Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

word designates the concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday’
(2001, p. 4). The term ‘thing’ is generally called into service when
conventional references fail us – when proper names or common
nouns are found to be either too general or too specific. But within
our use of the term Brown sees an ‘audacious ambiguity’, for as
much as the term seeks to ‘name the object just as it is’, ‘‘‘things”
is a word that tends, especially at its most banal, to index a certain
limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable
and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and
unidentifiable’ (2001, p. 5). It is this ability to locate the object at a
‘threshold’ of uncertainty that makes the term ‘thing’ so relevant to
practices of modification.
Brown goes on to describe things as, firstly, ‘the amorphousness out
of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject’, and
secondly, ‘as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere
materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their
force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic
by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems’ (2001, p.
5). By reducing (or elevating) an object to the status of a thing, we set
the object adrift from its normalised position in society, opening the
object to divergent material and social possibilities.
Brown claims that:
‘…producing a thing – effecting thingness – depends… on a fetishistic
overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable
reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through
which it is what it typically is. Thingness is precipitated as a kind of
misuse value. By misuse value I mean to name the aspects of an object
– sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic – that become legible, audible, palpable
when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes (in whatever
time it is) for an object to become another.’ (1999, p. 2)
Here ‘thingness’ is seen to arise from a heightened or deviant engagement
with the object. Although producing a thing does not require
a physical remaking of the object, it is clear that practices of object
modification fit within Brown’s description of object ‘misuse’. By
linking modification practices to notions of ‘thingness’ we can begin
to understand how objects may facilitate their own divergent reconfig-
Remaking Things
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