2. “As human beings we attach ourselves to the thingly world: our ordinary lives are lived out in the midst
of things. We often surround ourselves with keepsakes and mementos; we arrange our intimate
spaces with furniture, tools and utensils; we simultaneously hide and reveal our naked bodies with
clothes.”
It is stated that how things act on us while people act on them. Highmore put on emphasis on that people interact
with things even if people do not aware of, things act on people too.
4. Inundations
“ At certain hours of the day or of the night, it is very convenient to watch intensely how things rest … Those worn-out surfaces,
the scratches that hands have left on things, the often tragic and always charged atmosphere of things, they all produce a
pull towards the reality of the world. We sense the blurred impurity of human beings in those things, the classification, the
use, and the waste of materials, the imprints from fingers and toes, the eternity of a human atmosphere that inundates things
from outside and from inside. ”
(Neruda cited in Gumbrecht 2006: 312)
To understand this, it is important to watch an object at rest according to Neruda.
“ To watch an object ‘rest’ is to notice it not ‘working’ while also recognising
that it has work to do. It is at once to recognise its properties, its potential,
its sense of self. ”
5. Highmore points out that human behaviours are shaped by things as human shape the things. Highmore stresses out
that society is shaped by especially technological things.
According to Highmore our ordinary lives are affected by the entities of inorganic things.
• Inner and outer lives
• From childhood to adulthood.
Ordinary lives are lived out in the midst of things; furnitures, clothes, utensils, tools...
6. Figure: Ben Highmore‟s chair at rest
There is a mutual interaction between
people and things.
Campus chair is from the early 1970s. The producer
of the chair is Habitat, and it is a flat-paced furniture
Customers were very impatient when they buy it
but its assembly difficulties made buyers frustrated.
7. There is a mutual relationship between people and things as it is stated before so there should not
be superiority one over the other.
There are two therotical misdemeanors in ordinary life;
Reification: the thingifying of cultural processes
Anthropomorphising: the treatment of animals and objects as human-like
To prevent this situation everyday should be taken seriously.
8. The thingness of an object takes time. With the help of its unconditioned thingness it can be seperated from other
things. Familiarity is faster than sentimentality of an object.
When an object is full of memories and anectodes it causes the over-particularity of the object.
A chair is; a designed thing that acts on us, a functional object, a sentimental object, a familiar thing.
9. Symptomology; Bonding the object with other objects, rather than as an isolated object.
Symptomology is crucial to understand the objects tendencies because there is a little to say about
the sentimental subsistence of the objects.
10. Adorno points out the ‘damaged life’
“His task is to speak from the perspective of „damaged life‟, offering a wilfully negative critique of ordinary subjective life caught
in the midst of things orchestrated by the demands of instrumental reason. His questions ask what things want and how they
might produce us as subjects.”.(bad-manners)
Necessity of new sensoria of Benjamin : (habit-things)
“ Benjamin is often concerned with „habit-things‟: things, like manufacturing
tools on an assembly line, that are used over and over again and gradually
demand new dispositions from the body‟s sensorium. ”
11. According to Latour :
“ To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive
attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans. Here they
are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality.
They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts
of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth
century. What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a century
ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we
should do now to find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman
masses that beg us for understanding. ” (positive perspective)
Latour‟s point of view is anthropomorphic. When we give an example to that groom is made by human and it
replaces the human action and shapes it.
12. Some objects are more powerful than their affordances. They are:
Evocative things
Transitional things
Totems
Fetishes
Things can be good or bad in relation to a child’s desires and disappointments according to psychoanalysists.
“We attach ourselves to things and the way that become invested with a degree of emotional intensity. These objects do not
choose us we choose them, and this being thing-that-matters is a process of unconscience transfer of affections and
energy.Childhood toys;These transitional object are tied by drives and instincts and helps the seperation of childfrom
her/hisself (not-me). As the child is effected by environment, to cope with the newsituation, he/she finds new ways to adjust
his/her life or create a new world for the object.
13. Figure 2: A special toy
Childhood toys are transitional objects
which helped a child to diversify
himself/herself from others Children are
affected from the environment because of
that they create a life for the object and
for themselves.
14. Highmore stresses out the need for cunsumption and possess and being possesed by objects. “So consumption is
not merely buying and having, it contains using and destroying.”The desire of consume is the desire to return to
the quiescence of inorganic world, plasure of not being a self.
Campus chair makes a person to copy that stagnation, sleep.
“To be possessed by thing hampers the endless cycle of newness and obsolescence, being possesed by a thingness
of a object is to loose being a self, being a thing among things.”
15. Discussion Points
This article is about the ordinary things we live with. In recent years, philosophers, media theorists and those
involved in science studies have puzzled about our relationship with things. Are they objects that confirm status?
Are they extensions of human bodies – extending our capacities, our reach into the world? Are they mnemonic
objects – carriers of individual memories and collective memory? Are they the „hidden masses‟; unacknowledged
agents of history and social change?
Consumption is not just buying and having, it is also using and destroying. In terms of this, destruction means
dissapear or how do people need to produce again?
The desire of consume is the desire to return to the quiescence of inorganic world. If this is like that why do people
buy products? Is it an urge or need ?
