The object which I wish to consider for this study is a clip made from white plastic. The object is designed to seal opened food packaging to prevent the contents from going off. Due to the clip’s limited functionality, it plays a very specific and unchangeable role in my house and in my life. There are however other products which would suffice in a situation in which I needed to close a bag, for instance, a rubber band, or a clothes peg, or even a piece of tape. But, since purchasing this product and putting it in my kitchen drawer; when faced with a problem such as this, I reach for clip.
Let us now consider the design of this object, ir enables me to open the clip – it will bend along it’s join to any angle – I can then re-close the clip which clicks into place, securing whatever is enclosed. The clip was purchased as a multipack in IKEA, consisting of thirty clips of two sizes and six colours. When consulting the IKEA website to try to find out the designer of the clip, I discover intead helpful images depicting how one might put the product to use.
I did not find out the designer of the object, but it is interesting to consider that this banal object, and others like it, were designed, manufactured, distributed, sold and purchased by someone. The object can be situated within the framework of Steven Connor’s familiar or ‘fidget’ objects. Indeed whilst researching for this essay, I have made conscious effort to have it with me at all times, fidgeting with it in my pocket while I go about my daily life.
I would like to consider this object further; through exploring Martin Heidegger, and later Bill Brown’s, notion of ‘the thing’, to try to distinguish whether the item I have been carrying around with me is an object or a thing. I notice as I consider this question that I have been referring to the bag-clip as an object – up until this point where I have called it simply an item – as I struggle to think of a word that does not label it as either object or thing.
A first, somewhat simplistic notion is that a thing is something which is un-named or ambiguous, as Bill Brown outlines in his 2001 article, Thing Theory – ‘It (the thing) functions to overcome the loss of other words or as a place holder for some future specifying operation: ‘I need that thing to get at things between your teeth.”1 So here the bag-clip – a name I have given the item as a basic description of its function and therefore form – can be ‘that thing you use to close plastic bags’.
However, the bag-clip has a specific function which is identical to the others in the packet I purchased, and indeed all of the ‘ones’ that were manufactured. Then the bag-clip is an object amongst others identical to itself, to quote Bill Brown again; ‘Temporalised as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects.)’2
Now to contemplate Heidegger’s ‘thing’, which in accordance the old Germanic word for thing, he considers to be a ‘gathering’ of four; ‘In thinging, it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Staying, the thing brings the four, in their remoteness, near to one another.’3 He uses a ceramic jug throughout the text as an example of a thing. The jug, he claims, stands alone, ‘self-sustained’, as he states here; ‘As the self-supporting independence of something independent, the jug differs from an object.’4
He then considers if this alone is what makes the jug a thing, or if it may be the making of the jug that provides its thingness. It is in the potters rendering of the vessel from the earth that the jug is self-supporting. It is interesting to consider then, how Heidegger would view a mass produced plastic jug with otherwise similar properties. Thus if it is the gathering of the four elements that he has articulated, through the making of the object that allows it to be considered a thing, the bag-clip must then be a mere object.
Heidegger goes on to conclude that it is the void, or rather the displacement of one substance for another: the basic function of the vessel that gives it its thingness. Stating that it is in the outpouring of liquid from the jug that the fourfold gathering occurs, ‘But the gift of outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.’5
The bag-clip therefore does not comply with Heidegger’s notion of gathering, as the jug, as well as the bench, the plough, the tree and the hill do. In the closing paragraph of this text, he states; ‘But things are also compliant and modest in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere of equal value, compared with the measureless mass of men as living beings.’6
It is interesting to note however, that in singling out this particular bag-clip for study, I may have elevated it from the kitchen drawer where it is an object amongst others to a new position as a thing. Or indeed does the object become a thing when it is utilised? In actual fact, following this investigation, I feel no closer to a conclusion of the proper titling of the plastic bag-clip which I have dwelled upon.
1Brown. Bill. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1-22. University of Chicago Press. Page 4
2Brown. Bill. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1-22. University of Chicago Press. Page 5
3Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 175
4Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 166
5Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 170
6Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 180
