by Jon Lackman | 18 September 2008 | Books, Theory
In caa.reviews, Keith Moxey considers the anthology Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science edited by Lorraine Daston:
Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively determine the significance we ascribe to them. The various scholars included in Things That Talk seek to articulate the ways in which things speak to us even if we are ultimately responsible for what they have to say …
Art historians are all too familiar with peremptory calls for a “return to the object” when accepted norms of interpretation are threatened or broken. Imaginative interpretations (those based on psychoanalysis, identity politics, or postcolonialism, for example) are sometimes dismissed because they allegedly stray too far from the object itself—even if it is clear that those very objects called these interpretations into being. This book offers a new understanding of what a “return to the object” might amount to. Instead of closing off inventive approaches to interpretation, Daston and her colleagues open the doors to exciting new representations of what we encounter in experience.
