Thing Theory

So we are half way through the semester, and last week in my English 400 class we read an article by University of Chicago professor Bill Brown called Thing Theory.The article was extremely dense, and what I could grasp as it passed noisily over my head was that Brown is trying to help define the word thing, which we use as a substitute for the unknowable or undefinable. I started doodling in the margin in order to visualize the concepts, but, as usual, my drawings deteriorated into crass--crude actually, cartoons that helped very little but amused me nonetheless. I am seriously considering starting a comic strip called Thing Theory based on these doodles. Here are three of the drawings I did while I should have been concentrating on some of the more abstract points in Brown's article.


This was the first drawing I did. The "thing" is what happens when our relationship with benign matter--every day objects--is changed. I tried to show how the chair feels like he is taken for granted. The joke? The Chair is an object.


Same concept with this one. The chair has gotten the subject's attention now.First he tries to return to being an object and after this doesn't work he blames it on the "thing."



I have to thank my sister Lindsay for this one. I showed her the first two panels and she suggested I take the point of view of a toilet paper roll. Crude, but effective.

So I want to set up a premise around these, and other, house hold objects. I also want to create another environment in the yard, with the yard tools taking on the role of socialist proletariats and the house objects being more like spoiled bourgeoisie. The "thing" is this mysterious non-entity that possesses the objects to break the subject/object barrier and confront the clueless subject in various ways. I don't know if anyone is like me, but for a split second, when I stub my toe or bump my head, I feel as if the object meant to do it. That's around the level I'm sinking to with this idea.