ABSTRACT
Following Bruno Latour’s insight that the relationship between human beings and material objects is not a unilateral dominance, this chapter approaches material objects through Martin Heidegger’s and Bill Brown’s distinction of object and thing: While objecthood refers to an item’s clearly defined functionality, thingness denotes the unpredictable ways in which an item can appear in individual contemplations, e.g. when memories are associated with it. Such idiosyncrasies can also be found in thing-essays and can be grasped through Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. I also introduce a social dimension of thingness, using Baudrillard’s ‘sign value’ and Adorno’s concept of ‘false needs’, which describes how a focus on economic sign value can alienate persons from things.
