Thing Theory

Thing theory names an approach that scholars use to investigate human-object relations in art, literature, culture, and everyday life. Though commonly thought of as a way to study physical artifacts, thing theory is rather a means to explore the dynamics between human subjects and inanimate objects. Thing theory emerges from the scholarly concern with commodity capitalism, and therefore has many antecedents in anthropology, art history, and museum studies. But it more precisely names the theoretical framework that developed within English departments in the 1990s, and prompted literary studies to turn upon the object matter of literature. The phrase “thing theory” came widely into use in 2001, in Bill Brown’s introduction to a special issue of Critical Inquiry titled Things. There, Brown describes the questions that thing theory raises as queries not into objects alone, but into subject-object relations in particular spaces, at particular times. Literature was central to these queries, not only because English departments in the 1990s were home to the “high theory” that Brown draws upon, but because, as he argues, it is a privileged medium for revealing the force of inanimate objects in human experience. In other words, literature makes the “thingness” of objects visible. This distinction comes from Heidegger, for whom objects become things when they can no longer serve their common or intended function. When an object breaks or is misused, it sheds its conventional role and becomes visible in new ways: it becomes a thing. Thing theory draws upon this notion of productive estrangement to consider the meaning that physical artifacts can have for human subjects. While thing theory entails discussions of “real” artifacts, it has primarily been used by scholars in the humanities to discuss the representation of such things in art and literature—specifically as a means to understand what meaning such representations hold. Around 2010, a number of books about the agency of objects by philosophers, political scientists, and media studies scholars inaugurated what might be called a second phase of thing theory. This second phase entailed scholars seeking to decenter the human subject in their materialist studies. These “new materialisms” are less confined to representational forms and have expanded the reach of thing theory well beyond literary studies. The new materialisms—some of which build directly on an older Marxist tradition of historical materialism—and other branches of thought that attempt to decenter the human, including object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, and posthumanism, draw upon thing theory but might best be thought of as a set of allied approaches interested in the agency of things. This bibliography tracks the initial phase of thing theory in literary studies, consolidates the earlier scholarship it draws on most consistently, outlines the second phase of thing theory across a variety of fields, and looks to work that has inaugurated new, future directions.