The return to things

Domańska, Ewa

doi:0066-5924

Planned object

Title: The return to things

Abstract:

This text analyses the so-called "return to things", a movement which appeared in the humanities and human sciences in the late 1990s. The author attempts to move beyond both the positivistic and the semiotic approaches to the description of things and discuss the so-called "new material culture" and "technoscience studies" (Don Ihde's "material hermeneutics") as approaches which inspire this field of inquiry. The author claims that the "enchantment with things" can be placed within the context of the prevailing discourse of the Other and the ongoing attempts to create counter-disciplines, such as counter-history, counter-archaeology, etc. In such counter-disciplines, things, which hitherto have been silent and reduced to passivity, are allowed to speak in their own voice or manifest themselves in their individuality. However, even if scholars claim that things should be incorporated into history as something other than passive recipients of human actions, they appear to remain unable to transcend conventional epistemologies. To illustrate this claim, the author analyses the "biographical" approach to things and concludes that this approach is characterized firstly, by the personification of things that results from anthropocentrism and provides a way of neutralizing the threats posed by nonhuman entities; and secondly, by a kind of genealogical and genetic thinking, which by no means helps us create an alternative epistemology of history but, on the contrary, revives in a different context the fetish of origin. It appears that a discourse in defense of things (and in general of non-humans) is in the end a discourse in defense of the human being. Things are coming to be existential, "stable" markers that help unstable humans to orient themselves in the world

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