Evocative Objects comprises thirty-four quiteshort pieces (most four to six pages) reflectingin often very personal ways on the ‘dynamicrelationship between things and thinking’. (9)Each piece in the collection is preceded by ashort (half-page) excerpt reflecting on aspectsof objects from the ‘classics’ of philosophy,history, literature and social theory, includingLévi-Strauss, Piaget, Derrida, Vygotsky,Haraway, Kristeva, Mumford, Foucault,Baudrillard, Mauss, Latour, Marx, Barthes,Kopytoff, Winnicott, Lacan and Eco, amongothers. A synthetic conclusion elaborates on the theoretical links between the pieces, andthe bibliography broadens the context andprovides an extended reading list.While Sherry Turkle is well known for herhighly influential work on the psychology ofcomputing, including The Second Self: Com-puters and the Human Spirit and Life on theScreen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,1thisvolume reflects a wider interest, since it ‘con-tributes a detailed examination of particularobjects with rich connections to daily life as well as intellectual practice’. (7) Turkle isdirector of the Initiative on Technology and the Self at MIT, and the Evocative Objectscollections arose as a result of seminars at the Initiative. In all, three edited collectionshave been published by the MIT Press. Evo-cative Objects is the first, published in August2007. The second volume, Falling For Science:Objects in Mind, appeared in May 2008. Thethird volume, The Inner History of Devices, waspublished at the end of October 2008.Turkle’s interest in evocative objects, she tellsus in the introduction to this first collection,ELAINE LALLYSHERRY TURKLE (ED.)Evocative Objects: Things We Think WithThe MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2007ISBN: 9780262201681RRP: US$24.95 (HB)thinkingthroughthings
originated in her childhood. Indeed, she wrotein the introduction to The Second Self that we humans ‘search for a link between who weare and what we have made, between who weare and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy withour own creations, we might become’.2Thecomputer itself is often an evocative objectbecause:like a Rorschach inkblot test, [it] is apowerful projective medium … TheRorschach provides ambiguous imagesonto which different forms can be pro-jected. The computer, too, takes on manyshapes and meanings. In what follows, weshall see that, as with the Rorschach, whatpeople make of the computer speaks oftheir larger concerns, speaks of who theyare as individual personalities.3Turkle’s childhood experience of searchingthrough family photographs and trinkets forevidence of her absent father showed her thatobjects can be ‘clues’ allowing mysteries to besolved. (4) This is because, following Lévi-Strauss, material things are ‘good(s) to thinkwith’, and are essential resources for thebricolage of everyday life. Turkle’s personalexperience as a child was of interaction withobjects having high emotional intensity, andshe therefore ‘began to consider bricolage as apassionate practice’. (5)The contributions in Evocative Objects col-lectively reflect on a diverse array of objects.This volume, then, brings together a series ofsometimes intimate reflections on how thebiographies of people and things intertwine.Reflecting on the cello allows the author ofthe first piece to reflect on his relationship tomusic and to his mother; considering the cello also speaks to the intimate relationshipbetween bodies and things, and to issues oftechnical and cultural improvisation. Con-sidering archival objects that have belonged toand had a very close association with Le Cor-busier allows another author to reflect on theinterpersonal closeness that can be gainedthrough handling the objects a much admiredperson worked with. But digitisation changesthe relationship to the objects, making themmore widely available but no longer giving asense of awe at the tangibility of connection.Digital objects, it is suggested, cannot be evo-cative in the same way as an original.Changes in technology and evolution in the form of a class of objects can be part of the biography of the object: keyboards, bothmusical and computer or typewriter keyboards,mediate creativity and allow for ‘composition’as a manual activity. Ballet slippers areexemplars of a technology that has shaped acultural form. The shoes themselves shapephysical artistry but the gradations comingwith increasing expertise and seniority sym-bolise and physically track changes in thedevelopment and maturation of the dancer.Shoes can also represent the physical disciplin-ing and transformation of the dancer’s body.A diabetic author’s glucometer provides anindicator of the state of the body that is notavailable to direct perception, allowing for208VOLUME15 NUMBER1 MAR2009
‘tight control’ of blood sugar levels. Theevolving relationship between people andmonitoring technologies in everyday life is ref-erenced here: the author imagines a futurescenario as a ‘cyborg’ whose diabetes is con-trolled, not through external monitoring andconsciously controlled action, but via a small implantable device that operatesautonomously: ‘In this fantasy, I do not controlmy disease; my computer pancreas controls itfor me … In this scenario, it is difficult for meto remember that I have diabetes’. (67)From the point of view of a child, a yellowraincoat can provide a kind of armour and givea sense of control against the complexities(even chaos) of the external world. Anotherwriter thinks of a datebook as ‘an externalinformation organ—a piece of my brain madeout of paper instead of cells’. (80) Knowing it isnearby allows her to relax, although the senseof herself as cyborg bothers her. When thedatebook is lost, her ontological security isundermined. Moving to a digital diary doesn’tsolve the problem of the vulnerabilities ofrecording events in one physical location, butinstead leaves her feeling ‘destabilised’, sincethe digital record doesn’t leave traces of choicesmade and options erased.Many of us will recognise the sense that alaptop is ‘practically a brain prosthesis’. Buthow many of us would say that we love ourlaptops? ‘It doesn’t just belong to me; I belongto it.’ (88) This object, however, is not simplyitself a loved object, but also mediates intenselyemotional relationships with other people,through the text on the screen and the feelingof the keys under the fingers. Evocative objectsdo not just attach themselves to us but are also interfaces for our relationships with otherpeople.In Durban, one author sees a boy carrying a wooden facsimile of a transistor radio:‘although it looked like a Braun transistor radio,this object never produced sound’. Asking theboy about this object of ‘emulation and imagi-nation’, he is told: ‘“It can’t play music, but Ising when I carry it. One day I’ll have a realone.”’ (105) A young sister’s stuffed bunny,named Murray, teaches a scholar of child devel-opment about the power of personified objects.A rolling pin evokes more than nostalgia(which seems to trivialise the bond), butdemonstrates how the materiality of an objectmakes a tangible link to the past and to lovedones who are no longer with us. But evocativeobjects can evoke difficult and contradictoryemotions. In contrast with a gold orchidbrooch, which reminds the wearer of hermother but is simply a pretty object carrying nostrong emotion, the silver pin that is the focusof the piece ‘evokes bruises and ambivalence,emotional knots difficult to untangle’. (191)‘Blue cheer’ reminds us that pharmaceuticalscan also be evocative objects for many. A lastsingle pill, kept as a reminder of the person theauthor used to be, shows us how objects areable to act as mnemonics or placeholders. The pill is also an example of how aestheticsand function intertwine in evocative objects.An epigram from Baudrillard tells us thatdesign reduces all the possible valences of anobject ‘to two rational components, two general209ELAINE LALLY—THINKING THROUGH THINGS
models—utility and the aesthetic’ which areopposed to each other. But ‘neither has anyreality other than being named separately’, andindeed they are ‘two equally arbitrary agencies[that] exist only to mislead’. (102)The collection perhaps works best if it isviewed as a network of nodes, as starting pointsfor thinking about how objects come to beevocative. Indeed, the pieces of writing them-selves operate (sometimes at least) as evocativeobjects. Like all objects, our responses to themwill be individualised and idiosyncratic. One ortwo of the pieces, it must be admitted, touchedme personally through an emotional connec-tion with the objects or situations described. Agranddaughter, for example, gathers togetherclothes and other mementos and packs theminto a small suitcase. It remains unopened fortwo-and-a-half years, because ‘increasingly itfeels dangerous to open it. Memories evolvewith you, through you. Objects don’t have thisfluidity; I fear that the contents of the suitcasemight betray my grandmother.’ (248) When itis finally opened, the author’s strong emotionalresponse will no doubt find its reflection inmany readers’ responses (including this one),who can readily resonate with the impulse togather the objects that might recreate a lostloved one.The study of material culture has experi-enced a surge of interest in the past few years.Daniel Miller, a British anthropologist whosework has been at the forefront of the develop-ment of material culture scholarship since the mid-1980s, has suggested that artefactsmay be difficult to investigate within intellec-tual traditions based profoundly on languageand the language-like features of culture.4While the now extensive recent literature onmaterial culture is not referenced, this is notappropriate, since the genre of the EvocativeObjects collection is not highly academic orfocused around theoretical development,though there are many theoretical elementsbrought together in loose counterpoint. Thecollection certainly offers a wide selection ofpointers to relevant theory. In the conclusion,Turkle suggests that one role of theory withinthe volume is to defamiliarise the familiarobjects represented in the chapters. In turn, ‘astheory defamiliarizes objects, objects familiarizetheory. The abstract becomes concrete, closer tolived experience.’ (307)Readers will in all likelihood find some ofthe pieces in Evocative Objects more interestingto them than others. The volume is most likelyto appeal to students and teachers in fields atthe intersection of material culture, technologyand everyday life, who will find illustrativematerial and pointers to theoretical directionsacross a broad range of kinds of objects. Miller’srecent book The Comfort of Things, interestingly,is also less academic and more literary in form,perhaps indicating that material culture lendsitself quite naturally to analysis in more literarygenres of writing than more traditional aca-demic styles.5Reading the volume from cover to cover wasquite a fragmentary experience, and it is diffi-cult to develop a sense of flow in the text,because the pieces themselves are all quiteshort. It would perhaps be better to read210VOLUME15 NUMBER1 MAR2009
Evocative Objects by dipping into it rather thanreading straight through. Indeed, it would be agood book to take on holiday, or on a longplane journey. It was good to be reminded ofthe works and perspectives brought to bear onthe examples through the juxtaposition withthe short ‘orienting’ extracts, and to be intro-duced to some unfamiliar ones. My ownfavourite quote is not one of the ones included,but it might as well have been, since it capturesthe power of evocative objects to anchor us inthe world:Indeed, things are perhaps the most faith-ful witnesses of all, and in their fidelity tous they function as extensions of ourselves,reflections and echoes of who we are, were,and will become. Those things in yourroom, for example, those simple, ordinarythings mirror who and what you are, andsituated in that room they give a shape toits space, they form it into a place, theyoutline a world … Staying in their place,they give us our place, and without suchthings in our lives we would have no placeat all.6——————————ELAINE LALLY is a Senior Research Fellow andAssistant Director of the Centre for CulturalResearch at the University of Western Sydney.She researches in the areas of art and technologyas material culture, and the role of arts andculture in regional development (especially inWestern Sydney). She is currently undertaking amajor ARC-Linkage funded project, and hascompleted consultancies for ArtsNSW and theAustralia Council as well as other short-termresearch projects. Dr Lally is author of At Homewith Computers (2002). <E.Lally@uws.edu.au>——————————1. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and theHuman Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Cam-bridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984/2005 and Life on theScreen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York:Simon and Schuster, 1995.2. Turkle, The Second Self, p. 18.3. Turkle, The Second Self, p. 20.4. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consump-tion,: Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 100.5. Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things, Polity, Cam-bridge, 2008.6. R. D. Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom andDream, Routledge, London, 1989, pp. 193–4.211ELAINE LALLY—THINKING THROUGH THINGS
Citations (0)
References (4)
Technology as Symptom and Dream
Book
Jan 1989J Aesthet Art Critic
Robert D. Romanyshyn
View
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Cambridge
Jan 1984
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984/2005 and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Jan 1987100
Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption,: Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 100.
The Comfort of Things, Polity, Cambridge
Jan 2008
Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things, Polity, Cambridge, 2008.
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