Published in edited form in I-D/International Design, March-April 1992.

Clive Dilnot

WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN OBJECT ?

My title, as some of you may recognize, is a paraphrase from one of Stephen Jay
Gould’s short pieces of popular writing on natural history.

Entitled "What, if anything, is a Zebra?”, and originally written for his now famous
monthly column on biology, evolution and the history of science which appears in
Natural History, Gould’s article considers whether there is, speaking from the point
of view of evolutionary genealogy, any such a thing as a Zebra. Now since there are
indeed Zebra’s in the world, and Zebra’s are, or seem to be, distinctively so, then this
may seem an unnecessary, even absurd, question to ask.

But Gould’s point is that while it would appear to be self-evident that there must
indeed be an evolutionary class of things such as Zebra's, in fact the situation is not so
simple. Zebra's exist not as one but as three different species. Each shares the
characteristic of possessing black-and-white stripes, but the number and pattern of
distribution of the stripes varies, subtly but significantly, across the species. The
question for evolutionary taxonomists is then this: do the three species share a
common ancestor and thus constitute a single evolutionary unit ? Or are they in fact
three wholly different species, in the sense that each originates from different
moments in the evolutionary succession of branching relations between species.

In terms of evolutionary taxonomy this is not small question. Whether Zebra's

evolved once -- and thus have a single place in the evolutionary pattern of the genus
Equus and hence an intrinsic genealogical identity as a single sister group-or,
whether it might be that one species of Zebra more nearly relates genealogically to
the true horse than to other Zebra species (thus implying that Zebra's arose more than
once within the genus Equus) has considerable theoretical implications. Evolve once,

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and the notion of identity, Zebra qua Zebra would seem to be preserved: evolve
thrice, and the question becomes, as imas Gould's title suggests, that in an important
evolutionary sense, there is no such thing as a Zebra (making Zebra’s as a whole
simply a disparate group of horses which possess some confusingly similar distinctive
traits in common).

Now in the evolutionary sciences the debate on this issue gets very complex. In part it
is necessarily arcane, a matter of arguing to what extent Zebra's as we know them
constitute what is called a sister group, and possess what the science of systematics
calls shared derived characteristics, i.e., features found only in these animals and no
other. But if the answer to the question would seem to be of interest only to
professionals in the fields of evolutionary biology, in fact the issues that are raised
here of more general importance. At stake are three matters of general import for how
we think about things in general (using this last term in it’s double sense, as referring
both to things per se, objects, and to ‘things’ in the generic sense).

The first is the question of what we assume to be the case, a question on the one hand
about commonsense observation (which assures us that there indeed Zebra's) and, on
the other, about axioms, presuppositions and norms ("of course a Zebra is a Zebra !").
It is a question about the extent to which can we ever rely on these essential (but
possibly for all that misleading) tools of our thinking ?

The second issues is that of the conformity of nature, or of any complex phenomena,
to the classificatory schema we place on it. I put this second issue this way round
because although we usually think of ourselves, especially in science, but also in
observational practices like design, as deriving categories and classifications
objectively from observation of the phenomenal evidence before our eyes, the case of
the Zebra reminds us that however much we assume a simple congruity between how
we think of things and the "things themselves" (such that catergories naturally reflect
the nature of things) in fact we live with the constant danger that it is not things that
spontaneously give themselves categories but we who place categories on things,
sometimes accurately, sometimes mistakenly, always with consequences for how we
think about that thing. The further point from this is of the realisation of the
implication that classification is our work: classes, concepts, categories, are artifacts,
the product of our labour. Indeed they are designed things. But just because
categories are artificial, and in a certain sense therefore fictional, the question of the
relation of phenomena and their actuality to the classificatory schema we force on the

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world, and which we employ to make sense of, and to cognitively and even
experientially police it for us, needs to be kept sharply in view.

Now it is true that in the case of Zebras, devotees of wanting to preserve the relation
between the usual or “given” names of things and in this case, one of nature’s more
interesting visual embodiments, will be pleased to know that at the end of his article
Gould “saves” the Zebra by rejecting the challenge offered by cladistic analysis to the
Zebra's evolutionary status. This might seem to indicate that common-sense views of
things, and the simple identity of class and object are hereby restored.

Only, of course, it is not quite so simple. Even as we read Gould’s relatively

straightforward analysis and refutation of the challenge that the Zebra poses as an
evolutionary group, we realise that an important point has been raised. It is this. Not
only do we make, and not simply derive, the characteristics, and hence classificatory
schemas that we place on things, but we tend also to forget that we made them -- and,
even more importantly, forget that having been made, by us, they not only passively
organize phenomena in the world but subtly, and often not so subtly, react back upon
us their makers, to structure our perception of the world.

That this is not only an arcane question can be seen if we realize how when we
classify we do more than merely sort phenomena. Each form of class of things
contains within itself a kind of lens on the world. This is true even of supposedly
neutral descriptive terms. A nonsensical speculation might make this clear. Let us
suppose that we were to discover tomorrow that donkeys were genetic second cousins
to the Lion. Could we then think of donkeys in the same way as we had previously?
Would we not then cast a wary eye on the cousins of Eeyore and hesitate before
letting our child ride the donkey on the beach? More prosaically, we can see the same
perceptual shift when we think of the difference in affect and outlook immediately
suggested by the terms “mammal” (essentially good) and “reptile” (essentially bad).
In other words, classificatory terms contain (often unconsciously or through use and
association) implications with regard to behavior and identity. And this happens of
course in practices.in our own field . Think of the different associations and
expectations aroused by the terms "architecture" and "building, or think of how a
term like "object" brings to mind a certain set of axioms and presuppositions-of how
the word brings immediately to mind an inevitable, more-or-less oppositional,
relation to the idea of the "subject.”

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All of this suggests the force of classifications, and the weight of the axiomatic
structures, the presuppositions, assumptions, unconscious associations and the like
that accrue to classes and categories (we have only to think again, in the human world
of the labels “white” and “black” - or even, to take a current example, of the
identifying terms “Serb” and “Croat.”).

* * *

These observations, about Zebras, categories and the like are pertinent, highly, to
thinking about the status and definition of the object. For the first question to be
asked about the object is whether it is a "thing" at all. Of course objects are self-
evidently "things," - so much so that we forget that they are anything else, or have
another identity. Indeed, objects we might say are things that we forget about twice
over. As things, especially when classified as "dumb things," low things, things not
worth paying attention to, we forget them entirely (as has often been noted we
remember things, remark them, only when they won't perform satisfactorily for us:
when they have the temerity to stand in our way, close on our fingers or otherwise
display themselves). But more than this we forget that things are anything other than,
"dumb things." We forget that this attribution is as made as any other (and not truly a
derivation from observable phenomena- otherwise we might see for example that
objects are in not all necessarily "dumb things."). Yet we call them so-which means,
that for us, in practice, an object is not a thing, devoid of conceptual or categorical
identity.

But is an object ever for us then, simply a thing? It seems as if it is not. Rather, the
peculiarity of objects, for us, is that although we handle them, use them, make them
and design them, and do so every day, we do not do so innocently or directly. In fact
we do not handle, and we do not design, "things themselves." What we handle, what
we deploy, what we think about as an object in any instance comes to us from how
we think about the thing -- or better, from how we think about objects in general, how
we classify them, how we categorize them.

To put it another way, all the objects we live with, all the things we design, live under
the set of prime ideas about what an object is. Hence an object is, for us, first of all a
category, a concept, an idea. We do not recognize things as categories, as concepts,
because we scarcely think about objects consciously at all. Instead we think about
objects axiomatically, that is through through very deep rooted patterns and

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categories, or sets of rarely examined presuppositions and mental models. Together
these give us a kind of matrix, often almost unconscious, though which we deal with
objects and assume that we understand what they "are" and what it is that they do.

Now the fact that we work with such unconscious "understandings" of the object
might itself set us thinking. We might realize that this immediately tells us that the
object, no less than any other projection of our selves, has a relation to our
unconscious - and that we could therefore speak, perhaps very productively, of a
psychoanalysis of the object (indeed we can see that such is possible and could offers
tangible and productive insights for the designer: more on this at a later date). But on
the other hand this idea might also make us realize, once we begin to think about the
matter, that the categories and patterns through which we see things, or through
which, or because of which, we presuppose what things are, are not necessarily
identical with the character of things, indeed that they are often strikingly at variance
with actuality.

Let me give two small, but for all that significant, examples of this phenomenon. The
first concerns the issue of knowledge and things. Conceptually, we attribute to things
a generalized condition of stupidity, a condition of dumbness relieved only, if at all,
by the work of the designer in “adding” a semantic level to the form of the product.
Yet in actuality, in our use of things, we expect, and wish most strongly for things to
possess and exemplify a quite different kind of knowledge. In fact we want things to
embody knowledge about ourselves. This is proved of course by our rage at things
when “they” hurt us, or fail to work properly. We expect that a thing knows how to
work, and less visibly but even more anthropomorphically, we expect things to know
about the conditions of our sentience as human beings. Thus, in fact, we invest things
with a colossal amount of knowledge (even though, on another level, we deny this,
and persist in calling the object “dumb.”) Consider for example what it is that the
child-proof asprin bottle, and its contents, "knows" about the human world.

"It knows about the chemical and neuronal structure of small aches and pains, and
about the human desire to be free of those pains. It knows about the size of a hand
that will reach out to relieve those aches and pains. It knows that it is itself
dangerous to those human beings if taken in large doses. It knows that these
human beings know how to read and communicates with them on the subject of
amounts through language. It also knows that some human beings do not yet
know how to read or read only a different language. It deals with this problem by

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further knowing how human beings intuitively and habitually take caps off
bottles, and by being counterintuitive in its own cap, [. . .] it contains within its
design a test for helping to ensure responsible usage that has all the elegance of a
simple three-step mathematical proof."

Elain Scarry’s beautiful reading reading of the minimal structure of what the
asprin bottle cap “knows” takes us already into a realm in which the conventional
differentiation between objects and subjects given through the respective
categories, no longer quite makes sense. A second example where expectation
and actuality are at variance emphasises this point. We accept that our extreme
subjectivity often causes us to define ourselves in opposition to that which is not
sentient, not conscious. Hence, as subjects, we stand against, or define ourselves
in relation to, objects, which we say are not-human, not-sentient, not-alive. (Thus
we often maintain, in principle if not always in actuality, that to treat a person as
"an object" is ethically wrong). But as the simple asprin bottle example made
clear, this neat conceptual and representational division between ourselves and
objects, is never clear cut. It is true that material or verbal artifacts are not alive,
not sentient. But objects work for us because they internalize, in their structure,
an awareness of sentience and consciousness. A chair will only accommodate the
problem of the human discomfort at standing for example, if it itself acts as if it
knew, from the inside, in a kind of mimeticism of our own sentient condition, the
problems of body weight and the desire to repose in relaxing, but still semi-, or
potentially active position. But this means that to be an object, an object must be
like a subject. Thus although objects do not themselves perceive, objects are, in
the essential facts of themselves, necessarily objectifications of sentient
awareness.

We can put it like this: itself incapable of the act of perceiving, the design and the
structure of objects that we use are nonetheless of necessity memorialized structures
of perceptions about the conditions of sentient awareness in human beings. Only as
such can objects work to relieve the problems and pains (or to celebrate the joys and
wonders of) human aliveness. A woven blanket or solid wall must internalize within
their design the recognition of the instability of body temperature and the
precariousness of nakedness for only by absorbing into their structure these
perceptions will they be enabled to work to shelter or warm us.

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This means then that the object, despite what commonsensical but nonetheless
slightly pathological differentiated thinking tells us, is not merely so. Principally a
projection of a perception about the conditions of human aliveness onto the non-
sentient world, the very work of the made object is, on this understanding, not to
stand over us, as other to us, but to become the vehicle whereby we project and
distribute the facts and conditions of human sentience and consciousness onto the
non-sentient world. The world of objects then is not other to human beings, but is the
very projection of aliveness. And this we might say, counter-factually to how
"common-sense" often sees it, is the work of creation. It is after all why we make and
design things. Thus if objects are, in a way, surrogates for aspects of our subjectivity,
and if they fold our subjectivity into themselves (just as culture often objectifies us,
“causes” us to act like an object) where then is the ultimate distinction between
subjects and objects to be made ?

What these examples show however, besides opening us to some insights into the real
work of things, is how easily -- especially in the context of a culture which, for all
that it bases itself on the object, still affects to despise the world of things -- we can
both forget the work that the object achieves for us, and allow our thinking, that is our
not-thinking, the inherited axiomatic patterns of what we assume is the case, to block
our perception of the work of making and the (human) nature of things.

It should also remind us that design is not exempted from this condition. For all that
the work of design is precisely to achieve these ends, the question for design is
whether it is able to understand and accept this other understanding of the object. Can
design see the objects it deals with as containing within their structure, or within its
interior condition, a material record of the nature of human sentience and aliveness,
as being full rather than empty of knowledge, as being, in the last resort, “subjective,”
rather than "objective" ?

The answer to this question is by no means clear. Nor is it evident from where design
can draw resources to think more deeply about this issue. The very fact that design
thinking still takes its fundamental categories from the given axiomatic structure of
thinking in general, and that this structure is antithetical to being able to think well
about things and their work, means that it may be of little use, if we are to try to
recover these moments of the work of objects or things, to turning to the conventional
literature on design. Written from inside the paradigm of ideas which constitutes
design practice, such books or articles will not easily recover for us the work of

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things. We will only find this work described in a literature that lives on the every
edge of what would usually be thought of design ideas; even, in the case I am about to
discuss, of writing that lies right outside of design, and yet which is, for all that,
central to being able to think, with some degree of freedom and accuracy, about the
work of things. All of which brings me, by a roundabout route, to the remarkable
book by Elaine Scarry that I have already been extensively quoting from and
implicitly referring to, The Body in Pain.

[Note: a longer version of the remainder of this paper, written as a review of

Scarry, is in the file Bodiespain.doc with title “Bodies, Sometimes in Pain,
Sometimes Not”]

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That a book on human suffering, and principally, in its opening chapters, on the
experience of torture, and its "un-making" of the human body, should be said to be
central to design understanding could well be construed by the enemies of design as a
self-evident statement on the profession's participation in the production of an
alienated and dysfunctional world. Scarry's is a more serious reference. The import of
the book, for understanding the work of the object, lies in its second part, for Scarry's
is a double argument. In the first part of the book she is concerned with two means of
"unmaking" the human body, that is with the structures of torture and war, and the
deliberate infliction of human pain, an infliction that Scarry understands as the
attempt to decompose, to disintegrate the subject, by depriving the subject first of
voice and thus of language (for one awful characteristic of pain is its inexpressibility)
and then of sentience itself.

But, and this is the key point, the world of unmaking, the structures of war and torture
are the converse, the mirror-image, of the world of making. If unmaking is the
destruction, the disintegration of the human body, the deprivation of voice, identity
and ultimately of sentience, then its opposite is making. Making, the making of
things, is also the making of the human subject, for object made, and given, to the
subject, re-makes that human's world, enables the subject to live differently (through,
if nothing else, reliving some of the pains and problems of sentience). In short, it is
the work of things to relieve the pains and problems of sentience such that wider
human intercourse might take place.

A light bulb Scarry says, in a beautiful passage,

'transforms the human being from a creature who one who would spend
approximately a third of each day groping in the dark, to one who sees simply by
wishing to see: its impossibly fragile, milky-white globe curved protectively
around an even more fragile, upright-then-folding filament of wire is the
materialization of neither retina, nor pupil, nor day-seeing, nor night seeing; it is
the materialization of a counterfactual perception about the dependence of human
sight on the rhythm of the earth's rotation; no wonder it is in its form so beautiful'
(292).

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Thus objects, far from standing over us, against us, are rather, in essence, "for" us.
Objects, as Scarry puts it, "wish us well." More, objects are, in effect, a gift we give
to each other, and indeed the most ethical of gifts. For as she points out one can relive
another's pain in three ways: one can express sympathy for it, one can (which is much
the same thing) make a representation of it, or one can make an object that can relive
that pain. Each is not exclusive of the other of course, but it is notable, against the
axiomatic of our thinking, which, at the level of ethics in particular would deal, in
effect, only with the first, that the third, the making of the object, possesses three
great advantages over the first two. First, the object may be able to physically relive
the pain (as the chair relieves the pain of standing, the asprin the pain of the
headache). Second, released physically from pain the subject is able to re-enter life.
Third, the object not only relieves the pain that moment but potentially memorializes
that ability. The made thing endures. More, in so far as the subject can possess this
object then he or she is freed from dependence on another. The relief of pain is within
her control, it is not dependent on another's whim. The human being is now partially
relived of the pains and problems of sentience so that indeed he or she can more
easily become, and make herself or himself, more human.

All of this is scarcely insignificant, personally or socially. Nor is it insignificant to

how we think about the work of things. Not only does the act of making a object and
providing the subject with it, free the subject from obligation to, and dependency on,
'the day-to-day generosity of other inhabitants which cannot itself be legislated' (291)
but while we often think of material things in relation to possession and acquisition,
and of the object, especially the modern product, as in some ways antithetical to the
subject, -- and think of the field of objects as a whole as a standing refutation of the
human, Scarry re-writes this equation, arguing that a real examination of how things
work for us will show us that 'The general distribution of material objects to a
population means that a certain minimum level of objectified compassion is built into
the revised structure of the external world" (291).

All of this, clearly, implies an ethics of things: better, shows that such an ethics, of
objects, and therefore of design, is internal to the structure of making (and not
something therefore that comes from outside). Finally it reminds us that making is not
merely so. That to make, and to design, is to make something whose end is not in
itself but in the subject to whom, or for whom, the object is made (whether that
subject is individualized, or is ourselves, collectively, as a whole). For the object is
never for itself. It is to quote Scarry one last time, "only a fulcrum or lever across

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which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes its makers."
(307).

The idea of how the object knows, and what it knows, stands against the axiom that
objects are dumb. The idea that the object is a projection, not simply of a bodily
analogy or a bodily part, but of the very complex projection of sentience, of human
aliveness in all of its aspects (but most centrally, or first, the body's) is counterposed
to the axiom that still sees a divide: here a subject, who speaks, and there a object,
dumb, inhuman. The idea that to make is to re-make ourselves stands against the
axiom that we, as subjects, make ourselves without reference to the world. three
transforms then in how we commonly see ‘things” -- and inside it the beginning of
the basis of an ethics of things, and making --and of course designing.

I say beginning advisedly. My paraphrase of Scarry’s beautiful essays has something

of the quality she herself ascribes to her own reflections on making when she says, at
the beginning of the closing chapter of her book: “It is important to keep the scale of
what will be discussed here in perspective. If, for example, the skeletal structure
summarized here were visually depicted as a large and miraculous suspension bridge,
then all of what now follows would be the equivalent to describing, for example, the
character of the metal in a few of its pins or the pressure in its weave of cables in one
small section of its gigantic tracery” (281). In other words the thinking about what
making us, and about what objects are, especially how they are, for us, has only
begun. But the potentialities are perhaps enormous. For what would it be like to live
in a world of things capable of embodying, in more adequate, precise and beautiful
ways the conditions of our sentience and consciousness ? More to the professional
point, what would it be like to try to design such things? Scarry’s work has the joy,
for us, of beginning to suggest, to the alive and sentient mind of the designer, the
possibilities of such an enterprise. Hence its importance to design.

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