Thing theory

Thing theory is a branch of critical theory that focuses on human-object interactions in literature and culture. It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, which posits that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer function according to the use to which it is commonly put. When an object breaks down or is misused, it sheds its socially encoded value and becomes present to us in new ways through the suspension of habit. The theory was largely created by Bill Brown, who edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on it in 2001 and published a monograph on the subject entitled A Sense of Things.

As Brown writes in his essay "Thing Theory," "We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation."(4)

Thing theory is particularly well suited to the study of modernism, due to the materialist preoccupations of modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams, who declared that there should be "No ideas but in things" or T. S. Eliot's idea of the objective correlative. Thing theory has also found a home in the study of contemporary Maker culture, which applies Brown's aesthetic theories to material practices of misuse. Recent critics have also applied Thing Theory to hoarding practices.

Critics including Sev Fowles of Columbia University have begun to organize classes on "Thing Theory" in relation to literature and culture.