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Evocative Objects: Things We Think With Paperback – September 30, 2011

by Sherry Turkle (Editor)

4.3 50 ratings

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Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a 1964 Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with."

For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects—an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer—are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.

Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes—the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Print length

396 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

September 30, 2011
Dimensions

5.38 x 0.9 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0262516772
ISBN-13

978-0262516778
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A wonderfully evocative (there really is no other word for it) series of meditations on meaningful objects.—PD Smith, The Guardian—

Review

Original, absorbing, and beautifully written, this collection of essays will forever change the way you look at the objects in your life.

―Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History

Evocative Objects is a collection of great richness and complexity. Reading these essays transforms one's sense of the most commonplace objects, and prompts us to explore the palimpsest of the past within us.

―Jill Ker Conway, President Emerita, Smith College, author of The Road from Coorain

About the Author

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press.

Mitchel Resnick, an expert in educational technologies, is Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab.His research group develops the Scratch programming software and online community, the world's largest coding platform for kids. He has worked closely with the LEGO company on educational ideas and products, such as the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits, and he cofounded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of after-school learning centers for youth from low-income communities.

Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of thirty books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed; and The App Generation (with Katie Davis).

Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile. She received the IEEE Life Member's Prize in Electrical History in 2007 for her work on Chile's experiments with cybernetics and socialism.

William J. Mitchell was the Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr., Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and directed the Smart Cities research group at MIT's Media Lab.

Judith Donath is a Faculty Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a Visiting Scholar at MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

Trevor Pinch is Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University and coeditor of The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (anniversary edition, MIT Press).

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. He is the coeditor of From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (MIT Press, 1998).

Stefan Helmreich is Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Alien Ocean, Sounding the Limits of Life, and Silicon Second Nature.

Caroline A. Jones is Professor of Art History in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is the editor of Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (MIT Press).

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press; Reprint edition (September 30, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 396 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262516772
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262516778
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.38 x 0.9 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #945,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #614 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #3,069 in Essays (Books)
- #9,464 in Short Stories Anthologies

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4.3 50 ratings

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Sherry Turkle
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SHERRY TURKLE, a social scientist and licensed clinical psychologist, has been studying people’s relationships with technology since the early personal computer movement in the late 1970s. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the best-selling author of six books and three edited collections, including four landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together, and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Turkle has edited three books on our lives with objects, Evocative Objects, Falling For Science, and The Inner History of Devices. They explore how our relationships with the object world have significant implications for work, education, and intimacy. In Simulation and its Discontents, Turkle explores the costs, intellectual, personal, and political of living so much of our lives in artificial worlds.
Her most recent book, The Empathy Diaries (Penguin Press, March 2021) turns her method of “intimate ethnography,” on her own life, examining the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped her into the woman and researcher she became, making the point that her emotional and intellectual became one, that her career, as she put it, became “lit from within.” It appeared to critical acclaim. Dwight Garner in The New York Times called it a "beautiful book. . . an instant classic of the genre."
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Eden Medina
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Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her research brings together history, technology, and politics, especially in Latin American contexts. Her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile received the Edelstein Prize in the History of Technology, the Computer History Museum Prize in the History of Computing, and the Recent History and Memory Book Prize of the Latin American Studies Association (honorable mention). Her co-edited volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America received the Amsterdamska Award from the European Society for the Study of Science and Technology. Medina's current research studies how nations use science and technology to address histories of dictatorship and state violence and how science and technology intertwine with processes of truth, justice, and repair.
Medina received her Ph.D. from MIT in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology. She also holds Master in Studies of Law from Yale Law School and a degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.
Website: https://edenmedina.mit.edu/
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Stephen Hage

It's a mistake to believe that things are "just" things

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2009

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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.

8 people found this helpful

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David Block

Fails as a book, succeeds as a collection

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2009

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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

11 people found this helpful

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Janet C. R. Sullivan

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2015

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love it

One person found this helpful

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Angela Lloyd

excellent

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2014

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yes!

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Top reviews from other countries

Neil Armstrong

a feast for thought

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2014

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This book was suggested to me as I am an artist who often works with existing objects as an integral aspect of my work. It is a good bedtime read in the sense that you can dip in and out of these thoughtful and wide ranging essays... all very well written and accessible; snapshots into their authors lives.

7 people found this helpful

J

Interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 13, 2015

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A mixed bad in every sense of the word. The sheer range of responses is impressive, and found myself connecting with many of them on a number of different, and often unexpected, levels. I did find, however, as I got into the latter part of the book, that it felt rather like eating a rich chocolate dessert; what tasted great at first was beginning to feel a little sickly and too much of a good thing.

4 people found this helpful

Connie

Excellent service

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 3, 2019

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Haven't read the book yet, but looks interesting.
Excellent service.

Sophie

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 11, 2017

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Fantastic Product & Great Seller!

jane

Pretentious

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 30, 2021

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If you like pretentious short stories about nothing, then buy it. For me it is just another book my university recommended that is just endless drivel

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