be characterized in this manner, and the comparative question is an open one. In other words, when I say “India” I do not mean “only India.” But there is a trickier issue here: the issue of abstraction. The sort of profusion of objects that I have tried to describe as characterizing societies like India (to stress my reference to a category of places rather than to an Indian essence of some sort) is often seen as relentlessly closed to abstraction. The relevant oppositions here have a venerable history in Western philosophy, from Plato to Martin Heidegger, in which the relationship of materiality to abstraction has been chewed to pieces. I do not wish to add a footnote to this venerable scholastic history. What I prefer to do is to ask how materiality and abstraction may inhabit one another in societies like India, in which the social life of things is both rich and undisciplined enough to allow a fuller analysis of their relationship. India, in spite of a growing and status-hungry middle class, is not yet a “consumer society” in the Western sense. Thus, the materiality of objects in India is not yet completely penetrated by the logic of the market. That is to say, objects are not yet seen primarily as material repositories of monetary or exchange value. In the most advanced industrial economies, of which the United States is still in many ways the leader, objects have become fairly thoroughly colonized by the market. Everything has a price, including blood, fame, information, body parts, athletes, and gene codes. Of course, the ideology of the marketplace in the United States struggles mightily against this reality, seeking constantly to provide “personal” touches to objects, “singular” features to what are obviously commodities, and magical aspects to what are fully marketized experiences or commodities. Still, the tide has long ago turned and the pursuit of wealth as such has in every way outstripped the lust for the objects that it can buy. All Americans now under-