Thingifying the World (Ii)

A sign in the University of Chicago Bookstore:

— ‘Umbrellas are non-refundable.’

I can see why the Bookstore chose this phrasing.  It’s not just shorter, it’s more polite, less in-your-face than the alternatives:

— ‘If you buy an umbrella here, you can’t get a refund for it.’

— ‘We won’t refund your money for an umbrella bought here.’

If I were running the Bookstore, I’d probably use the same sign they did, and I don’t mean to imply that the fate of humankind rests on the phrasing here.  I only want to use the sign as an example of what we do when we thingify the world.

I hope the umbrella example helps to show what I mean by ‘thingify’.  The sign is dealing with what is going on in the world, but converts all that into a single characteristic of a thing.  

What is going on, what is happening, is that customers of the store buy umbrellas and then return them, asking for their money back.  But the store isn’t going to give them their money back.  I presume this is because some visitors to campus see the store as providing a program of free umbrella rental.  They buy umbrellas while it is raining, use the umbrellas for an hour or two, and then, when it stops raining, they’d like to get their money back.

I don’t have a stance on anybody’s ethics here—I only want to keep stressing the ‘going on’ bit.  The sign deals with what will—or, actually, won’t—happen.  If you, as a customer act one way (buy an umbrella) and then act in a second way (bring it back), the sign lets you know about how the store will act (specifically, how they will not act).

There a lot of fairly complex doing here: not just people acting in visible and immediately consequential ways, but lots of invisible and corollary doing, too: people wanting, taking to the counter, cutting off tags, using, staying dry, calculating, remembering, anticipating, preventing, declining, and so on.  But the language of the sign takes all that doing and congeals it—makes the doing disappear by converting it into a characteristic of a thing.  In the sign, there are no people doing–nothing going on. All you see, in the sign, is a thing — the umbrella — and a characteristic of that thing.  The thing has the characteristic of being non-refundable.  The people and their doing is gone—transformed into the non-refundable quality of the umbrella.  

All that’s happening in the world has been thingified–converted into a feature of a thing.

Again, I’m not suggesting that much of anything hangs on this sign, but the process of thingifying is really quite remarkable, when you think about it.  

To begin, notice that time gets erased, or at least shoved into the background.  The doings of the customers and the store all play out in sequence, and that sequence reflects the ordinary way that we think about past, present, future.  You can think about this in terms of change.  If you think about what’s happening, you’ll trace continuing change over time.

But when the doings of people are thingified into the characteristic of the umbrella, that sequence disappears, and so does change.  The characteristic of non-refundability becomes a permanent, unchanging feature of the umbrella.  The umbrella is just as non-refundable today as it was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.  People may be continually changing in what they do, but the umbrella remains the same.

And then there’s intrinsic-ness.  When everything that is happening gets thingified into the umbrella, there’s a quick, unnoticed, but stunning, shift in location.  Just picture to yourself all that is happening: what do you see?  You might see the interior of the store, you might see someone noticing the sign or not noticing the sign, you might see someone buying an umbrella, someone checking them out at the counter, someone using the umbrella around campus, trying to return it, someone telling them ‘no’, and so on.  

But when all that is happening gets thingified, what do you see?  In fact, you might struggle to see anything at all, because it’s hard to picture ‘non-refundable’.  But even the struggle suggests the change in location.  If non-refundability is a characteristic of the umbrella, then the language of the sign has shifted our attention away from all that is happening and where it is happening. Instead, we look toward the umbrella itself.  The scene has shifted.

And it’s likely that our attention will shift even further, at least metaphorically, to the interior of the umbrella.  That is, we tend to think of characteristics of things as existing within the thing.  Consider common characteristics of umbrellas, qualities like its size, weight, span, color, sturdiness.  It’s odd to say it, but we think of these characteristics as existing inside the boundaries of the umbrella itself. This idea seems too obvious to need saying: people think, ‘Of course the characteristics of something are inside that thing! Where else could they be?’ But the idea turns out to be plenty complicated: scientists have had to sort out weight from mass, and wow, is color tricky.

The point here is simpler, and has to do with the way that we think when we thingify. We do something that actually quite radical. When we transform all that is happening into a feature of the umbrella, we take a lot of going’s-on that are proceeding through time, in the world, and we assign all that to the unchanging, interior of a thing. 

One last note about thingifying: when we transform all that’s happening into a thing, we also move from the particular to the abstract.  This, of course, is one of the reasons that the store likes the sign.  The sign serves the store’s purpose of making the situation seem much less particular.  It would feel quite particular, even personal, if the store said ‘We won’t give you a refund for an umbrella.’ Instead of that uncomfortable particularity, the store uses language that not only gets rid of the specific people involved, but goes further in getting rid of the specificity of ‘we’ and ‘you’ by assigning to the umbrella an invisible and abstract quality: non-refundability.  

It’s the abstractness of thingifying that makes the language useful to the store. It’s this that allows the sign to serve the function of avoiding a tone of personal confrontation or even just personal disappointment.  

So: thingifying eliminates going-on, and at least moves in the direction of eliminating time.  It re-locates what is going on in the world into the interior of things.  It converts what is particular and concrete into something (sorry) abstract.  

So what?  Why think about it?

Very often, I don’t believe we should think about it.  I don’t in the least want to imply that thingifying is, somehow, intrinsically, abstractly, unchangingly, wrong.  I certainly don’t mean to imply that we ought to stop doing it.  Or that we should even try to stop doing it.

But I do believe that for some pragmatic purposes it can be quite helpful to pay attention to it.  Sometimes, thingifying is quite consequential.

Take this fateful instance from US political history: ‘… they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights.’  

I think that this is stunning, breath-taking, thingifying.  The Declaration here takes up an extraordinarily complicated and important chunk of going-on—the ways that people and institutions act, politically. And that going-on, the political actions of a society, are going on in the world, and through time: endlessly varying, unfolding, conflicting, changing. The Declaration deftly erases these aspects of all this going-on by thingifying them into a simple, timeless, abstract characteristic that is located in the interior of people.  The Declaration takes the infinitely complex happenings of politics and thingifies them into an abstraction–‘rights’–that are inherent inside people.

I think it’s quite useful, for practical political purposes, to notice that this is happening, and to consider what the consequences might be for people who think about politics on this basis.  (When I say ‘think about on this basis’, I don’t mean to imply that the authors the Declaration believed what they had written. I mean that thingifying is a crucial method for how they did their thinking.)

But for many people, it’s quite hard even to notice the thingifying that gets done by the phrase ‘unalienable rights’. Human rights has become such an important basis for so much political thinking that it can be difficult to get enough distance from it to be able to understand it as an instance of thingifying. And you’re not going to be able to see the consequences of thingifying ‘rights’ if you can’t see that thingifying is happening here at all. So it may be easier to go back to our umbrella.  

Contrast two people, who happen to be standing next to each other at the umbrella section of the University of Chicago Bookstore. It’s raining. They both decide to buy umbrellas. They both notice the sign.

One of these people resists the sign’s effort to thingify. This person look through that ‘non-refundable’ characteristic of the umbrella to see what is going on in the world. They think, perhaps with a rueful shake of the head, that they aren’t going to get a refund for their umbrella because the store has decided not to give them one.  

The other person is different: they accept the thingifying. This is not conscious, of course: they don’t stop and consider how it came about that the non-refundability would be a characteristic of their umbrella. (Did non-refundability arise through the manufacturing process? Does it come from the materials used in the umbrella? Does it come from the form of the umbrella? Is this a characteristic of all umbrellas, or only of a sub-category of umbrellas? Are there several species within the genus Umbrellicus?)

No, accepting the thingifying isn’t conscious: thinfigying is just one of the countless mechanisms we use to do our thinking. We mostly don’t notice it. But consider the difference between our two people. The first person ignored the thingifying, and saw the sign as describing goings-on in the world. The second person accepts the thingifying, and erases time, the scene, and the store. So this person thinks that they will not get a refund because not getting a refund is an unchanging, unchangeable, intrinsic characteristic of the umbrella itself.  

I think that there are quite practical consequences here. I think that our two people will think differently, and act differently. If you’re writing to these people, there are quite practical consequences for how you should use language to influence them.

And then there are the philosophical reasons to pay attention to thingifying.  As I’m sure is clear from every sentence I write, I believe that thingifying has caused a lot of philosophical confusion, a lot of effort spent trying to work out the exact nature of abstract, timeless non-refundability, while losing track of the complex, fluid, particular goings-on that non-refundability has thingified.  

This is one understanding I get from Wittgenstein’s goal of showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.  I think that we’ve thingified ourselves deep into a fly-bottle of philosophical confusion, and to get out, we may well need to re-trace the steps by which we got in.

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