Categorisation: Stuff, Things and Objects
In a recent Guardian article by Justin McGuirk (17 September 2012) the Museum of Things is inspected revealing a history of German design and notions of function and taste. Through questioning why the Museum of Things and not Design, McGuirk cites Heidegger’s division of the world “into ‘things’ (more likely to be hand-crafted) and ‘objects’ (more likely to be machine-made), arguing that ‘things’ were more authentic.”
Where Tracy Potts in her TRASH Conference keynote paper recently made a distinction between stuff and matter in her discussion about clutter, McGuirk’s references to Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects creates a synergy of categorisation in which the designed world can be ordered; stuff and objects being the machine-made clutter whilst matter and things have “thing-power” and Heideggerian Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein).
Heidegger considered the study of being a human phenomenological construct; “Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.” Being and Time (Roderick Munday provides a useful glossary of terms in Being and Time here: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/b_and_t_glossary.html )
