A Thing Like You and Me

I tried unsuccessfully to find production details for Bowie’s video. I am referring to the 1977 version.

David Riff pointed out the connection to Andy Warhol’s work, especially in Bowie’s song “Andy Warhol” (Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall / Andy Warhol, Silver Screen / Can't tell them apart at all), and introduced this amazing quote to me: “To desire fame—not the glory of the hero but the glamour of the star—with the intensity and awareness Warhol did, is to desire to be nothing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profound. It is to want to be nothing but image, surface, a bit of light on a screen, a mirror for the fantasies and a magnet for the desires of others—a thing of absolute narcissism. And to desire to outlive these desires there as a thing not to be consumed.” Thierry de Duve and Rosalind Krauss, “Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 4.

The concept of participation is explained in detail in Christopher Bracken, “The Language of Things: Walter Benjamin’s Primitive Thought,” Semiotica, no. 138 (February 2002): 321–349. “Participation, which is the ‘absence of relation,’ merges the subject of knowledge, which is not necessarily a human being, with the object known” (327). Bracken goes on to quote Benjamin directly: “In the medium of reflection, moreover, the thing and the knowing being merge into each other. Both are only relative unities of reflection. Thus, there is in fact no knowledge of an object by a subject. Every instance of knowing is an immanent connection in the absolute, or, if one prefers, in the subject. The term ‘object’ designates not a relation within knowledge but an absence of relation” (Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 146, emphasis added). Accordingly, participating in an image is not the same as being represented by it. The image is the thing in which senses merge with matter. Things are not being represented by it but participate in it.

This comment was based on her interpretation of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s propositions in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: British Film Institute, 2004), in which both authors investigate the role of the inanimate in cinema. Another great proposition by which to think through this issue was made by Carsten Juhl, who suggested Mario Perniola’s The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic.

Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (New York/London: Continuum, 2004), 1.

According to Benjamin, the expressionless is a critical violence that “completes the work, by shattering it into a thing of shards, into a fragment of the true world.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 340.

According to Weizman, their idea is based on putting forensics back in the frame of rhetoric (where it originated in Roman times) meaning “in front of the forum,” and implying the speech of objects in professional or legal courts. When evidence is given the capacity to speak, objects are treated as “material witnesses”; they also therefore possess the capacity to lie.

Quoted in Christina Kiaer, “Rodchenko in Paris,” October no. 75 (Winter 1996): 3.

See Bracken, “The Language of Things,” 346ff.

Ibid., 347.

Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Languages of Man,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 69.

The last paragraph is taken from: Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Things,” translate (June 2006), →.

Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question),” trans. Christina Kiaer, October 81 (Summer 1997): 119–128.

Ibid., 110.

Ibid., 111.

Lars Laumann’s touching and amazing video Berlin Muren, about a Swedish lady who married the Berlin Wall, makes a strong and very convincing case for object-love. The lover would not just love the Berlin Wall while it was functional but would continue to love it long after it had come down, after history had impacted violently on the object she desired. She would love it through its destruction and agony. She also claimed that her love was not directed to the things the Wall represented, but to its material form and reality.

See for example Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media,” trans. Aileen Derieg, republicart (May 2003), →, or Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Things”: “To engage in the language of things in the realm of the documentary form is not equivalent to using realist forms in representing them. It is not about representation at all, but about actualising whatever the things have to say in the present. And to do so is not a matter of realism, but rather of relationalism – it is a matter of presencing and thus transforming the social, historical and also material relations, which determine things.”