The following remarks form brief meditations on the scalar pressures that several strands of contemporary critical thought have been placing on the well-recognized expanded field of things that have fallen under the purview of thing theory in the past decade and a half.

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.

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.

Have you been to Target recently? They have these great new products designed by famous philosopher Gilles Deleuze—cool! 

One of those little lies you tell undergraduates is that Romanticism-its obsession with unique inner feeling, its obsession with nature-emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution.