Evocative Objects

For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we thinkwith." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, anddesigners that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional andintellectual 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 isits focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects--an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer--areshown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion ofevocative 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 behindfor a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, theintimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes--the role of objects indesign and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition andpassage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs eachautobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creatingjuxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and LevVygotsky'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 arethemselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look moreclosely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold ouraffections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauze 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.