Customer Reviews

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this book because it seemed to get to ideas I've been using in my latest painting project. Turkle gives a very nice and brief introduction to how she became interested in objects as a path to philosophy and ways of thinking about the world. The vignettes are rather random and I think quite beautiful. This is not a book that will have a great final point. It meanders and allows you to make associations and hopefully draw some conclusions about your own life and the objects in it. I also like that the book itself is a wonderful object. About the size of a hymnal or some other type of book meant to be held and easy to carry around. A very nice book as a gift for someone who has too many things!

This book is a gem. In this collection of essays, the authors reflect on how a seemingly simple object - a rolling pin, a train, a pair of ballet slippers - can serve as an emotional marker and play a powerful role in understanding relationships, life transitions and loss. I'll recommend this book to my book group because it should prompt a lively discussion about the evocative objects of the members.

THis is a lovely book, a treat for the imagination. Sherry Turkle has arranged these short essays with photographs and artfully chosen bits of literature, psychology, or cultural theory for accompaniment. Her own essays are erudite, clear, and beautifully written. REading this will prompt enjoyable meditations on your own evocative objects.

Book Review submitted by: Stephen J. Hage, [...]

This is an unexpectedly delightful yet seriously thoughtful book that invites you reexamine your relationship to objects, about which, you seldom, if ever think.

It's a collection of essays written by humanists, designers, scientists and artists--thoughtful individuals--that disclose the fluidity and complexity of being alive by revealing their very personal relationships with objects as mundane as a rolling pin and as banal as comic book superheroes.

Each essay is paired with writings from philosophy, history, literature and theory which resonate with the essay in ways that illuminate both what the essayist is saying and what he or she means.

Each essay, in a very different way, demonstrates why it is a mistake to assume that objects are nothing more than inanimate collections of atoms and molecules. They show instead that objects can be and often are capable of evoking potent emotional responses dealing with grief, fear, loss, love, hatred, abandonment, intellectual curiosity, poverty and existence.

Here's a taste of what's in store for you should you choose to read this book:

From the essay MURRAY: THE STUFFED BUNNY

Before the essay the paired writing offers this: "To get to the idea of playing it is helpful to think of the preoccupation that characterizes the playing of a young child. The content does not matter. What matters is the near withdrawal state, akin to the concentration of older children and adults. The playing child inhabits an area that cannot be easily left, nor can it easily admit intrusions. This area of playing is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual but it is not the external world. Into this play area the child gathers objects or some sample derived from inner or personal reality...[Thus] in playing, the child manipulates external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling [And] there is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this to cultural experiences." --D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality


The essay is about the experiences of a little girl with an actual stuffed bunny and explores how, at first, she finds it no different from "the rest of the pastel objects" of her world. As you follow the story you learn how the little girl (the author's sister) develops the idea that a she can love a bunny.

Next you come to understand how she deals with the separation anxiety associated with the realization that when she begins nursery school she won't be able to take Murray with her. Later you learn how the little girl infuses Murray with a life of his own in a utopian setting with provinces and capitals and a complicated topography. And finally the author reveals this about Murray: "...he has given me a ringside seat at the performance of Shayna's imagination, even as I remind myself that in fact it was she, as his creator who bought me the ticket to that seat."

This book will make you laugh and cry, say WHAT(?) and oh yeah, I know exactly what that feels like. I found reading it like riding an intellectual rollercoaster that forced me to reexamine not only objects but my relationship with and to them.

The book begins and ends with an essay by Sherry Turkle which adds to the reading experience and further illuminates how and why objects, can and do become powerfully evocative.

I recommend this book without reservation.

Sherry Turkle's "Evocative Obects" fails as a book because Turkle fails to draw unifying and distinguishing principles about any certain set of 'things.' Nobody doubts that objects evoke, nobody doubts that 'objects' can be...well...anything: real, virtual/digital, Wordsworthian 'spots of time', memories, etc. The problem is that we seem not to be able to define a new, exclusive class of things called 'evocative objects,' predict when a thing will be a member of that class or not, what role it will/may/might/ought to perform, what its long term effect will be on the development of the person at whatever stage the person encounters it and how the person will change over time having been 'evoked.' What, who, when, where, and why does it evoke, and are we evoked? Even saying that "I have been evoked by that object" sounds a little peculiar (except at maybe a Wittgenstein birthday party) since when we are evoked, we are pretty passive observers of our selves. And I don't think this is what Sherry (just easier than "Dr" or "Prof") means.

Rather, there is a class of special things (in the sense above) comprised of "invocative objects": they do cause changes in us, they likely relate to a stage of development and there is something in them and something in us that are "the same." Or so I gather from Sherry's closing essay.

That said, the collection is fascinating - and Sherry's essays should be seen as no different in kind from any of the others. Perhaps that's what saddens me: she recognizes her invocative objects - the photograph and the imago of her dad and the world of "the grandparent's box" - and she fails the test of ultimate engagement. (All the other writers pass, with varying grades). When she goes off to France to study and learns that the magic box has been removed, I want her to tell the post-modern retroflexive structuralists that she is on a mission of her self; that she is Sherry, not Cherie; I want her to rush back and reclaim the box. For it is the stone of her wise woman of Karoo. Alas, it is hard to find the box for the bibliography, Sherry. That's 'interesting': I think that's the last thing one wants to be called by a professional.

Each writer, really, presents a startling and intimate picture - even if as inverse (for Sherry and Evelyn Fox Keller, for example). We meet David Mann, born perhaps into the frozen people, who finds he is chosen by his World Book Encyclopedia: how passionate he grows, wrapped in his prayer shawl to shut out everything but the articles of the world of 1952. Still he wrestles - more than 50 years now - to "grasp...feelings" and to open his soul. He does not have a "private practice" of medicine in Cambridge; no, he "practices privately." Did Sherry say that, or did David say that?

Caroline Jones, an art historian, chooses as "an object in question" one of her own paintings to show how she relates, and doesn't, to her brothers and sisters - and to one sister who more there by being left out. "Surely I can solve any puzzle...," she says - except for the one that matters. "Stop using italics," I yell at her. "Stop talking German! Stop conjugating 'limn'! Just tell me." She won't, except in the parentheses.

One more, and most poignant of all. Nancy Rosenblum surely completes the honest connection between her invocative object - the Chinese Scholars' Rocks - and her self. She begins with a depiction of these rocks in a gentle, self-effacing prose. And then comes the revelation about her husband, his death, his love of these, their work together - more than work, maybe a joint calling or adventure or un-puzzling. It is almost a masculine, Orphean lamentation, not a damnation. In so few paragraphs, how completely she loved, and still loves, him. "How can a rock be a man?" she asks. With a woman like that, how could a rock not become man?

Enough. There are lots of little miracles in these essays. You will not be unrequited or unrewarded for the reading.

Just a question or two, Sherry. Why couldn't you find non-MIT connected folks to write? Don't bartenders and such have invocative objects? You need to find them. And I implore you to can the accolades in the author's credits. Isn't it enough to know, for example, that Tracy Gleason is a psychologist - need we know more in order to see if Tracy can bring her life full circle?

Four stars: three as a single "book" and five as the story of who each of us might have been had we found different invocative objects.

David Block

This book vividly illustrates that not all human attachments to inanimate objects can be casually discounted as mere materialism. The emotional investment that we make in souless chunks of dead matter can be liberating, complex, fascinating, eerie, burdensome and, most of all, human.

I read Evocative Objects partially because I was sorting out some of my own feelings toward inanimate attachments, and partially because I wanted to read an anthology for something different. In the end, the book was less about the prior (my original self-help motivation) and more about the latter: forgetting myself altogether and instead just reveling in others' viewpoints and experiences, letting the the complexity of the human experience wash over me.

My own experiences echoes that of the previous reviewer David Block. Turkle opens up an interesting subject for discussion but I was expecting a deeper analysis. The closing essay by Turkle indicates and reviews points of interest but but doesn't satisfy. I was expecting Turkle to say more to tie the ideas together.

The bulk of the book is a collection of essays by researchers at MIT about particular objects that they have imbued with personal meaning. Most of these are quite enjoyable, the ones that stood out for me include Carole Strohecker on "Knots", Judith Donath on her "1964 Ford Falcon" (I was the last owner of a 1964 Ford Fairlane and can relate) and Howard Gardiner on "Keyboards" (I'm reading him in another book)... as I review the index every single essay except Turkle's is memorable.

Initially I tried to read the book in a single setting, and then got bored - it was good, but not all at once. I then finished it bit by bit, sipping the experiences. I'd recommend this as a gift book for someone who is a collector or who someone like myself just likes to browse in antique and craft shops for interesting items. I'd also recommend this book for writing teachers as a jumping off point for student essays.

Perhaps the best response to reading this book is to write your own personal chapter about similar objects in your own life, perhaps one that connects you to a previous generation. For example I have a scalloped bowl designed to look like a leaf of lettuce that belonged to my mother and before that my grandmother. Its slightly chipped , but I use it carefully once a year....

This is a beautiful book,the essays are well written and they give the reader a good idea of the reason why the objects are meaningful to them.
I'm a designer and it informed some of my investigation and inspired me, but it is definitely not a new approach to the subject.

The only reason I purchased this book was for bookclub. Didn't enjoy it, not my cup of tea.