A friend of mine shared with me an essay called “Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time.” The author, Joseph Dumit, is a cultural anthropologist which essentially means he asks lots of questions about things.
Around the holidays I find myself thinking about the thingness of things. I think about the fragility of little objects as I unpack ornaments that have been collected over 25 years. I think about the material quality of bigger things like the Christmas tree in my living room that has sadly stopped taking in water.
And like Dumit, who thinks his way through the ideas of Donna Haraway (writer of “The Cyborg Manifesto”), I wonder at the interconnectedness of things. . .wrestling with my passive acceptance of it. Dumit writes,
The everyday conspires against us, or with that part of us that wants to live in an everyday in which objects are mere parts of the world and it all makes a certain kind of sleepy sense.
Instead of succumbing to that sort of sense-making, Dumit and Haraway want us to reckon with our too-easy acceptance of the global connectedness of it all, from clothing to coffee beans to architecture. For them the intersecting thingness of our world must be worth more than a shrug.
Thus, storytelling.
Dumit says:
Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places.
Meaning what?
I think it means that to wake up from any sort of sleepy reading of things requires that we look at “how many dimensions of a particular object one knows about, to explore the vastly different stories that one can tell about it. The multiple dimensions that make up objects also make up ourselves, as well as our categories. Telling the stories of an object therefore begins unpacking our own clichés, our certainties, our affects.”
New stories of old things must be shared (like the world we live in) for miracles to be witnessed.
Even though the ornaments I unpack each year are just things, mere parts of the annual Christmas season in my household, the repeated act of unpacking obligates something of me. Objects made possible by a connected world where glass and wire and metal are taken (extracted. . .) from one place and fused together in another.
Tellers of different stories.
Miracles to reckon with.
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