Thingness, as Bill Brown argues, "names [...] a productive function" (31), and the turn to the archive speaks to modernism's interest in solid objects, as to modernist studies' signature concern with the intersections of history and literary and material culture.
the mind does not--I don't think--know this but the fingers, oh, for all my life scribbling open the unseen, done with mere things, not interested in appraisal, just seizure--what is meant by seizure--all energy, businessserious, about direction, tracing things that dissolve from
thingness into in-betweens-- The hands have a mind of their own, and memory.
Chast's parents are compulsive hoarders who become "stuck" with these "inanimate objects" to the degree that they take on the
thingness of these inanimate objects and become, as they age, as immobilized as these objects are.
Similarly, Trappler as 'a painters' painter' had effectively engaged the elements of art to present the
thingness of 'being' through the process of mixing colors; materializing rhythms, separating the life of the painting from an objective reality of forms and boldly demonstrating that painting "does not need to contain an object and does not need to represent anything" (Trappler, 2009, p.
Sociologists have often read this rule with the emphasis at the end of the sentence, on the "
thingness" of the social, as external and constraining.
These interviews suggest some sites of instability in vaccinations that point to a vaccine's
thingness, in spite of the way they are constructed for parents.
Considered developmentally, for example, physicists observing subatomic particles smashing into each other, at speeds approximating the speed of light, is just a later form of the infant's exploratory sucking reflex, or of the repetitive dropping of bits of bread and other objects from a high seat on to the floor to see what happens: how they fall, how they land, with what results--these are all instances of trying to make sense of the universe's structure of cause and effect
thingness. Or, to take another example, when two three-year olds play effortlessly, varying the heights and designs of block towers followed in turn by knocking each tower down, we see some part of how value itself is interwoven into the fabric of means and ends.
(Indeed, Hawthorne's House foregrounds precisely how photographs did not displace the "
thingness" of the body in death.) In addition, in the antebellum era, when handsewing was a widespread feminine skill and practice, sewn garments materialized kinship as well as feminine presence and creative agency.
She emphasizes the
thingness of film, its tactility--a quality that has to some extent been retroactively produced by the advent of digital technologies.
The point is not to reveal the essence or
thingness of the object (Ding an sich) but to regard as beautiful what alone is available to us, that is to say, the object or, more precisely, its appearance.
Because it has more
thingness? To be clear, I do not disagree with Gutas in his critique of an essentialist view of religion.
I forgot my name, my humanness, my
thingness, all that could be called me or mine.