1) Highmore traces how ordinary lives are shaped by our interactions with everyday objects like furniture, clothes, and tools. While people act on objects, objects also act back on us in subtle ways through their presence and functionality. 2) He examines the psychoanalytic effects of objects from childhood into adulthood, such as how transitional objects help children develop, and the desire to consume and possess objects stems from envy of their stillness and "thingness." 3) Focusing on a campus chair from the 1970s, Highmore analyzes its social and usage history to understand its particular qualities beyond just its material form, demonstrating how objects accumulate meaning through personal experiences over time.

1. Ordinary Lives FAMILIAR THINGS Ben Highmore Merve AYDIN ID501 2011

2. Inundations In the Midst of Things In the Thrall of Things

3. Keywords; Thing, thingness, meaning, notice, anthromorphism, symptomology, nothingness, ordinary, particularity, sensoria, psycoanalysis, cathexis, transitional objects, possession, death drive, lifelessness Cited in Text; Pablo Neruda, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Latour, Robert Lowell, Shery Turkle, Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Tracy Gleason, Virginia Woolf, Bill Brown, Sigmund Freud.

5. He mentions that technological things are shaping the society (Benjamin’s and Latour’s scope)

6. His aim is to look from the object’s point of view to get the sense of the object’s particularity

8. Ordinary lives are lived out in the midst of things; furnitures, clothes, utencils, tools... We do not notice our daily objects but we do interact with them. Symbiotic interaction People Creaturely Things Non-creaturely

11. To focus on object’s point of view; Naruda suggests a method for connecting to that ordinary things, thingly actuality of objects; “Watching objects as they are resting” Because, to watch an object rest is to notice it is not working while also recognising that it has a work to do. It is at once recognise its properties, its potential, its sense of itself. Inundations are qualities that flow from and inside to things, qualities which may or may not have a meaning.

12. Campus chair at rest What are the inundations that Naruda speaks of? Does the chair hasbeen marked, its witnessing activity there to be read on its surface, the stains of memoirs? To get some sense of chair’s particularity, Highmore goes through some anectodes that comprise its social and life story.

13. The mentioned chair belongs to early 1970s. Its producer is a company named Habitat, and it was a flat-paced furniture (KD: knocked-down) The KDs that flat packed created a “can’t wait to get it home” feeling for customers. But the assembly work and its difficulties consists of both impatience and patience, delay and desire. The satisfaction of getting at home creates a frustration against instant gratification of walking away with the ready furniture. Habitat; It is a boutique lifestyle shop which offers a wide range of products from furniture to herbs. It is an essembled life-image as a form of boutique shopping. Habitat calalogue which not only showed you what you could buy, but offered a vivid tableux of how the world of Habitat should be lived. (Ikea)

20. evocative things transitional things totems fetishes some objects have the capacity to represent powerful qualities beyond their prescriptions and affordances Psychoanalysis offers a way of describing how things matter to people in profoundly affective ways e.g. Klein’s study offers objects that can become ‘good’ or ‘bad’ inrelation to the child’s desires and frustrations. Psychoanalysis, then, has a tendency to see the objectbecoming a thing-that-matters by a process of unconscious transference ofaffections and energy. Cathexis isthe transfer of energy from a person to another person, or thing or idea; but the energy is attached to the representation or the idea ofthe thing, rather than the thing itself. Thats how objects are become significant and charged.

21. As a Materialist Analogy; 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-metters 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 child from her/hisself (not-me). As the child is effected by environment, to cope with the new situation, he/she finds new ways to adjust his/her life or create a new world for the object.

25. To be possessed by thing interrupts the endless cycle of newness and obsolescence, beingpossesed by a thingness of a object is to loose the I-ness of self, being a thing among things.

27. Ordinary Lives FAMILIAR THINGS Ben Highmore Merve Aydın ID 501 / 2011