Things we think with

What are the things we think with?

These things evoke my Antarctic experience: fluff collected from the clothes dryers on the Aurora Australis, and from Davis and Mawson stations; dried pools of inky water on paper that traced the motion of the ship during a storm; hair clipped from the heads of expeditioners for a fund raiser on the homeward journey. These objects I can hold and feel bring back the journey more than any photograph.

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Waiting at the Sydney airport for a plane on Sunday (June 17th), I found an article in New Scientist (June 2007, p52), by a woman doing some image-based research, that reminded me of “Roget’s Circular”.

Sherry Turkle, Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has just published “Evocative Objects: things we think with“, published by MIT Press (2007).

Turkle writes that “Classical methods insisted on the researcher’s distance from the object of study”, and yet “…biology rejects theories that challenge the dogma of single and centralized causal factors.”

She warns that “we risk imposing on nature the very stories we like to hear”, and that those stories are “often the most reassuring ones and those that confirm comfortable ways of thinking.”

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For Sherry Turkle, “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.” In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.

This volume’s special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects–an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer–are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, “No ideas but in things.” The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.

Whether it’s a student’s beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes–the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.

In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner’s keyboards and Lev Vygotsky’s hobbyhorses; William Mitchell’s Melbourne train and Roland Barthes’ pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello’s glucometer and Donna Haraway’s cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Essays by:
Julian Beinart, Matthew Belmonte, Joseph Cevetello, Robert P. Crease, Olivia Dasté, Glorianna Davenport, Judith Donath, Michael M. J. Fischer, Howard Gardner, Tracy Gleason, Nathan Greenslit, Stefan Helmreich, Michelle Hlubinka, Henry Jenkins, Caroline A. Jones, Evelyn Fox Keller, Tod Machover, Susannah Mandel, David Mann, Castle McLaughlin, Eden Medina, Jeffrey Mifflin, William J. Mitchell, David Mitten, Annalee Newitz, Trevor Pinch, Susan Pollak, Mitchel Resnick, Nancy Rosenblum, Susan Spilecki, Carol Strohecker, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Sherry Turkle, and Gail Wight.