Zeroing in on Evocative Objects

Abstract

Sherry Turkle's collection Evocative Objects is a compulsively readable volume. In her own words, it "began with a seminar series at the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and became a way to capture the intellectual enthusiasms of that enterprise" (p. viii). Each chapter focuses on one author's fascination with a specific object or kind of object. The first five are an indicative sample: a cello, knots, archival documents of Le Corbusier, stars, and keyboards. Along with the unusual subject matter of the book comes an unusual style, for while the authors gathered here are mostly academics, they do not write in a typical academic manner. Instead, they reflect on childhood artifacts with starry eyes, and confess to traumas in family life with an often stunning intimacy. While it may seem remarkable that commerce with inanimate objects should provoke such a baring of souls, there is no denying the evidence: the reader somehow feels on closer terms with these authors after sharing a few pages about comic books or stuffed animals than if rifling through their diaries by night. Perhaps human interiority is less hidden than we suspect. Perhaps friendship is built not on the privileged exchange of censored inner riddles, but on a shared obsession with the mystery of publicly accessible things. Despite the intimate tone of many of the pieces, the hard kernel of objectivity required by the format inoculates the participants against any pedantic narcissism of the known postmodernist type. Turkle's phrase "evocative objects" is not meant as a loose description, but as a technical term. In what follows I will zero in on what evocative objects might be, and attempt to determine their possible importance. One obvious complication is that the book is not a solo-authored treatise, as if Turkle were single-handedly defining a new concept and could be held personally responsible for its development. This is an anthology, after all, and Turkle frames the work with an unusually light touch. Our sole guidance from the editor comes from an 8-page