When Does a Thing Become a Thing?

A conversation between language, making, relations, and the being of objects

रूप नाम आधीना। रूप ग्यान नहिं नाम बिहीना॥रूप बिसेष नाम बिनु जानें। करतल गत न परहिं पहिचानें॥

This is from Ramcharitmanas, and it was the starting point of an epiphany for me.

A rough sense of the passage is that form is dependent upon name; without name, form cannot be known, and without knowing the name of a particular form, it cannot be properly recognised.

I have returned to these lines many times.

There is something almost deceptively simple about them. They seem to suggest a relationship between name, form, knowledge and recognition. But if you stay with the thought for a little longer, it opens into a much larger question:

What happens to a thing when we name it?

And before that:

What makes something a thing in the first place?

I have often wondered what conversations between great thinkers would actually look like.

Not the polished arguments that appear in books, where one thinker is separated from another by decades, disciplines and footnotes, but an actual conversation.

What would happen if they were sitting around the same table?

This fascination probably comes from books such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and Douglas Hofstadter's imagined intellectual dialogues, and from the experience of reading works in which thinkers from very different fields seem to speak to one another across time.

So I decided to try something similar.

Not to claim that these thinkers would actually say these things, and not to manufacture a consensus between them, but to place their ideas beside one another and see what happens.

I wanted to bring together Tim Ingold, Martin Heidegger, J. L. Austin, Bruno Latour, and Graham Harman

 and ask them one question:

What is the relationship between language, making, relations, and the independent being of things?

Ingold: Things emerge through making

Tim Ingold gives us one way into the problem.

For Ingold, making is not simply the execution of an idea that already exists in the maker's head. The maker works with materials, and materials respond.

Wood bends.

Clay collapses.

Fibre stretches.

Metal resists.

The final form emerges through this interaction.

A pot, therefore, is not adequately described as:

idea + material = object

It is better understood as a process involving material, maker, environment, technique, history and use.

The object is something that emerges through a process.

Making, then, is not merely the production of an object. It is one of the ways in which a thing comes into being.

Heidegger: But what makes a thing a thing?

Heidegger takes the question somewhere else.

He asks us to distinguish between an object and a thing.

A hammer can be described scientifically as an arrangement of materials. But that description does not capture the hammer as it exists within human activity.

It belongs to a world of building, repairing, constructing, breaking, fixing and working.

The thing does not exist in isolation. It appears within a world of relationships and practices.

But Heidegger's question is deeper than simply asking what an object is used for.

He asks what it means for something to be.

This opens a gap between:

what a thing is for us

and

what it means for the thing to be.

Austin: What if words themselves make things?

J. L. Austin introduces another possibility.

Some utterances do not merely describe reality. They perform an action.

"I promise."

"I apologise."

"I declare this meeting open."

"I pronounce you married."

Under the appropriate circumstances, saying the words is part of performing the act.

Language can therefore alter the status of things.

A piece of paper can become a contract.

A person can become a spouse.

A statement can become a legal declaration.

An ordinary object can become a sacred object through a ritual act.

The physical matter may remain unchanged, but its status within a social world has changed.

Language may not create matter, but language can create kinds of things.

Latour: The words are never alone

Bruno Latour complicates this further.

Suppose someone declares an object sacred.

The words alone are not necessarily sufficient.

There might be a ritual, a person authorised to perform it, a community that recognises it, a physical object, a particular place, written records, institutional structures and repeated practices.

The sacredness of the object is maintained through a network.

So the question becomes less:

"Did language create the object?"

and more:

"What network of humans, materials, practices, technologies and signs allows this thing to exist as this particular kind of thing?"

A museum object provides a simple example.

A piece of craft placed in a village house, a market, a museum and an archaeological archive may be physically similar.

Yet it can become four very different kinds of thing.

The label matters.

The institution matters.

The history matters.

The people interacting with it matter.

The material object is part of the process, not simply the endpoint.

Harman: And yet the object remains more than all of this

Then Graham Harman enters the conversation.

He would object to reducing the object to its relations.

The pot is not simply:

• what the potter intended,

• what the user does with it,

• what the museum says about it,

• what the culture believes about it,

• what its material composition is,

• or what language calls it.

There is always something about the object that exceeds these descriptions.

This is central to Object-Oriented Ontology.

An object is never completely exhausted by our knowledge of it or by its relations with other things.

The pot remains, in some sense, more than what we can say about the pot.

And now the question changes again.

So where does the thing actually begin?

We now have several positions.

Ingold:The thing emerges through making and material processes.

Heidegger:The thing appears within a world of meaning and relations.

Austin:Language can perform actions and create social realities.

Latour:Things become stabilised through networks of humans and non-humans.

Harman:The object exceeds every relation we establish with it.

These positions do not necessarily answer the same question.

Perhaps they are describing different moments in the life of a thing.

And this brings me back to those lines from Ramcharitmanas.

रूप — form.

नाम — name.

ज्ञान — knowledge.

पहिचान — recognition.

The verse places these concepts into a relationship.

A form becomes knowable through its name.

But then another question appears:

Does naming merely allow us to recognise something that already exists, or does naming participate in making the thing what it is?

And if naming participates in making it what it is, where does the material thing end and the linguistic thing begin?

Now imagine the Mahabharata

This is where the question becomes particularly interesting to me.

Imagine taking these philosophical positions and placing them inside a mythological world.

Consider Gandiva, the bow of Arjuna.

What makes Gandiva Gandiva?

Is it the material from which it is made?

Is it the craftsmanship?

Is it its history?

Is it the name?

Is it the person who possesses it?

Is it the stories attached to it?

Is it its divine origin?

Is it the recognition of others?

Or is there something about Gandiva that remains Gandiva even when none of these descriptions completely capture it?

Now imagine a world in which names have ontological consequences.

Before something is named, it is simply something.

Once named, it enters a different order of existence.

Once narrated, it acquires history.

Once used in ritual, it acquires status.

Once made by a particular craftsman, it acquires lineage.

Once carried by a particular hero, it acquires identity.

And yet, according to Harman, the object would still exceed all these relations.

This gives us a possible sequence:

Matter → Making → Naming → Use → Ritual → Story → Recognition → Object

But perhaps it does not end there.

The object can turn around and begin to affect all the things that gave it meaning.

The object that refuses its definition

This may be the most interesting part of the problem.

Imagine an object whose name says one thing, whose maker says another, whose user believes something else, whose community gives it another meaning, and whose material behaviour contradicts all of them.

What is the object then?

Perhaps the central conflict of such a world does not need to be between good and evil.

It could be between different understandings of what it means for something to exist.

One character believes:

"To name a thing is to bring it into being."

Another believes:

"A thing becomes through making."

Another:

"A thing exists through its relations."

And another insists:

"You can never know the thing completely."

The mythology then becomes a laboratory for ontology.

The stories are not merely about objects.

They become stories about how worlds produce objects—and how objects, once produced, begin to produce worlds.

And perhaps that is the question I was looking for when I first encountered those lines:

If form depends upon name for recognition, what exists before the name—and what happens to the thing after we give it one?