My post earlier this week referenced Sherry Turkle. Here is more about her from a review of her new book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. In this book she pursues more than the psychological/sociological implications of computers and life on line. She has extended the concept of the “evocative object” to computers as well as other objects.
A number of other scholars have explored the implicit power of things. Two examples are James Elkins’ The Object Stares Back and What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, by W. J. T. Mitchell. Then there is my own ongoing research into the highly evocative objects of my personal life. This is a very real domain for me and for most artists.
Here’s an excerpt from Penelope Green‘s review:
Objects and artifacts have long been Professor Turkle’s stock in trade. When she arrived at M.I.T. in the 1970s…Professor Turkle brought a humanist’s eye to the device that her new colleagues had become enamored of: the computer.
To her, it was an “evocative object,” a “companion to emotion, and a provocation to thought.” She looked beyond what the computer could do for us to what it might do to us, as individuals and as a society. As a sociologist of science, she spent years studying hacker culture, child programmers and gamers…Her new book uses a similar approach to illuminate more familiar objects. A vacuum cleaner, a closet, photographs, a linty pill in an old wallet — each is examined through varying lenses of anthropology, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
For instance, a datebook and that linty pill, an antidepressant no longer taken by its owner, together bring to life Michel Foucault’s and Roland Barthes’s ideas about a disciplinary society and how its members learn to discipline themselves. As indigestible as this premise sounds, the book is actually a very tasty read…Gifts and heirlooms hold particular power for social theorists like Professor Turkle. She writes about how a gift retains something of its giver and so becomes animate, and about gift-giving as an ancient form of social glue.
Hi Deborah. I’ve long been a fan of the decorative or applied arts, and a collector of the flotsam and jetsam of life, inasmuch as these objects embody the spirit of their place and time. “Things” have the power to invoke emotion in the viewer, even as the viewer can imbue an object with meaning and power. The verb “evoke” is defined as: to bring to mind memories or feelings from the past; to make beings appear who are normally invisible (evoke a spirit). Thanks for the link to the NY Times article…I plan to pick up a copy of Evocative Objects.
MadSilence
I am familiar with Turkle’s earlier work on computers, but your description of her more recent work and how it relates to visual art is fascinating. I gave up visual art because as a daughter of Holocaust survivors who had lost everything, I couldn’t tolerate parting with “objects” I created. Instead my work in life is more ineffable, the psychotherapy interaction. I think a lot about the contrast and the fork in my path and what it all means and this post just provokes a great deal of more thought that I will ponder and eventually post something on. Thank you.
I’m going to take a look at this book. There’s something about the object and our emotional attachment to it, our projections on it, that give the object a life of its own.
Borges has a great sonnet on this theme: “Things”, (Las Cosas). The things in our lives will last longer than the memory of us, yet they will never know we were even here.
Sometimes when I have a question I google it, and I have a vague sense that the computer, resting on my lap, is an Oracle. Its just a feeling, but I think it might have something to do with the theme of this book.
I too am compelled by this domain. II talks of a resistance to things, and certainly I worry about the tendency to materialism that a fierce attraction to objects implies. But as a maker of objects, I have to hold that paradox as a fact of life. And thank you C for the reference to Borges’ sonnet. I too experience my computer as an oracular presence, as a coach, a guide.
This topic is rich and will show up again I am sure.