THEME: Communicating with Objects
Joshua Wilner, English
In terms that anticipate Marx on commodity fetishism or Adorno on the culture industry, Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads inveighs against a “craving for extraordinary incident” produced by “the increasing accumulation of men in cities” and gratified by “the rapid communication of intelligence.” To this situation he opposes the conditions of “humble and rustic life,“ where the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” and “men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.”
We may smile at Wordsworth’s idealizations of rural life, but his expansive attention to the different ways in which people may “communicate with objects” – to the problematic, we might say, of object relations – is as prescient and instructive as his critique of an urban culture coming to be dominated by the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities and mass media. The 2018-19 Rifkind Center faculty invites its participants to reflect on and discuss the changing role of objects – natural, fabricated, historical, conceptual – in their fields of study and cultural production. Historical study arguably awards more attention to material culture than ever before; our former colleague David Jaffee’s last book, The New Nation of Goods: Artisans, Consumers, and Commodities in Early America, 1790–1860 (2010), may serve as one example among many. Bill Brown’s influential 2001 essay, “Thing Theory,” is a well-known instance of a related turn in literary studies, which he places in the context of “a new materialism within which the thingness of an object cannot be abstracted from the field of culture.” (See the online description (http://ccct.uchicago.edu/object-cultures) of the “Objects Culture Project” which he currently directs for a suggestive overview.) More broadly, concerns with the materiality of language and the history of print have been central to literary studies now for decades. The relations of works of art to both natural objects and other man-made ones have long preoccupied both the working artist and the art historian and assume a new urgency and complexity in the de-materializing context of digitalization. The ways in which objects and representations circulate in modern society is obviously central to the work of MCA, and the very distinction between objects and representations is a long-standing problem in philosophy, whether from the analytic or the continental sides. I hesitate to venture a generalization about music, but would imagine that the question of the relationship of music to the objects through which it is produced and recorded has been made more acute with the ascendancy of digitalization.
Readings for the group will be largely shaped by the interests and backgrounds of the participants, but could include works by Marx, Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Debord, Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bowlby.
