What is Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Having a Coke with You,” trying to teach about objects, things, and thingness? In this essay, David J. Alworth uses thing theory as a hermeneutic method to ask not what the critic can do to the text but what the text can do to the critic: O’Hara’s poem, approached this way, is already a thing—or rather, an object whose thingness manifests in and as an outcome of interaction between text and critic, poem and reader, art object and perceiving subject.

Kate Marshall remarks on the scalar pressures that contemporary critical thought has been placing on the field of thing theory in the past decade and a half. She looks at three aspects of this scalar shift: the placement of things in ever-expanding timescales; the cosmological positioning of things either distant or grandiose; and the attempts to thingify systems and collectives.

One premise different materialist theories share is that things are alive and kicking: no longer inert matter or mere backdrop of human action and consciousness, the world of objects is seen to have a vitality of its own. While it is important to remember that physical things continue to exist after their social lives (in a narrow sense) have ended, we need to complicate the stories we tell about their active trajectories.

In her 2016 book Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett poses the incompatibility between words and things as a comic problem—and then offers a formal response to that problem.

The fact of graspable limits to our comprehension has plenty of meaning, without our needing to map our own ethical or epistemological presumptions onto that beyond. 

In 2001, when Bill Brown published his essay on “Thing Theory,” it seemed that scholars were tired of subjects. But now, nearly two decades later, one must wonder if we’ve also grown tired of things.