Objects (essay)

We are spirits in the material world
(Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world)

--The Police

1: Intro

I'm pretty sure that when Sting wrote the above, he wasn't thinking about the connections we form with everyday objects that go beyond the expectations and requirements of living in a consumer culture. His critique of such a culture is even more pertinent today than when the song was released in 1981, and it will continue to be so until the foundations of our society are radically altered. Nonetheless, I think that there is something reactionary in most of the discourses that work to advance such critiques, from environmentally aware left-leaning political platforms to self-reliance praising libertarians and the doctrines of temporal insubstantiality preached by most religions. Nietzsche took these religions to task for being "despisers of the body," but did not go so far as to write an extended defense of objects. This post won't fill that gap, however, I hope it will help us to think more carefully about the objects in your life. As I see it, transcending our material culture is not a matter of embracing some intangible spirituality practicing extreme self-denial; it hinges instead upon developing more fulfilling relationships with those objects that can substantially improve our life, and refusing to be consumers of those that can't.

Now that you've waded through all that, I should say as soon as possible (so you can skip to the pictures if you want) that the original intention behind this post was to simply make a short list of my favorite objects with pictures and descriptions of each. In that sense, this is a personal document, not a philosophical one. But I hope that by contextualizing this list, I'll make it more meaningful for you, the reader. The idea for something like this has been with me ever since I saw a book called Evocative Objects: Things We Think With on Amazon. I had been thinking about objects since long before then, but it took seeing a book-length philosophical medition on them to make me consider writing something of my own. I haven't read Evocative Objects yet, though I plan on doing so at some point in the future. Maybe it will change some of the thoughts that I set down here.

There is one more idea that I'd like to set down before continuing: the way in which objects contribute to our identity. Identity can mean both our own self-image, and the image that others have of us. Objects do not serve only to enhance our lives in specific material ways; they may also contribute to our ideas about ourselves, whether or not we realize it. Certainly they contribute to the ideas that others have about us. Things evoke emotions, and by associating things with people we complicate our emotional perception of both thing and person. On a purely personal level, they tie us to the places we live, the people we know, and the things that we do. In the story "Man-Eating Cats" by Haruki Murakami, the narrator suffers a crisis after leaving behind all of his posessions to run away with a mistress:

As we were flying over Egypt, I was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear that someone else had taken my bag by mistake. There had to be tens of thousands of identical blue Samsonite bags in the world. Maybe I'd get to Greece, open up the suitcase, and find it stuffed with someone else's posessions. A severe anxiety attack swept over me. If the suitcase got lost, there would be nothing left to link me to my old life--just Izumi. I suddenly felt as if I had vanished.

2: Criteria

What constitutes an object? It's a harder notion to pin down than I originally thought. I think that one can safely rule out living things--hence the phrase "inanimate objects"--but it seems to me that plants are a gray area. They look like objects, but this is only because humans percieve time at a certain rate. To rocks, the blooming and dying of plants must seem just as ephemeral as a fireworks display does to us. And then there are objects that are animate, but not living. Animate in the sense that they move under their own power; robots, for example. For the purposes of my list, I'm going to rule out all living things (plants included) and robots. Anything that moves without being made to. To me there is something distinctly un-objectlike about them, though you may see things differently.

I would also like to rule out media objects. I say "like to" but the truth is (you'll see below) that I can't, not completely. Media objects convey sensory information, but this information is stored in an abstract form. The "point" of them is not not their form, but the data. Of course, before computers, some formal considerations were obligatory. CD booklets or record sleeves would be the most obvious examples. Those are now secondary, and will probably disappear in the next several years. Yet there are cases when media objects take on object-like qualities. Here are three cases that I think apply, the third of which is important for my list:

1. Music as object: I'm referring here specifically to recorded music. Certain compositions lend themselves to being played as background music, either to create ambience or to accompany a certain activity. I'm thinking of something like Getz/ Gilberto, Brian Eno's Ambient 1, or even (this might be pushing it) Massive Attack's Mezzanine. These recordings are fine on their own, but to me they really seem to shine when part of something else. And it is this combination of music and a physical environment/ activity that makes the object-like.

2. Film as object: Andy Warhol thought that we would project films onto walls like paintings, and that they would become part of the room (in much the same way I talk about music above). His early experiment with this was Sleep, a five hour film of a man sleeping. Of course that's asinine if you expect people to watch it like we watch movies today, but I think his film-as-painting idea has some merit. Screen savers (wasteful as they are) essentially embody this concept.

While I'm on the subject of images, I realize that I haven't mentioned static images like paintings or photographs... a pretty serious omission. I think that these can pass as objects, since the information they encode isn't in an abstract form--it's in the object (the paint, the photo-chemicals) itself. So although these are media objects as well, they are also object objects.

3. Books as objects: Obviously the information stored in books is not as abstract as that in CDs, DVDs, or magnetic tapes. Furthermore, the experience of a book more tied to the physical object of the book itself--what it feels like, looks like, even smells like. One can write in a book if one wishes, or even re-bind an old book. Finally, there are publishers (McSweeneys and Chin Music Press are two you should know about) that specialize in creating books that are pleasing objects, rather than just collections of pages. Then there are the reasons for which I included a book in my list which I will discuss...

3: The List

I decided to make the list a series of separate posts. See above.

4: The Future

Although I deliberately excluded objects from my list that exist only as digital information, it doesn't seem too early to discuss the possbility that in the future, the majority of the objects that we interact with will be virtual. There are already a multitude of virtual objects with monetary value (items in MMORPGs or anything in SecondLife), and despite the fact that not seeing objects in terms of their monetary value is part of what I'm trying to encourage (Marx called this habit commodity fetishism), it may be a precursor of other things to come. There is also the question of software-as-objects--most apparent in applications like desktop Post-it notes--but I'll save that for another discussion. Today we are still firmly entrenched in our material world, and until computers are able to simulate all forms of sensory information in a completely realistic manner, material objects will have their place. This also means that the things buy, keep, and use will be subject to obsolescence and decay. As I draw this object lesson to a close, I'd like to point you to the Wikipedia article on the Japanese aesthetic system known as "wabi-sabi." Appreciating our objects even as they age requires an aesthetic sensibility that our cutlure does not readily provide; in Japan, philosophers and poets developed a tradition of seeing beauty in that which is imperfect, old, or fleeting that goes back several hundred years. Those of you who will be taking my tea course this spring will hear more about this then.

5: Conclusion

If you've made it this far, then I encourage you to take a few moments when you get the chance and think about what objects mean the most to you. Where did you get them? Why do you like them? Do you see a place for them in your future? If you make a list, let me know; I'd like to read it.