(half-living)
Some objects need to be translated. Not necessarily rationalized, but explained, or given a sort of purpose. These things, often things that we cannot use are namely keys to understand something vital – that everything has an intrinsic value. Now if I’ve understood Elizabeth Grosz right than the relationship between a person and an object is never unmediated, but rendered through technology, context and relativism. Even though this is true, a thing has a worth even outside of these frames. We do not always have to evaluate everything by how it’s made or what its symbolic value is. Maybe a culture of high standard should not only be judged by how it treats its children but also how it treats objects that are severely out of fashion? It should also investigate non-normative ways of approaching things such as through love, intuition and the arts because these are the least mediated ways of communicating.
The Suggestion of there being a possibility of an immediate contact with objects may come across as somewhat naïve and unscientific but if there is, it’s just as important relationship to examine intellectually as is the obsession with tools and relativism. Maybe just for finding out that there is none. The study of the “soul” should not only annex religious fields but also our methodical institutions. Maybe spirits are fantasies of the physical induced by spatial and intellectual relationships? What kind of modes are these and how can we use them? Are there shortcuts between the corporal world and us? Can we create essence?
Wim W
archandphil 
October 9, 2014 at 8:58 pm
Dear Wim, I would love to hear more about your image, which I believe from our class discussion is a brick? It appears as a quasi-living brick, almost a growing brick…Can you say more? You ask some very thought provoking questions, and I realise that you would gain a great deal if you also read the Jane Bennett essay, which discusses ‘thing-power’ and begins to attempt some of what you are addressing. That is, somehow seeing the world from the point of view of things (at the risk of anthropomorphic superimposition), also to value things, as we value people. This is to powerfully reverse an anti-technology critique that is often associated with Martin Heidegger, but also sometimes with the Frankfurt School, that in gathering nature toward technological ends, we risk also turing humans into instruments, or means to ends, we risk turning humans into ‘things’. What you are asking is, what if instead, we raise things near to the level of humans, and value these things, not even simply in relation to ‘us humans’ but also the relation between things? This may well be an ethical and ecological question or challenge that you are framing.
Great work!
H Frichot
October 10, 2014 at 5:44 am
Thank you Hélène,
I will look at your references and read more about the subject. I love technology and craft as languages of making and speaking to things even though I think that we are also able to connect to them directly. Yes, it really is about ethics isn’t it? Is anyone writing about ethical problem areas in relation to people and matter today?
All the best,
Wim